29 
The History of the Book in the Iberian Peninsula
29 MARÍA LUISA LÓPEZ-VIDRIERO
Printing arrived late in the Iberian Peninsula, towards 1472 in Spain and 1487 in Portugal; the region’s surviving incunables are characteristically archaic in style. The introduction and subsequent development of the printing press in Spain did not follow the pattern typical in the rest of Europe for three principal reasons: the political organization of Spain into multiple kingdoms; the fact that no one city was identifiable as the national capital; and the coexistence of two main languages, Castilian and Catalan.
Although Saragossa, Logroño, Barcelona, Valencia, and Seville were leading printing centres, the Castilian presses (Salamanca, Burgos, Alcalá de Henares, and Toledo) were especially important in Spain’s typographical map. As printing began to develop, Castile was enjoying a golden moment of political and cultural hegemony; the printing press played a crucial role in the policy of national unity promoted by the Catholic Monarchs (1474–1516). Just as the Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties would later, the Reyos Catholicos used the press as an instrument for developing both the theory of statecraft and its practical application.
The advent of printing called for the reorganization of bookselling and the circulation of MSS, requiring the introduction of edicts to regulate the book as a commercial and intellectual product. These legislative measures attempted to bring authorized printed materials on to the market during escalating conflicts in 16th-century Europe. Widespread censorship became one of the gravest intellectual and civil problems of the period. A law of 1502 regulated the intervention of the Crown in the printing industry and tried to resolve conflicts over the importation of ‘false and defective’ printed books. This was the first of many such measures that were to run alongside developing religious problems in Spain and Europe. Thus, a proclamation of 1558 established administrative and doctrinal control based on a complex formalized system, reinforced by the appearance in 1559 of expurgatory indices and lists of forbidden books drawn up by Fernando Valdés, Inquisitor General 1547–66. The reign of Philip II (1556–98) saw increasingly severe legislation: originally it attempted to regulate the printed book as a commercial object, but finally it consisted of a complex web of measures treating the book as an intellectual and ideological product. The consequences were decisive for controlling the publication of spiritual and liturgical literature for laymen.
Imports, opportunism, and service to the Church—already observable in the earliest Spanish incunable, Juan Parix’s Sinodal de Aguilafuente (Segovia, 1472)—are three of the chief characteristics of early Spanish printing. The use of roman type in the first product of the Spanish press distinguishes it from the gothic type employed in most early Spanish printing. This peculiarity reveals Spain’s dependence on foreign models for its printing: prominent workshops employed foreign experts, including Parix, Heinrich Botel, Paul Hurus, Math-aeus Flander, Peter Brun, Nicolaus Spindeler, and Johannes de Salsburga, as printers. Before coming to Spain, European journeymen printers (principally Germans) passed through Italy and France; as a result, they stocked the type cases of their new Spanish offices with founts collected on their travels, their work reflecting their native customs and preferences.
Parix’s Spanish output illustrates other printing tendencies. His second series of printed books—e.g. Escobar’s Modus Confitendi (1471–2), and Pontanus’ Singularia Iuris (c.1473)—all demonstrate the desire to open up broader geographical markets. These works, associated with university studies, tested possible demand for establishing production centres close to towns where the studia generalia (the great medieval universities) flourished. The Church and the universities were the driving forces of publishing and printing in Spain; they provided the texts and a guaranteed market for printers and stationers. They also financed many editions of religious books.
From 1475, gothic and roman types were both employed in Spanish incunable printing, but gothic dominated production well into the 16th century. Gothic type remained in use for legal printing, and it appeared in popular productions such as broadsides until well into the 18th century. Spanish gothic founts reveal the foreign influence in type design, and, to a certain extent, that influence lies behind the typographical features common to Castilian black-letter types.
Three stages of Castilian printing can be distinguished. From 1472 to 1478, there are records of only fifteen printing offices, of which nine had a printer whose name is known. Spanish printers worked in Seville and Valencia; in the rest of Spain, presses were run by foreign master printers. The names of most printers working in the northern Castilian Meseta remain unknown, except for Parix (at Segovia and perhaps also at Salamanca). Both the language of the works produced (seven in Latin, five in vernaculars) and the types employed (eight in roman, four in gothic) reflect the need to meet the demands of a precise and ready market in the midst of manifest technical limitations.
