The Imprenta Municipal is located on a street that has been associated with Madrid printers and booksellers for several centuries. The original building was renovated and reopened in 2011 and has since become Madrid’s de facto Museum of Printing. On exhibition is an extensive collection of printing tools, presses, types, cases, and binding equipment. It is a place where nonspecialists can gain an appreciation for the history and art of the book.

Address: Calle de Concepción Jerónima, 15, 28012 Madrid, Spain
Imprenta Municipal Website

The storied Librería Bardón, known by Hispanists all over the world, is operated by the third generation of the book-loving Bardón family. It occupies a 19th-century house on the Plaza de San Martín where bibliophiles can find many treasures, including comedias sueltas.

The interior is a perfect example of an antiquarian bookstore designed with a graceful archway, furnished with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and an emblematic ladder to reach the top.

An anonymous engraving published in 1850, depicting a stall adjoining the convent of San Agustín (Barrio de la Ribera, Barcelona).

Source: Roderick Cave History of the Book in 100 Books p. 222

The colophons of items printed in Madrid from the seventeenth century to the 1830s frequently referred to the Gradas de San Felipe as a place where sueltas and similar ephemera were sold.

San Felipe el Real was an Augustinian monastery, founded in 1547 with the encouragement of crown prince Philip (later Philip II). It stood on a low mound or platform in the calle Mayor between the calle de Esparteros and the calle del Correo. Steps led up to a kind of esplanade, on which the monastery church stood. The main entrance to the church faced the calle de Esparteros, and in front of the entrance was the “Lonja de la Entrada de la Yglesia.” On the north (calle Mayor) side was the “Lonja Grande.” [1] The sloping ground allowed galleries (covachuelas) to be constructed under the lonja grande, and early prints show doorways opening from the calle Mayor into this space. These covachuelas were rented out by the monks, and one of the few sets of accounts to have survived shows that from 1783 to 1786 the total rent for eighteen covachuelas exceeded 10,000 reales a year (Sánchez Espinosa, p. 145). In addition to these covachuelas, Dr. Sánchez Espinosa suggests that the awnings that can be seen projecting from the wall of the church provided protection for more stalls, and that there were even more bookshops in the nearby streets (pp. 148–9).

Early modern Madrid had several “mentideros”: places where madrileños met to gossip and exchange news, and the Gradas de San Felipe were a favorite one of these. The presence of stalls and kiosks selling a wide variety of goods, including toys and printed ephemera such as newsletters, plays and playlets, was an added attraction, and we find various forms of the address in colophons: “frente a San Felipe el Real,” “frente las gradas de San Felipe el Real,” “en las gradas de San Felipe el Real,” “en su puesto, gradas de San Felipe el Real.”

It should be noted that San Felipe was only a short distance from another favorite suelta-vending area: the “lonja de comedias de la Puerta del Sol.” [2] Dr. Ulla Lorenzo’s study makes use of the advertisements in the Gaceta de Madrid to show that there were numerous such areas in the central part of the city.

The monastery of San Felipe el Real suffered extensive damage when it was taken over to accommodate French troops during the War of Independence. It was closed in 1835 and pulled down in 1838. [DWC]

[1] Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa, “Los puestos de libros en las gradas de San Felipe el Real de Madrid en el siglo XVIII”, Goya: Revista de Arte, 335 (2011), 142–155 (p. 144, fig. 4).
[2] Alejandra Ulla Lorenzo, “Nuevos datos sobre la lonja de comedias de la Puerta del Sol (1733–1786)”, Neophilologus, 102 (2018) [online].

Portrait of Antonio de Sancha

A bookstall in the 18th-century as imagined by an illustrator.

This portrait of a young woman by Goya, now in the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), is reproduced in Antonio Rodríguez Moñino’s book Catálogos de libreros españoles (1661–1840), with the caption “Retrato de la famosa librera de la calle de las Carretas.” After considerable research into the provenance of the painting, Patrick Lenaghan, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, believes that “The painting previously had that title but when Brown and Mann catalogued the Spanish paintings of the National Gallery, they pointed out that it probably came from Serafín García de la Huerta's collection and that therefore the title was probably not correct.”

The same portrait is also reproduced in Francisco Vindel’s Manual de conocimientos técnicos y culturales para profesionales del libro. This is Vindel’s comment on the portrait (p. 87): “En la calle de Carretas hubo una librera a quien retrató Goya; he procurado investigar de quién se trataba, y como resultado he obtenido que desde 1778 hasts 1800 hubo dos libreras en la calle de Carretas, que fueron la viuda de Corradi, en 1778, y en 1794 la viuda de Piferrer, y yo creo que seguramante esta última fué la que retrató, y el llamarla famosa fué a causa de que en la calle de Carretas había las siguientes librerías: Blanques Martínez, Escribano, Francés Bailo, Hurtado, Bravo, Tieso, Gómez, Orcel, Campis y la citada viuda de Piferrer, y seguramente era notable una librería regentada por una mujer, entre tantas otras, o porque era muy bella, según se ve n el retrato que de ella hizo.”

