INTRODUCTION Iberian Books is an ongoing bibliographical research project based at University College Dublin’s Centre for the History of the Media. It has been funded through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation under their Scholarly Communications and Information Tech- nology Scheme. The overall objective of the project is to produce a foundational listing of all books published in Spain, Portugal and the New World or printed elsewhere in Spanish or Portuguese during the Golden Age, 1472–1700. In 2010, Brill published the project’s survey of printing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, recording some 19,900 bibliographically distinct items, surviving in 104,000 copies in 1,320 libraries worldwide. The present two vol- umes represent the results of the latest phase of the project’s activities, extending the coverage up to the middle of the seventeenth century. Around 45,000 items are recorded, along with the locations of some 215,000 copies. Iberian Books has brought together information scattered and fragmented across a host of online, published and manuscript sources. It has incorporated references from major biblio- graphical works and specialist articles, including the momumental Manual del librero hispano- americano, compiled in 28 volumes by Antonio Palau y Dulcet.1 It has drawn also from the major collective cataloguing projects in Spain and Portugal, the Catálogo Colectivo del Patrimonio Bibliográfico Español (hereafter CCPB) and the Base Nacional de Dados Bib- liográficos (hereafter PORBASE).2 A list of the principal reference works consulted can be found following the introductory essay. The project has also mined and processed information from the online, card, and printed catalogues of close to 1,500 libraries worldwide. While the national libraries of Spain and Portugal hold the most significant collections of material, other repositories in Madrid and Lisbon hold substantial volumes of works – most especially the libraries of the Real Academia de la Historia and the Biblioteca Histórica Marqués de Valdecilla (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). Around 30 per cent of all known books are to be found only in provincial Iberian collections, of which by far the largest are the libraries of the Universidad de Sevilla and the Biblioteca Pública del Estado de Huesca. However, the importance of looking beyond the Peninsula and undertaking a global census of copies is demonstrated by the fact that a third of the largest holdings of Iberian material (thirty-three out of the top hundred holdings) are to be found outside of Portugal and Spain. In order of importance, the largest non-Iberian collections are the British Library in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, the library of the Hispanic Society in New York, the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile in Santiago, the Houghton Library at Harvard Univer- sity, the Biblioteca Nacional de México, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome, the Bodleian Library of Oxford and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome. In total, around a fifth of all items recorded in the present two volumes of Iberian Books can only be found in collections outside of Spain and Portugal. The project team has also made efforts to at least partially address the problem that not all printed items survive in a public or research collection by scouring auction records; we have 1 Antonio Palau y Dulcet, Manual del librero hispano-americano (Barcelona, Librería Anticuaria de A. Palau, 1948–1977), 28 vols. 2 The CCPB can be accessed at http://ccpb_opac.mcu.es/CCPBopac/ while the PORBASE catalogue can be accessed at http://www.porbase.org/. viii ALEXANDER S. WILKINSON & ALEJANDRA ULLA LORENZO established a good working relationship with some key Madrid auction houses, as well as with American Book Prices Current, a commercial organization based in Washington, Connecticut which collates information on books sold at auction, from major firms in North America, the UK and elsewhere.3 Iberian Books represents an important advance in the research infrastructure. The lack of a national short-title catalogue for Spain and Portugal (and their associated territories) has been a major barrier for scholars. For too long, Hispanists and Lusophonists have been forced to look on enviously at the developing resources produced for other parts of Europe. Iberian Books transforms this. It is now relatively straightforward to identify the corpus of works written by an author or printer, the popularity of particular texts, and to locate surviving copies of these items. Moreover, in the past, those interested in understanding the broader dynamics of the publishing industry, its shifting fashions and fortunes, were forced to rely on impressionistic samples of particular holdings. Such an approach could only ever offer a hugely distorted picture. Iberian Books now brings broader trends into sharper focus, transforming our ability to analyze how the marketplace for print functioned. Proclaiming the merits and strengths of Iberian Books is not to say that the project team is oblivious to its flaws. The undeniable reality is that Iberian Books represents a good begin- ning rather than the end of a process. The survey we have just completed of the first half of the seventeenth century was achieved at a cost of just under €180,000 – a fraction of what has been spent on comparable national projects. Iberian Books is an achievement, but an imperfect one. It is important that scholars who make use of its entries are as conscious of its limitations as its benefits. Most of the established national short-title projects, including the English,4 Italian,5 Netherlandish,6 Flanders,7 French Vernacular,8 and German9 catalogues have undertaken sig- nificant book-in-hand work to verify records and offer reliable bibliographical descriptions. This activity has taken place over many years, sometimes generations, and often with sig- nificant teams of staff and external collaborators. The English STC, which began life in the 1920s, is undoubtedly the most advanced – helped by the concentration of surviving copies in a relatively small number of libraries worldwide, and the editorial attention devoted to it by a succession of talented and determined bibliographers. Even more than ninety years later, however, this resource, which most early-modern British scholars would regard as indispens- able, is missing many copies (and undoubtedly items); its coverage especially of smaller and medium-sized continental collections is surprisingly incomplete. The problem of scope is much more pronounced in other, comparatively more recent, national cataloguing projects. As with 3 American Book Prices Current is an annual record of books, manuscripts, autographs, maps and broadsides sold at auction. It is available by subscription at https://www.bookpricescurrent.com. 4 William Pollard and Gilbert Redgrave, A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland: and of English books published abroad, 1475–1640 (London, The Bibliographical Society, 1926). The second edition was begun by W.A. Jackson & F.S. Ferguson and completed by Katharine F. Pantzer. The second volume was published in 1976 while the first volume appeared a decade later in 1986. 5 http://edit16.iccu.sbn.it/ The Edit16 Project is an initiative of the Laboratorio per la bibliografia retrospettiva of the Instituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unicois. Currently, it holds data on 60,000 items. The project is based on records from participating Italian libraries; it does not at present offer a global survey of copies. 6 The Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN) is compiled and published by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, see http:// http://picarta.pica.nl/. This catalogue should now be used in conjunction with Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby (eds.), Netherlandish Books (NB). Books Published in the Low Countries and Dutch Books Printed Abroad before 1601 (Leiden, Brill, 2011), 2 vols. 7 The Short Title Catalogus Vlaanderen (STCV), is available at http://www.vlaamse-erfgoedbibliotheek.be/stcv. 8 Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby and Alexander Wilkinson (eds.), French Vernacular Books. Books published in the French Language before 1601 (Leiden, Brill, 2007), 2 vols. This is also available online at http://www. ustc.ac.uk. 9 The VD16 Project holds information on some 100,000 records and can be accessed via http://gateway-bayern. bib-bvb.de/aleph-cgi/bvb_suche?sid=VD16 The project is based almost entirely on the collections of German libraries and has excluded single-leaf items. .