From 1480 to 1490, presses were distributed more widely. In Castile, they extended over both Mesetas. Printing took root in urban centres with established markets. Workshops were set up in university and commercial towns: Salamanca, Valladolid, Toledo (Juan Vázquez), Huete (Álvaro de Castro), Burgos (Fadrique de Basilea), and Zamora (Antonio de Centenera, focusing on university courses at Salamanca). Almost all the printers of the day used a particular international gothic type, even at Coria and León. The quality of the editions improved, incorporating native engraving and wood engraving. In Los doze trabajos de Hércules (Zamora, 1483), for example, Centenera considerably advanced the illustration of literary works, a practice that would flourish in the 16th century.
From 1491 to 1500, native gothic types were improved and new, foreign types also appeared. The gothic designed by the brothers Baptista and Gregorio de Tortis, for example, became fundamental to Hispanic typography. Fadrique de Basilea at Burgos, the anonymous printing office at Salamanca, and Peter Hagembach in Toledo, all used these Venetian typefaces. At Valladolid, Juan de Francourt employed a new gothic typeface of Parisian design for Tratado de confesión (1492), Ordenanzas reales de la audiencia y chancillería de Valladolid (1493), and Díaz de Toledo’s Notas del relator (1493). Publishing output grew and became more refined: page design began to be richly ornamented, and illustrated editions appeared from workshops whose importance grew. These years also witnessed the appearance of Arnao Guillén de Brocar, one of the principal printers during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. He was active or had a commercial presence in Pamplona (Navarre), Logroño (Rioja), Alcalá de Henares, Burgos, Toledo and Salamanca (Castile), Seville (Andalusia), and Saragossa (Aragon).
By European standards, 15th-century Spain had a small printing output, although its presses produced more than Belgian or English workshops. Spanish printing was competitive chiefly because more than half of its publications were in the vernacular (Castilian and Catalan). In this respect, Spain led Europe. Spain’s production of liturgical and legal texts was also the highest in Europe. The geographical radius of its printing activity is equally significant: only a quarter of Spain’s output emerged from Catalonian and Valencian presses. The Castilian cities, with good communications, relied on long-established commercial fairs and a civic elite active in the import and export business. Castile’s commercial prosperity and the growth of its governmental administration and universities ensured that printing became a permanent industry.
The Catholic Monarchs’ legal measures to stimulate printing and the book trade were potent weapons in their establishment. Printers’ exemption from military service and the reduction of taxes on book imports served to encourage the book trade and turn it into an attractive mercantile sector. These measures also included incentives for citizens to enter the trade, and for foreign printers to consider Spain, and later Portugal, countries with favourable employment prospects, especially during the European economic crisis towards the end of the 15th century.
Seville was well suited to immigrant German printers, and in 1490 a group of them was invited to make the city a typographical centre. The aim was for them to collaborate with the studia, a typical arrangement in other European university cities. However, an analysis of Sevillan production shows that publications there went beyond academic matters. Meinardus Ungut and Stanislaus Polonus came from Naples and formed a printing company in Seville to meet the official aim of producing editions of works on civil and ecclesiastical law that previously had been scattered and inaccessible. El libro en que están compiladas algunas bulas, printed by Polonus years later in Alcalá de Henares (1503), testifies to the aim of publishing a legal canon to standardize juridical and legislative provision.
Sevillan printers produced the highest proportion of vernacular books in all Spain. Across a broad range of genres—medicine and law, liturgical works, and translations and adaptations of the classics—only a third were in Latin. Moreover, a national literature was developing that included histories of Castile, vernacular devotional works, and books for entertainment. The publication of Ludolf of Saxony’s Vita Christi, translated by Ambrosio Montesino and printed by Polonus at Alcalá de Henares (1502, 1503), was subsidized by the government, despite its being a religious work. It demonstrates the Spanish monarchy’s desire to rival the magnificent illustrated edition (in four volumes, printed by two Germans) financed by the Portuguese monarchs in 1495.
