INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Publishing in the Iberian Peninsula, 1601–1650
Alexander S. Wilkinson
There are limits to how much we will ever know about early-modern publishing. We have lost more early printed books than have survived. What has been preserved in research libraries and in private collections almost certainly distorts, perhaps significantly in some aspects, our impression of what was once printed, bought, read and heard.1 Yet, reconstructing and inter- rogating the surviving printed record can reveal a huge amount and offer a good, if incom- plete, sense of the contours and the dynamics of this very important industry. Certainly, the present volumes of Iberian Books represent a very substantial improvement in our capacity to understand and contextualise the book trade in Golden-Age Spain and Portugal. To date, scholars have been able to consult a range of sources, such as individual library catalogues (online, card and manuscript), collective catalogues covering specific regions, and analytical bibliographies of some, but not all, Iberian printing centres. The objective of Iberian Books has been to bring together all these separate strands of information and offer a listing of what has survived, or known to have once existed. Much detailed bibliographical work remains to be undertaken. It is likely to take generations to refine entries, incorporate some collections missed or only partially captured, and to exorcise bibliographical ghosts. However, we do now have a robust platform, or at least a far more robust platform than we have ever had, from which to attempt an overall survey of Iberian print. The purpose of this introductory essay is to present the information accumulated by the project over the past four years, and to offer insight into the scale, geography and character of publishing in the Iberian book world in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Chronological Distribution
12000 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 0 1470s 1480s 1490s 1500s 1510s 1520s 1530s 1540s 1550s 1560s 1570s 1580s 1590s 1600s 1610s 1620s 1630s 1640s
Figure 2. Overview of items produced by decade, 1470s–1640s.
1 For a discussion of survival rates, albeit in a French context, see Alexander S. Wilkinson, ‘Lost Books Printed in French before 1601’, The Library, 10/2 (2009), pp. 188–205, and for ephemera in a Spanish context, see ‘Cheap Vernacular Print in Spain before 1601: Some General Trends and International Comparisons’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 90 4/5 (2013), pp. 871–893. xiv introductory essay
1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0
16011602160316041605160616071608160916101611161216131614161516161617161816191620162116221623162416251626162716281629163016311632163316341635163616371638163916401641164216431644164516461647164816491650
Figure 3. Chronological Overview of Iberian Book Production, 1601–1650.
Figure 2 provides an overview of items printed in each decade from the 1470s up to the 1640s. It demonstrates the steady increase in production that took place over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. What is perhaps most extraordinary, however, is the dramatic jump in output from the 1600s. It would appear that there was a doubling of the number of works printed between the final decade of the sixteenth century and the first decade ofthe seventeenth, with an even more staggering 221 per cent increase between the 1590s and 1640s. Overall, we can see real growth over the 1600s through to the 1620s, then modest contraction in the 1630s, followed by growth once again in the 1640s. Figure 3 affords us the opportunity to look at the number of items printed on a year to year basis. From this, we can see that growth in the first two decades of the century appears relatively smooth, with only a few minor bumps. This situation changes from 1626, when steady and even growth seems to have been arrested. From 1626 to 1637, we see periods of contraction and stabilization. From 1638 to 1642, there appears to have been a very substantial increase in the output of the Iberian presses. This coincided with a series of major news events in these years, which were reported widely in numerous pamphlets – including the successful Spanish relief of Fuenterrabía in September 1638. From 1643, there was a significant contraction in production (a 23 per cent decrease compared with 1642). Thereafter, production levels seem to have remained relatively stable up to the middle of the century. The very notable peaks, in 1601 and 1650, are in large measure illusory. They are the consequence of common library practice in relation to attributed dates. For instance, where there is no obvious date on a title page of a work – which occurs most often on very short ephemeral publications – librarians and indeed other bibliographers often estimate the year of publication in broad ranges, for instance, 1601–1610, or 1650–1655. These appear in the statistics under the first date. So far, our analysis has been predicated on the fact that counting the number of recorded items printed in any given year or decade can offer a reasonably reliable indicator of produc- tion levels. The obvious problem with this assumption, however, is that counting the number of books fails to differentiate properly between very large folio items which could take many months to produce, or pamphlets or broadsheets which could be printed with great rapidity, often in under a day. We might, therefore, look towards another yardstick to assess the pro- ductive capacity of the Iberian presses, and that is the number of sheets used to produce each item. The calculations involved in generating these figures are relatively straightforward, if time consuming. First, we created a clean series of numbers. Items where pagination or foliation was incorrect and inferred values were present were resolved, for instance ff. 19 [=20] became ff. 20. Roman numerals were converted into arabic notation. The combined value of all folios or pages for each item was then calculated. For items which were paginated rather than foliated, the total was divided by two. The folio count was then divided by the format of the book. So a quarto pamphlet with pagination of xii [4] would equate to two sheets. That is 16 pages divided by two to calculate the folio value (=8), divided by 4 (quarto), equals two sheets.