My dissertation is a social history of prints, the materiality of state formation, and the making of urban spaces. Using the Andean capital of Bogotá as a starting point, I examine a world shaped by the social relations of production, exchange, and use of books and prints. By taking a material approach to prints, I focus on daily practices, and analyze the spaces that made up Bogotá’s world of prints: printing shops, bookstores, libraries, prisons, orphanages, schools, and offices. As well as centering spaces, I pay special attention to the people who inhabited them and shaped them with their labor and expectations: typesetters, folders, bookstore owners, readers, and bureaucrats. I make two main arguments: one related to state formation and another one to space and urban history. On the one hand, I show how the labor of compositors, binders, scribes, and other workers in producing, amassing, and ordering prints enabled the articulation of a state-system. Books and official paper forms allowed for the streamlining of bureaucratic processes, made spaces and people legible, and endowed the state with routinized forms of authority and legitimacy. On the other hand, I demonstrate how the practices of printing, reading, and writing shaped social and spatial relations in Bogotá, and were key for the city’s enthronement as the center of Colombia. The world of prints, I argue, was ultimately the material basis with which the state was bound together and spatialized.