The introduction of printing in Portugal, however, was not associated with royal power, but rather with the Jewish community (see 8). Works printed in Hebrew were the first to appear from 1487 (Pentateuco, printed by Samuel Gacon in Faro); these were set in imported types, easily obtained by an international community with commercial ties to Paris, Livorno, Genoa, Naples, Antwerp, and Amsterdam. The type designs found in these incunables reflect a desire to embellish the biblical text. The quality of their execution may be explained by collaboration, before the arrival of printing, between an important centre of Luso-Hebraic calligraphers and the probably Jewish school of xylography connected to local scriptoria. The neighbouring paper mills established in 1411 helped foster the emergence of the main Hebraic printing offices at Faro, Lisbon, and Leiria. The seven incunables from the first press (1489–92) in Lisbon—that of Rabbi Eliezer Toledano—employ characters and ornamental borders closely related to those created in Hijar (Aragon) by the Hebrew printer Eliezer ben Alantansi (1485–90). The similarity of name and typeface suggests that this printer possibly migrated. Between 1488 and 1495, printing moved from the coastal region to the interior of Portugal, and the spread of Judaic and Christian bibliography connected with biblical exegesis lasted until the decree expelling the Jews in 1497. The last Hebrew press was that of Samuel Dortas in Leiria, ending its activities in 1496 with three editions of Abraham Zacuto’s Almanach Perpetuum, now with the text in Latin. These firms began printing in Hebrew, but later in Latin, Castilian, and Portuguese. In Spain, the crisis facing Hebrew printing had already occurred in 1492, the year of the expulsion, causing the disappearance of the presses of Juan de Lucena (1475) at La Puebla de Montalbán (Toledo), Solomon Alkabiz (1476–82) at Guadalajara, and those at Zamora and Hijar that had provided synagogues’ liturgical needs, including exegetical readings.
Portuguese incunables, both Latin and vernacular, reveal the importance of the Church and the Crown in such titles as: Tratado da Confissom (Chaves, attributed to Randolfo, 1489); Constituições do Bispado do Porto (Rodrigo Álvares, 1497); and Breviarium Bracarense (Braga, 1494), printed by Johann Gherlinc, an immigrant from Barcelona, where he operated 1486–9. Ludolf of Saxony’s De Vita Christi, translated into Portuguese by the Alcobaça Cistercians, is a fine example of foreign participation in Portuguese typography. In 1495, the Germans Nicolaus of Saxony and Valentinus of Moravia (who adopted the Portuguese name Valentim Fernándes under the protection of João II) produced this emblematic work in four volumes, decorated with woodcut borders, chapter-headings, and engravings of German provenance. Fernandes was the first to be granted the royal privilege to print and sell Marco Polo’s Travels (1502).
During the 16th century, Portuguese printing progressed slowly. The Lisbon presses remained in foreign hands: Jakob Cromberger, a member of a German family established in Seville; Germão Galharde, a Frenchman; and Giovanni Petro Buonhomini (active 1501–14), an Italian who also worked in association with Fernándes, using the name of João Pedro de Cremona. With João Álvares (1536–c.1587), originally holding the privilege of printer to the University of Coimbra, a group of native printers emerged. Luís Rodrigues (Lisbon 1539–49) improved typography and added the use of italics. In 1564 António Gonçalves, assistant to Duarte Nunes de Leão, obtained his licence and devoted the greater part of his output to religious and moral works; in the Espejo del Principe Christiano he appears as printer to the archbishop of Lisbon. The editio princeps of Os Lusíadas (1572) marks the start of a prolific epoch in Rodrigues’s workshop. Camões’s influence—based on his experience on the Malabar coast—is reflected in editions from 1573: Sucesso do Segundo Cerco de Diu (1574) and História da provincia de sãta Cruz (1576). António Ribeiro (1574–90), was the King’s Printer from 1580; António Álvares, was printer to the archbishop of Lisbon; and Francisco Correia, the royal printer and printer to Cardinal Don Enrique, rented his printing office from Johannes Blavius in 1564 and continued printing in Lisbon until 1581. From the middle of the century, Lisbon again depended on important foreign master printers. Among these were: Blavius, from Cologne who settled in Lisbon between 1551 and 1563, and Pedro Craesbeeck, a Flemish disciple of Plantin’s, who established his Lisbon printing office in 1597 and produced a fundamental work for the history of the Portuguese language, Origem da Lingua Portuguesa (1605) by Nunes de Leão. Craesbeeck and his son António held the title of royal printer until it passed to the Frenchman Miguel Deslandes.
The period of Portugal’s annexation to Spain (1580–1640) had repercussions for written culture and for the activities and allegiances of the printing trades. Lourenço de Anvers, printer to the duke of Bragança, and Valente de Oliveira both printed periodicals, gazetas, and mercúrios. Domingo Lopes de Rosa and António Olivares, through minor and occasional publications, supported the Portuguese political cause. During the 16th century, Spanish presses published works in Portuguese: liturgical books commissioned by the Braga diocese at Salamanca, legal works, and the Manueline Ordenações at Seville (Cromberger, 1521, 1525). With the Annexation, both countries published significant works of imperial policy. Political events and permeable frontiers explain the phenomenon of ‘flying printers’ between Spain and Portugal (e.g. Tanco de Frejenal).
