The two centuries between 1500 and 1700 are identified as the Golden Age of Spanish literature, its Siglo de Oro. The publication of Antonio de Nebrija's Gramática de la lengua castellana in 1492 would be a more precise starting point, and for some the death of the great playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca in 1681 brings the Golden Age to a close. But that date can be extended by some years to the untimely death of the Mexican nun, poet, and playwright, Sor Juana de la Cruz, who died in a cholera epidemic in 1695. Its highlights include the poets Garcilaso de la Vega, San Juan de la Cruz, and Fray Luis de León; the picaresque novels Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache of Mateo Alemán; and Spain’s greatest author of fiction, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quijote. During this same period more than 1,100 playwrights lived and wrote in Spain and the Spanish colonies in the New World: authors like the Portuguese Gil Vicente (who wrote in both Spanish and Portuguese); Bartolomé de Torres Naharro; Lope de Rueda; Juan de Timoneda; Juan Ruiz de Alarcón; Guillén de Castro; Francisco de Rojas Zorilla; Tirso de Molina; Cervantes himself; and his great rival Lope de Vega.1 These plays took a circuitous route from performance to the printed word. Until 1837, when the concept of intellectual property was enthroned in Spanish law, and for some years afterward, playwrights sold their plays to the manager of a theater company, who in turn sold them to a less important theater company or to a publisher, who then became the legitimate owner with the right to print the play and profit from it.2 Publishers and printers then strove to improve the odds of financial success by enhancing the printed object in order to attract the attention of potential buyers. They surrounded the creative portion of the work with supplementary material: the paratext, whose primary goal was to make the work more saleable. Publishers missed no opportunity to promote, market, or advertise. Every available inch on page one, above and below the title, as well as part of the colophon on the last page, and any blank pages following the colophon, were all was pressed into service for this purpose.
Publishers, printers, and booksellers laid claim to the space before Jornada Primera and after FIN. They took advantage of the first page of the play, following the path trodden by the pioneer printers of the 15th century, to offer eye-catching possibilities to entice the consumer to purchase the item; at the end of the play, an informative colophon or a list offering additional titles for sale, sometimes as part of an extensive series, was temptation for further purchases.
Paratext supplied by the publisher/printer, or at the request of a bookseller, appeared in the form of caption titles, news about performances, names of actors and acting companies, colophons, lists of titles the bookseller had in stock, and cancel slips to show the transfer of stock from one bookseller to another. There is an Exhibit Case with examples to illustrate each of these themes.
This virtual exhibition attempts to examine different categories of paratext in comedias sueltas printed before 1834 and to look closely at how some publishers, printers, and booksellers approached the commercial aspects of advertising and promoting their wares.
The majority of the images are from the holdings of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York Public Library, and my personal collection--a total more than 4,000 sueltas--all of which I have handled individually more than once.
In compiling the catalogues of the sueltas in the NYPL, it was the repeated act of copying colophons verbatim that brought to my attention just how much information could be packed into three or four lines of text. Then, suddenly, a most unusual colophon appeared at the end of an auto (sacramental play), Calderón de la Barca’s La protestación de la fe. It was printed by Antonio Sanz, whose colophons were fairly uniform and not overly informative, but in this instance he stepped into the role of literary critic and justified the reason for printing this particular work by Calderón. It prompted me to look much more closely at how printers and publishers saw themselves and what methods they used to sell their goods.
This exhibition is designed to show a variety of interesting examples, it is not a systematic examination of all colophons or all title lists attached to comedias; thus, it cannot serve as a firm basis for the history of the printing industry’s advertising practices. It is however, enough of a sampling to illustrate trends and methods in salesmanship in the Spanish book trade of the 18th and early 19th centuries. More than anything, it is hoped that it will raise some interest in printing history, ephemera, the book trade, reading habits, among other possible subjects in the world of books and collecting.
1Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera y Leirado, Catálogo bibliográfico y biográfico del teatro antiguo español, desde sus origenes hasta mediados del siglo XVIII. Madrid, M. Rivadeneyra, 1860. Facsm. Reprint Biblioteca románica hispánica. IX. Facsímiles. Madrid: Gredos, 1969.
2Radically new legislation was passed in 1837 affected living authors: dramatic texts belonged to those who had written them rather than to those who had bought them. This, however, clearly did not include authors long dead. As long as the public continued to have a taste for classical writers, printers gladly catered to them in hopes of financial success, all the more so since they did not have to pay for the right to publish.
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