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A Parceria A. M. Pereira, founded in 1848 by António Maria Pereira (1824-1880) - from humble origins, who learned his trade as a bookbinder at the Casa dos Vinte e Quatro - assumed a degree of importance until the first decades of the following century. It remained in the hands of the family for a century, managed by their son (from 1880 to 1898, when he died) and grandson (from the 1920s onwards). The publishing house would collapse after the Second World War - when it experienced a period of some boom, with the sale of titles related to the conflict, but which led to the accumulation of debts - in a process that dragged on until 25 April, when it was overhauled by the Estado Novo through the Companhia Nacional Editora [National Publishing Company], which took control of the company in order to implement a financial reorganisation which, however, never took place. One of the possible reasons for this may have been the inability of António Maria Pereira, the grandson, to attract new names in publishing, thus failing to reach new audiences and distancing himself from the regime, with which he sympathised (he was president of the Grémio Nacional dos Editores e Livreiros [National Guild of Publishers and Booksellers] and a councillor on the Lisbon City Council, for example). This led the Parceria to be associated with the regime and to lose its readers (A. M. Pereira, Parceria..., 1998.) After the 25 April Revolution, the company was taken over by workers and closed in 1980. Throughout its lifespan, Parceria was generalist, publishing all genres, from renowned authors (such as Camilo Castelo Branco) to novels for the general public, as well as dictionaries, school textbooks and religious works, etc. Although history was not central to its strategy, it appears in its catalogues, mainly from a commercial point of view. For example, it published the works of Oliveira Martins between the 1890s and the 1940s (which was later continued by Guimarães Editores), with successive re-editions; Pinheiro Chagas and Júlio de Castilho were also published by this publisher.
Henrique Marques (1859-1933), a former employee of the Parceria, was one of the founders of the Empresa da História de Portugal, which was very active at the beginning of the 20th century. It was established in 1898 with the aim of re-editing Pinheiro Chagas' História de Portugal: Popular e Ilustrada (eight volumes, plus six by Barbosa Colen, Marques Gomes and Alfredo Gallis until 1909), in weekly 16-page fascicles, a sales model favoured by the publisher. The work had already been published anonymously in 1867, authored by a Society of Men of Letters, after which a second edition was published. The success of the História de Portugal allowed the company to expand its catalogue to include other authors and invest in new projects, such as the works of L. A. Rebelo da Silva (in 41 volumes, bringing together highly disperse material), António Feliciano de Castilho and Almeida Garrett; and even fascicle editions of Os Lusíadas [The Lusiads]and the Bible, which were also very popular. The company was dissolved in 1916. (H. Marques, Memórias…[Memories], 1935, pp. 211 et seq.)