The early years of the 16th-century Spanish printing scene brought increased attention to Seville, where works including Juan del Encina’s Cancionero and Nebrija’s Introductiones represented contributions to national literacy and linguistic history. An active family enterprise began with Jakob Cromberger in 1503. The intellectual circle surrounding Seville cathedral and the city’s academy—Pedro Núñez Delgado, López de Cortegana, and Jerónimo Pinelo—had their books printed by Cromberger, his son Johann, and above all by the latter’s widow, Brígida Maldonado, who supervised the printing of Juan de Cazalla’s works (Lumbre del alma, 1542), as well as Doctrina Cristiana and the Confesionario by Domingo de Valtanás (1544). The Crombergers printed the first Spanish translations of Desiderius Erasmus (Querella de la paz (1520), Enchiridion (1528?), Los coloquios (1529), and La lengua (1533, 1535, 1542). Spanish Erasmianism had another active printing office in Castile, that of Miguel de Eguía, Brocar’s son-in-law. Eguía’s press at Alcalá de Henares, a university city and focus of intellectual reform, issued the monumental Compluten-sian Bible (1514–17). In 1529, Eguía also printed an anonymous edition of the Diálogo de Doctrina Christiana by Juan de Valdés, whose condemnation by the Inquisition prompted his journey to Italy.
The reformers, including Juan and Alfonso de Valdés, exemplified the supporting role of European presses in the spread of Erasmianism: the Diálogo de Lactancio or Lactancia, together with the Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón, were printed in Spain in 1529. In 1531 the Inquisition banned the publication, and Juan and Alfonso de Valdés appeared in the indexes of prohibited books at Milan and Venice in 1554, and at Portugal in 1581. The Lactancio was printed on its own (bearing a false imprint) in Spanish at Paris in 1586. Another edition (Dialogo en que particularmente se tratan las cosas acaecidas en Roma, Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1586), was produced by Antonio del Corro, whose Protestantism obliged him to leave Spain. At the insistence of the earl of Leicester, he was appointed theological censor at Christ Church, Oxford (1578–86); he founded the Spanish Protestant Church. Queen Elizabeth I’s protection enabled Spanish exiles to continue their intellectual work; English presses played a fundamental role in publishing books written by Spaniards persecuted for religious and political motives. Spain, for its part, supported English Catholics and, through the Jesuits, encouraged a secret press for the English mission and the establishment of another press in the English College at St Omer to produce Counter-Reformation works for distribution among recusants.
There were also other reasons for European countries to involve themselves energetically in the market for Spanish books. The consequences of the Council of Trent (1545–63) were decisive. The Nuevo rezado required the immediate and huge production of liturgical books beyond the capacity of the Spanish presses. Philip II granted the right to print these books to foreigners who possessed the necessary technical and economic means. Christopher Plantin, appointed chief King’s Printer in 1570, was the great beneficiary of this measure that proved so adverse for the national book industry. The fact that the Spanish monarchy had possessions outside the Iberian Peninsula explains why presses in the Low Countries (Brussels and Antwerp) or in Italy (Milan and Naples) should have produced Spanish works for sale not only in Spain and America, but for the European trade. From the 15th century, Spain’s principal book imports were Latin works from Italy and Germany. There was considerable European involvement in the Spanish book trade, including the financing of occasional publications.
At the beginning of the 16th century in Catalonia, Venetians such as the bookseller Francesco de Moris represented and acted on behalf of a wide network of booksellers from Venice and from Genoa; the latter were also active in the paper trade. In Valencia, Giovanni Battista Riquelme and Lorenzo Ganoto, both merchants from Savona, financed the Suma de todas las crónicas del mundo (printed by Gorge Costilla in 1510) and the Cancionero General (printed by Christoph Kaufmann in 1511). In Castile, Francesco Dada and Giovanni Tomasso Favario financed Andrés de Burgos in 1505 to print Encina’s Cancionero on his Burgos presses. Melchior Gorricio subsidized Hagembach’s editions in Toledo. From the 1520s, the companies of bookseller-stationers who were related to the great printing houses of Italy or Lyons (Giunta, Portonariis, Boyer) turned from controlling book imports to book production and publishing through their Castilian sub-offices in Salamanca or Valladolid. They maintained an active presence in the fairs at Medina del Campo; the Giunta family set up in Saragossa, Burgos, Salamanca, and Madrid; Guillaume Rouillé, the outstanding Lyons publisher, created a powerful commercial network. The Lyons publishers—the Cardon brothers, Philippe Borde, and Claude Rigaud—strongly supported Catholic reform by financing Jesuit and Dominican authors in the Iberian Peninsula.