The portrait is in The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Antonio Rodríguez Moñino. Catálogos de libreros españoles (1661–1840). Madrid: Langa y Compañía, 1945.
Francisco Vindel. Manual de conocimientos técnicos y culturales para profesionales del libro. 2a edición aumentada. Madrid, 1948.

Nowadays, the Baixada de la Canonja is a picturesque, narrow street in the Barrio Gótico, leading to the Catedral Basílica Metropolitana de Barcelona. In the last two decades of the 18th century and into the first few years of the 19th century, printers and booksellers Juan Serra and Juan Centené list it as their address in their colophons.

The Baixada is now a short street lined with massive stone walls. There are no stores—in fact, there are no openings at all in the walls. It is likely that the length and other characteristics of the street were altered by the extensive transformation that began in Barcelona in 1913, in preparation for the 1929 World Exposition, and that affected the Cathedral and the entire area around it.

Carrer de la Llibreteria (Bookstore Street) was the home of many bookstores in the old city of Barcelona. Many booksellers and printers were housed on this street, even though at the time its last segment, leading towards Via Laietana, was known as “Baixada de la Presó.” (So named because at the end of the street was a prison, which operated until 1837.) The first portion of the street was renamed “Baixada de la Llibretería” in 1958 to better represent its history and spirit.

Today, Carrer Llibreteria and Baixada de la Llibreteria have become much more diverse, with all kinds of shops promoting their products. Yet, the old Casa Rubió, founded in 1800 and later renamed as Papirvm, has been in business for more than two centuries. Papirvum sells all kinds of antique-inspired writing materials, all of which are manufactured using techniques that have been handed down from one generation to the next. The current owner, Dolors, is internationally known for her beautiful hand-made marbled paper, which is used for Papirvm’s own products and is also exported throughout Europe.

The Lonja de la Seda, built between 1482 and 1533, functioned as a trading house for silk merchants at a time when Valencia’s location made it an important center of Mediterranean trade. In 1996, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site, and it is a main architectural attraction for visitors to the city.

José Carlos Navarro, bookseller for José Ferrer de Orga and for Martín Perís imprints, had a bookstore on calle de la Lonja de la Seda. The imprints of these sueltas, published between 1811 and 1818, include the address on the title page. Locating the store on a well-known street and making the address very public, must have been good for business.

Reference is made to Miguelete in José Gimeno's colophons in the 1820s. Gimeno was a Valencian printer with a bookstore located frente al Miguelete, an address easily found with reference to the Cathedral, a central landmark in any city.

Miguelete is the name of the biggest bell (cast in 1532) housed in the gothic-style octagonal bell tower of the Cathedral of Valencia.

According to Martín de Riquer, whose scholarly notes accompanied the 1965 Juventud edition of Don Quijote, claimed that in chapter LXII Cervantes was describing the printing house of Sebastiàn de Cormellas, on Calle del Call, which brought out a good number of classic works of the Spanish Golden Age. It is obvious that this image strays from strict framework of this exhibition, however, the connections are too tempting to resist: we meet Cervantes’ 17th-century hero in the 18th-century print shop that published the novel.

This engraving of Don Quixote visiting a print shop in Barcelona comes from Sancha’s 1797 edition of Part II. The scene, like the novel, is full of references to real-life characters as well as to fictional ones. The image is rich in details related to printing: a man in the background on the right is setting type (composing stick in his left hand, picking type from the case with his raised right hand); in the background, on the left, a printer is lifting off a sheet from the bed of the press. The gentleman wearing a turban, at the back left, is Antonio de Sancha, who is recognizable from his often-reproduced portrait. The younger, bewigged man directly in front of him is most likely his son, Gabriel, who carried on the business. The event, which in the novel takes place in Barcelona, has been transposed to Madrid, the location being identifiable by the sign over the door that reads “Imprenta de Sancha.”

It is an engraving by Juan Moreno Tejada (1738–1805) after a composition designed by Luis Paret y Alcázar (1746–1799). The original drawing in this case survives in the Biblioteca Nacional (BNE DIB/15/54/13).

[Courtesy of Patrick Lenaghan, Head Curator of Prints, Photographs and Sculpture, Hispanic Society Museum & Library]

Paret’s composition was engraved by Juan Moreno Tejada (1738–1805) for the book.