The Western Book in Spanish America

(September - December, 2009)

This exhibit features some key episodes in the story of the book and the printed word in Spanish America, as illustrated through the collections of the Latin American Library. Contrary to the role of the printing press in Northern Europe, where printing spurred the spread of Protestantism and was instrumental in disseminating the ideas of the New Science, presses were established in the Spanish colonies in a much more circumscribed environment, as instruments of empire to aid in the administration of the colonies and the conversion of native peoples. Case 1 is devoted to the establishment of printing in Mexico (1539), Puebla (1640) and Guatemala (1660) and presents some early examples of printed books from those cities. By the eighteenth century, printing presses begin producing newspapers, which carried a variety of reports of general interest to literate criollos and administrators, such as the arrival and departure of fleets and merchandise, news on wars and current events in Spain and other parts of the colonies and the Americas, cultural notes, and reflected a growing interest in scientific news of the day.

Case 1: The First Two Centuries of Printing: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Case 2 features examples of eighteenth century periodicals from various Audiencias, including an issue of the influential Mercurio peruano from Lima, by far the most successful of the period.

Case 3 presents key bibliographic compilations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that illustrate the role of these catalogs as vehicles in the formation of nationalist and protonationalist identities.

Case 4 features two of the most significant periods in Spanish American typographical history in the twentieth century. The 1930s-1950s, which constituted the so-called “ Golden Age ” of publishing in the region, spurred by the Spanish Civil War and World War II, when publishers in Mexico, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile fill in the void in Spanish-language publishing in Euro pe. And the boost in publishing in Cuba as a direct result of a concerted state policy following the early phases of the Cuban Revolution to become a regional publishing hub.

This exhibit is made possible by the Zemurray Foundation through the Doris Stone Endowment to the Latin American Library.