Royal, noble, and patrician book-collecting in Spain provides an excellent vantage point for observing the vitality and shape of the book trade. As the collections and rare items belonging to individual bibliophiles became available, three exceptional libraries were created: the Columbine Library, the Casa del Sol library, and the Royal Library of Philip II, also known as the Escorial Library. The Columbine Library in Seville houses the collection of the humanist Hernando Colón (1488–1539), son of Christopher Columbus, while the Casa del Sol library in Valladolid, which is essential for studying the Anglo-Spanish book trade, contains the holdings of the count of Gondomar, who served as Philip III’s ambassador in London (1613–18, 1620–22).
The poor quality of paper and ink and the worn types of many later 16th-century books testify to the generally low standards of bookmaking at a time when the world of Spanish letters was reaching its zenith. Although Spanish presses were generally undistinguished, production was increasing considerably, religion, history, law, and cartography being the dominant subjects. Closely linked to Spanish political and economic development during the reigns of the later Habsburg monarchs, there was a proliferation of minor printing in the form of news-sheets, arbitrios, and reports. Post-Tridentine spiritual practices led to an increase in sermons and devotional literature consonant with the new urban religious sensibility and sociability. Nevertheless, the printing industry and book trade began to decline in the last quarter of the 16th century. The lack of technical resources and skilled operatives became evident, especially in the early decades of the 17th century, when the wish to publish in Spain still existed. But the decisive causes of the decline were religious and civil censorship, interventions by the Inquisition, royal privileges permitting monopolies of sales and of printing liturgical books, together with the lack of essential materials and means. The shortage of trained professionals is palpable: around 1640 in Madrid there were only ten printing offices with some 50 master printers and pressmen, and 45 people in the bookselling trade.
Madrid, a great printing centre from 1560 to 1580, also boasted the Imprenta Real (Royal Press), set up by an agreement between Philip II and Juan de Junta (a Florentine printer belonging to the Giunti family, who had started printing at Salamanca). In contrast with more ordinary productions, this workshop’s output represented the splendour of the Baroque, creating outstanding illustrated books with characteristic architectural title-pages—portico and altar-piece—designed by important Spanish and foreign artists, especially Flemish engravers (Pedro Perret, Juan Schorquens, Jean de Courbes, Juan de Noort, Pedro de Villafranca), such as João Lavanha’s Viaje a Portugal de Felipe III (1622). The works of great Spanish authors of the Golden Age—Góngora’s Soledades (1635) and his Polifemo (1629)—were set in type at the Imprenta Real as well as at other Madrid printing offices. Under Juan de la Cuesta’s imprint (1604–25) appeared Cervantes’s Don Quixote, part I (1605) and Novelas ejemplares (1613), Lope de Vega’s Arcadia (1610) and Jerusalén conquistada (1609), and Ercilla’s Araucana (1610). Luis Sánchez, who had the best pressmen and was also a publisher and bookseller, printed Pedro Mexía’s Silva de varia lección (1602).
The printing office visited by Alonso Quijano (Don Quixote, part II, chapter 62) has been identified with the outstanding firm in Barcelona at that time, owned by Sebastián Cormellas. His presses were divided between two establishments, one in El Call and the other in Plaça de Sant Jaume. Before Don Quixote’s fictional arrival, he had already brought out Lazarillo de Tormes (1599), Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), and Montemayor’s La Diana (1614). The Prologue to Quixote, part I, reconstructs in masterly fashion the complexity of the Spanish book during the Golden Age.
On the Spanish Levante, Valencia maintained its leading place as a printing centre; a number of its successful families—Mey, Macé, and Gárriz—demonstrate the benefits to be obtained from the printing trade. In Aragon, the Dormer, Larumbe, and Lanaja families maintained a high level of book production at Saragossa. Seville continued as the main Andalusian centre; the widow of Nicolás Rodríguez is associated with a typical illustrated genre, the festival book, which reproduces ephemeral architecture (e.g. Torre Farfán, Las Fiestas de S. Iglesia de Sevilla, 1671). In Old Castile, the presses remained active at Valladolid, the capital of Spain under Philip III between 1601 and 1606, with established printing offices (Fernández de Córdoba) and printers such as Luis Sánchez, who operated there and in Madrid, and Godínez de Millis who also had premises at Medina del Campo.
