Dedicated to D.W. Cruickshank

This project was well along and had been seen and critiqued by Donald Cruickshank over several months before he passed away suddenly on 17 August 2021. There is no way in which I could ever have thanked Don enough for the generous and thoughtful help he provided. The pre-eminent scholar in the field and a friend of several decades, he reviewed and evaluated the text at every stage. He answered questions and suggested published materials—even before I knew I needed them—to support my observations and hypotheses. When I was puzzled by something, he offered bibliographic citations and references to explain and clarify the issue. His unselfish contribution resulted in the compilation of the examples related to false attributions and concealed reprints sections. I will forever be grateful for his generosity in sharing his vast knowledge with me and, by extension, with all those who will enjoy and benefit from this online exhibition.

Acknowledgments

From its inception, this project required a great deal of technological expertise. A website needed to be designed, a database created, and multiple spreadsheets managed. Dozens of images had to be scanned or photographed, and carefully arranged and labeled. All these time-consuming tasks, many of which were way beyond my capabilities, required a team effort, and I could not have asked for a better team.

I thank Andrea Contreras, Patricia Davalos, Ronna Feit, Alyse Hennig, Matthew Murphy, Cristina Stubbe, Diana Vazquez, and Mackenzie Zalin for their amazing talents, their patience, understanding of, and enthusiasm for a seemingly eccentric project that required arranging in logical order dozens of cropped images, paired with slivers of captions.

Guillermo Carone, a website designer with the sensibilities of a trained architect, had worked on my previous (and ongoing) project https://www.comediassueltasusa.org/. Not only did Guillermo translate my design ideas with elegance and understanding into an attractive Home Page, but for the Gallery Page he also suggested several images related to bookish places in his native Barcelona.

Maria Passarotti is Senior Developer at Collective Access and an expert in the use of this open-source software for cataloguing and publishing museum and archival collections. Maria designed a visually elegant and user-friendly database, which is easy to navigate, even for those with limited experience. She made endless suggestions to improve it at every step of the way. With patience and good nature, she also suffered my endless questions, changes, panic attacks, and deep ignorance of technology.

Only a librarian knows how much every writing project relies on the help of librarians. Access to libraries was almost nonexistent during the pandemic. The Grolier Club library had several volumes that I needed to consult “immediately.” Toward the end of the lockdown, Meghan Constantinou and Scott Elwood went into the library a few days a week to scan materials, which they made available to me in record time. Never have I been more appreciative of being a Grolier Club member and more grateful to its staff.

Of course, the collection of The Hispanic Society Museum & Library plays a central role in this online exhibition, as does its library staff. John O'Neill (Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books) provided support in all matters related to the cataloguing and photographing of HSM&L's entire collection of comedias sueltas, even allocating shelves in the reading room to provide us with easy access. Javier Milligan (Curator of the Modern Library) catalogued much of the collection and assisted in myriad other ways to make this project a reality.

The Gallery page includes images of paintings and engravings that add substance to the subject of the exhibition. These depict people or events in the history of the printing of comedias sueltas. Because I lacked sufficient knowledge to write informative captions for these works of art, Patrick Lenaghan (Curator of Prints and Photographs) came to my rescue by carefully vetting all the information and writing scholarly labels.

Not all examples could be found locally, and when inter-library loans failed, a friend came to the rescue. Cory Reed, cervantista por exelencia, photographed the images that I needed from the superb collection of the University of Texas, Humanities Research Center. The addition of the full text of the four relaciones de comedias helped enormously to communicate the point that I tried to make in the last Exhibition Case.

I am immensely grateful to those who read and offered constructive suggestions of the several iterations that led up to the final version: Cathleen Baker, Charles Faulhaber, Julia Hernández, James Lowry,  Stephen Schmidt, and Michael Suarez. This online exhibition would be of less substance without their careful and informed reading. I appreciate their imprimatur.

It really does take a village (of mostly librarians), and I have been most fortunate in working with very special villagers (most of them smitten by early printing). All of them share the credit for the successful creation of what I hope will be a fun and memorable experience, as visitors walk down the virtual corridors of this exhibition, stopping at each Exhibition Case and clicking their way through the examples within it.