The Spanish and Portuguese Enlightenment modernized the legal, industrial, and economic aspects of the printed book. Lisbon reflected this vitality: the number of booksellers swelled to 750, mostly of Portuguese origin. A similar increase occurred among the printers, especially from 1756 onwards. Until José I’s death in 1777, the marquis of Pombal’s political programme, most notably the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759, promoted this noteworthy growth. In Spain, a change of dynasty began to take place in 1700 with the death of Charles II. The house of Bourbon entered Spain with Philip V (born at Versailles in 1683), who reigned 1700–1746. Thus began a process of profound modernization and accommodation with the European Enlightenment, which would reach its apogee during the second half of the century and the reign of Philip’s nephew Charles III (1759–88). New legislation supported efforts to promote the commercialization of the book, but the measures sharply divided different sectors of the book trade. In 1752, legislation against the import of books failed because of fierce opposition from Spanish booksellers; but the law of 1754, promulgated by Ferdinand VI (1746–59), successfully regulated trading in imported books. It demanded a special royal authorization for works in Spanish by native authors, and imposed a tax by the Council of State on every foreign printed book imported for sale. The bookbinders opposed imports because they took away their business, and in 1778 they succeeded in obtaining a legal measure that allowed the import only of unbound books, those in paper wrappers, or those with old bindings. The government’s strategy of attempting to break the centuries-old dependence of Spanish booksellers on foreign products was designed to promote domestic production by making it difficult to import books and by fostering local trade associations. Between 1758 and 1763, Madrid saw the creation of the Royal Company of Printers and Booksellers, which principally used Joaquín Ibarra y Marín’s printing office. In 1759 the Compañía de Impresores y Libreros de Valencia was formed, followed four years later by the Royal Company of Printers and Booksellers of Madrid. Supported by the government, this limited company aimed to recover parts of the market traditionally dependent on foreign presses.
With Charles III came approval for the free pricing of books, the first measures to control periodical publications, and recognition of the exclusive rights of authors and their heirs. Responsibility for censorship rested with the cultural institutions of government, such as the royal academies. A law of 1768 enshrined the intervention of the Inquisition in the printing of books. The Imprenta Real collaborated with other institutions such as the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, producing such publications as Retratos de los españoles ilustres (1791), a monumental work that engendered pride in the Spanish Enlightenment. This attitude was reflected in the publication of Juan Sempere y Guarinos’s six-volume bibliography Ensayo de una Biblioteca española de los mejores escritores del reynado de Carlos III (1785–9).
Education was to be encouraged and national pride recovered by publishing the country’s historical sources as well as the classical and contemporary works essential for enlightened thought. These texts were to be translated into Spanish by great authors who would help to create a national consciousness and restore the purity of the language. This initiative is represented by such publications as: Los Diez libros de Architectura de M. Vitruvio Polione, traducidos y comentados por Don Joseph Ortíz y Sanz (1787) and Conyers Middleton’s La vida de Cicerón, translated by Nicolás de Azara (1790). The Biblioteca del Palacio Real, founded in 1711, collaborated in this undertaking as a supplier of texts and as a publishing house. Nicolás Antonio’s national bibliography—Bibliotheca Hispana Nova (Ibarra, 1783–8); Bibliotheca Hispana Vetus (widow and heirs of Ibarra, 1788)—is a product of that cooperation. One indication of Spain’s resurgent importance is the fact that both John Baskerville (Specimen of the Word Souverainement in 11 sizes, 1766) and Giambattista Bodoni (1776) travelled to Madrid to present samples of their types for the royal press.
The state also sought to make Spanish de luxe publishing competitive throughout Europe. Books of quality emerged from the Madrid workshops of Ibarra, Antonio de Sancha, and Benito Cano, and from printing offices in Valencia run by Antonio Bordazar (active 1701–40), Benito Monfort y Besades, José Orga, father and son (1744–1808), and Salvador Fauli (1742–1800). The engravers from the Academy of Fine Arts worked for these printers on editions that are justly famous today, such as a Sallust (Conjuración de Catalina y Guerra de Yugurta, translated by the Infante Don Gabriel Antonio, son of Charles III, 1772), and the Quixote of the Academy (edited by the Real Academia Española, 1780), both printed by Ibarra. Bodoni was appointed royal printer, in part because the dukedom of Parma was linked to the Spanish royal family. Typography and the allied book arts improved considerably, to some extent because government grants to printers, engravers, and binders allowed many to have professional training in Paris or London. The type specimen books of the era—by Antonio Espinosa (1766, 1771, and 1780), Gerónimo Antonio Gil (1774), the convent of San José in Barcelona (1777 and 1801), the Palacio Real (1787), the Royal Press (1788 and 1799), the widow of Eudal Paradell (1793), and Francisco Ifern (1795)—bear witness to typographical advances mainly concentrated in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia. One of the most interesting and wide-ranging of contemporary bookmen was Antonio de Sancha; a bookseller, printer, publisher, and binder. Among the re-editions of the Spanish Golden Age published by the elder Sancha is the poetic anthology Parnaso español (1768–78), a nine-volume compilation of the best Castilian poets illustrated with their portraits. His son Gabriel produced the exquisite volumes of both parts of Quixote (1797–8, 1798–9).
The chronicles of Spanish history were republished in monumental style by the academic movement: the Crónica de Juan II (Valencia: Monfort, 1779), for example, rivalled in political design the handsome edition printed by Brocar in Logroño in 1517. The Spanish monarchy’s links with the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the dukedom of Parma widened the ambit of Spanish printing to Italy. From the middle of the 18th century until the death of Ferdinand VII (1833), Spanish binding also enjoyed a period of splendour; and although French and English influences were manifest, royal binders such as the Sanchas, Gabriel Gómez, Carsí y Vidal, Santiago Martín, and Antonio Suárez Jiménez developed techniques in which the mosaic, ‘cortina’, Valencian, and Spanish tree calf styles stood out.
From 1808 political problems—royal exile, the Peninsular War (1808–14), constitutionalism, and Ferdinandine absolutism—delayed until the 1840s the modernization of printing that had taken place in the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, the period of transition between the ancien régime and modern society is of great interest for publishing history. Spain, an invaded country that was developing a parliamentary system of government, adopted new uses for printed material, including propaganda, ephemeral patriotic literature, and newspapers. The mechanization of book production had a special impact on Madrid and above all Barcelona, which, impelled by Catalonian industrial development, became a powerful urban printing centre during the 19th century. Towards the end of the century, the indianos, or rich colonists returning from America, provided capital, brought new marketing techniques, and favoured the launch of a book industry that relied on the collaboration of the magnificent noucentisme artists.
Espasa-Calpe, a remarkable Spanish publishing house that connects the 19th and 20th centuries, employed a business model favoured by industrial societies. Espasa, the family imprint (Barcelona, 1860), formed an association with Salvat (1869–97) and captured the market in translations of French books. The firm launched a magazine of high quality (El Mundo Ilustrado), bought the rights of Brockhaus & Meyer (1905), and the plates of Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon. Later, with a committee of 33 editors and more than 600 collaborators, the firm published the Enciclopedia Espasa. In 1925, now merged with Calpe and assisted by a favourable contract with Papelera Española, the national paper-making company, Espasa opened an innovative, all-embracing bookshop in the Gran Vía in Madrid. La Casa del Libro was stocked with their older flagship series of scholarly texts: Clásicos Castellanos and their more popular Colección Austral, launched in 1937 by their Buenos Aires office during the Spanish Civil War.
The Second Spanish Republic (1931–6) brought in a policy of promoting books and of integrated publishing that supported education and the diffusion of culture. Intellectuals associated with the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institute for Teaching) and members of La Generación del 27 (The Generation of 1927) founded important periodicals: the Revista de Occidente, directed by the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset between 1923 and 1936; Litoral, edited by Emilio Prados and Manuel Altolaguirre; Gaceta Literaria, edited by José Bergamín between 1933 and 1936; Caballo Verde para la Poesía, edited by Neruda; and Octubre, founded by Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León. They also published books of high quality via private presses (Manuel Altolaguirre-Concha Zardoya). Silverio Aguirre was the Madrid printer most involved with the Silver Age authors, and Signo the most representative publisher.
Argentina and Mexico, countries that welcomed the Spanish Republican exiles from 1939, provided continuity for this intellectual publishing movement (Losada, Emecé, Séneca, and Sur) (see 48). In postwar Spain, poetry magazines such as Garcilaso or Vértice were the heirs, albeit under a Fascist banner, of the aesthetics and high standards of 1930s printing. The annual publishers’ prizes awarded by Nadal (1944) and Planeta (1952) encouraged literary publishing. Editorial Aguilar promoted high production values with its three differently sized series, ‘Obra Completa’, ‘Crisol’, and ‘Crisolín’, all printed on India paper and bound in leather. In Valencia, María Amparo and Vicente Soler (Tipografía Moderna) launched their exquisitely produced series for bibliophiles, ‘La fonte que mana y corre’ (1945–75). Collaboration between Amparo-Soler and the bibliophile Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino saw the launch of Editorial Castalia in Madrid and its flagship series in 1969, Clásicos Castalia, which has since proliferated in series for all ages of reader: Castalia Prima, Castalia Didáctica, and Escritoras Madrileñas, to name a few. This collaboration gave continuity, in the midst of the dreary postwar Spanish publishing scene, to the Republican tradition of careful critical editing.
Francisco Pérez González created the publishing house Taurus in 1955, with Gutiérrez Girardot and Miguel Sánchez. Later on, Santillana, under Jesús Polanco’s direction, consolidated and gave security to the publishing industry. Juan Salvat joined the family firm in 1955 and ran Salvat Editores until 1992, when it was sold to Hachette. He introduced door-to-door selling of weekly parts or fascicles; his programme for revolutionizing the distribution system was adopted by Circulo de Lectores and Grupo Zeta. In 1959, Germán Sánchez Ruipérez founded Anaya, which became a leader in educational texts and is now incorporated into the Santillana Group. Beatriz de Moura founded Editorial Tusquets in 1969 after working at Lumen, created by Esther Tusquets. Their series ‘Marginales’ and ‘Cuadernos Ínfimos’ became essential for short-story readers and authors. Jorge Herralde founded Anagrama in 1969 and created the prizes Ensayo (best essay, 1973) and Herralde de Novela (best novel, 1983). Carlos Barral and Jaime Salinas, promoters of the Formentor Prize at the end of the 1950s, internationalized Spanish publishing at Seix Barral and introduced the Latin American Boom writers at Alfaguara. Alianza Editorial (with its pocket editions designed by Daniel Gil), Siglo XX, Taurus, and Cuadernos para el Diálogo, were all symbols of progressive quality of popular publishing in the late Francoist era.
A. Anselmo, Origens da imprensa em Portugal (1981)
—— História da edição em Portugal, 1 Das origens até 1536 (1991)
P. Berger, Libro y lectura en la Valencia del Renacimiento (1987)
Bibliografia Geral Portuguesa, Século XV (2 vols, 1941–2)
BMC 10
J. Delgado Casado, Diccionario de impresores españoles (Siglos XV–XVII) (1966)
——— and J. Martín Abad, Repertorios bibliográficos de impresos del siglo XVI (1993)
V. Deslandes, Documentos para a história da tipografia portuguesa nos séculos XVI e XVII, ed. A. Anselmo (1988)
J. Domínguez Bordona, Manuscritos con pinturas (1933)
M. Fernández Valladares, La imprenta en Burgos, 1501–1600 (2005)
C. Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville (1988)
——— Journeymen-Printers, Heresy, and the Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Spain (2005)
F. Guedes, Os livreiros em Portugal e as suas associações desde o século XV até aos nossos dias (1993)
[Leituras,] O livro antigo em Portugal e Espanha, séculos XVI–XVIII/El libro Antiguo en Portugal y España, Leituras: Revista da Biblioteca Nacional, 3.9–10 (2002)
M. L. López-Vidriero and P. M. Cátedra, eds., El libro antiguo español (3 vols, 1992–6)
J. P. R. Lyell, Early Book Illustration in Spain (1926)
M. de la Mano González, Mercaderes e impresores de libros en la Salamanca del siglo XVI (1998)
F. J. Norton, A Descriptive Catalogue of Printing in Spain and Portugal, 1501–1520 (1978)
M. Peña Díaz, Libro y lectura en Barcelona, 1473–1600 (1995)
——— El laberinto de los libros: historia cultural de la Barcelona del Quinientos (1997)
W. A. Pettas, A History and Bibliography of the Giunti (Junta) Printing Family in Spain, 1526–1628 (2005)
J. V. de Pina Martins, Para a história da cultura portuguesa do Renascimento: A iconografia do livro impresso em Portugal no tempo de Dürer (1972)
Real Biblioteca (Madrid), Encuadernaciones de la Real Biblioteca, www.encuadernacion.realbiblioteca.es, consulted May 2008