Preface

Collecting some variety of printed matter and membership in a book collectors’ club go hand in hand. Along with some 850 collectors from around the world, I am a member of the Grolier Club of New York. The Club was founded in 1884 by nine men, all active in the printing and book trade, who wished to foster "the study, collection and appreciation of books and works on paper, their art, history, production, and commerce."¹ The Club continues to fulfill its original mission by maintaining an extensive library dedicated to all aspects of the book arts open by appointment to researchers from all walks of life, and by inviting the public to its exhibitions and lectures free of charge. Exhibitions are at the core of members’ activities, whether mounting one’s own or viewing those of fellow members. Both are activities about sharing with kindred spirits the thrill of what one discovers among one’s treasures.

Many Club members collect high points, manuscripts, fine printing, fine bindings, extra-illustrated copies, early medical treatises, books-of-hours printed on vellum, first editions, association copies, items of distinguished provenance—in other words, objects of rarity, with notable attributions. In my case, even claiming to be a book collector is an overstatement; my collection seems not to get beyond pamphlet-length publications, cheaply printed, never bound, not illustrated, lacking any previous owner’s ex-libris (or perhaps just a professor’s name on a rubber stamp). In English, these publications are known as chapbooks under the umbrella of printed ephemera. In Spain they are called pliegos sueltos and are part of the string literature (literatura de cordel) tradition. String literature is lightweight, not because of its subject but because its pages can be displayed clipped to a string in a bookseller’s kiosk—think of bouquinistes along the Seine. To be specific, the subset of pliegos sueltos that I collect are comedias sueltas: the works of a great many Spanish playwrights of the 16th through the 18th centuries, which were printed before 1834. These are singly printed plays (not to be translated as comedies) in quarto format, in double columns, with a drop title. The adjective suelta translates as "loose" in English. In this context it describes the play printed on three-to-six gatherings which were sold unbound. The Introduction contains a detailed discussion of the history and circumstances of comedias sueltas, including an explanation of why so many were printed.

Spending months at home during the pandemic afforded many of us the opportunity to spend quality time with our prized possessions: to sort, catalogue, admire, cull, rehouse, or even add to by way of online purchases. In other words, to engage seriously with these objects that afford us pleasure and instruction. In some cases, this increased involvement led to discovering previously unnoticed patterns, ideas, or meanings among the items. Some weeks into the lockdown, while cataloguing my sueltas, I came to the realization that Spanish printers, publishers, and booksellers of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries used every centimeter of space on these imprints to promote the sale of their publications.

“Paratext” is a relatively new concept within the field of literature, introduced and defined by Gérard Genette in his Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation.² In brief, paratext consists of all that appears in the printed artifact that is additional to the original, creative work produced by the author. The study of paratext looks not at the literary content of a work, but at the way(s) in which it is presented to the world or the way(s) in which it manifests itself in the world through elements that surround the text: among them, the table of contents, illustrations, ornamentation, list of dramatis personae, and information included in colophons. Few works have addressed this concept in relation to comedias sueltas. D.W. Cruickshank touches on several aspects of this subject, and Lisa Surwillo treats in depth this subject as it pertains to post-1833 imprints.³ For a general discussion and historic overview of paratext in books, especially in Spain, see Antonio Castillo Gómez.⁴

In the best Club tradition, I wanted to share in a non-academic way what had been hiding in plain sight, but had only recently become obvious and visible to me, with other collectors and Hispanists. It seemed that an online exhibition was the best vehicle to share my insights.⁵ This exhibition includes examples in support of the thesis that in comedias sueltas of the period, the paratext served principally as advertisements: for the work itself, for other works by the same author, for the publications of a given publisher, or for other merchandise carried by the bookstore. Sometimes it is surprising how aggressively they promoted these publications.

This realization and the resulting virtual exhibition are based on direct observation and handling of primary sources, not on the published research of previous scholars. It is not intended as an academic or exhaustive study of paratexts as they relate to the history of printing of the long 18th century. Instead, this appraisal of more than 4,000 sueltas does offer a first survey of the subject. The examples presented are primarily from my own collection, but I have taken the liberty of illustrating certain points from plays in public institutions: mostly from The Hispanic Society Museum and Library (HSM&L, formerly The Hispanic Society of America) and The New York Public Library (NYPL) among others.

My interest in comedias sueltas began while I was pursuing doctoral studies in Spanish literature and simultaneously working at the Research Division of The New York Public Library. My mentor, Professor Hannah Bergman of Lehman College, aware of printed catalogues of important collections of comedias sueltas in a handful of U.S. libraries, suggested that we compile a descriptive catalogue of NYPL’s holdings. In 1975, we began to take inventory; by the end of our exhaustive search, we had found that the Research Libraries held 1,210 copies of plays printed in this format. We published our findings in two slim volumes.⁶ A few years later, for my doctoral dissertation, I compiled a catalogue of the 475 items, bound in 26 volumes, in the collection of the Hispanic Society’s library.⁷ My own collecting of sueltas as a graduate student had a slow start but gained momentum once my publications got on the radar of some book dealers. I now count more than 1,300 items in archival boxes or bound in factitious volumes on my shelves.

After some years away from academic pursuits, I continued to collect with an interest in bringing this corpus of ephemera to the attention of members of the bibliophilic community, be they Hispanists or collectors. The website, COMEDIAS SUELTAS USA is a survey of Spanish comedias sueltas printed before 1834 in the collections of U.S. libraries. Its purpose is to compile a census of all copies of comedias sueltas held in academic and independent research libraries (some also known as public libraries). The website was presented for the first time in October 2015 with a demonstration of the Beta version at the AITENSO conference at Queens College.⁸ At the core of this website is a database that includes a bibliographical record and copy-specific images (of at least the first and last page) of every suelta in every library. This goal is being pursued with élan and with the generous help of scores of librarians (many of them Grolier members) who have taken a keen interest in this project.

In addition to providing a more-than-cursory examination of the printing trade, as well as the commercial aspects of book promotion and advertising in 18th-century Spain, I hope that in exploring this virtual exhibition it reinforces the notion among literary scholars that texts do not exist in a vacuum; the vessel that carries the text affects the way they are perceived. Even the images included here, in their imperfect state—not all as clear and as sharp as I would like them to be—help to convey the fact that comedias sueltas were at the low end of a printer’s output, cheaply printed, in haste, and with little care.

As other Grolierites who mount their own exhibitions, I hope that visitors to this virtual one will discover something of the riches of printed matter as objects, even objects of mere ephemera, that it will spur their interest in the related subjects of the history of books and printing.

¹Quoted from the constitution of the Grolier Club.

²Genette, Gérard. Paratexts : Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

³D.W. Cruickshank, “On the Stage, on the Page: Some Developments in Spanish Drama, 1681—1833,” in A Lifetime’s Reading: Hispanic Essays for Patrick Gallagher, ed. Don W. Cruickshank (Dublin: University College of Dublin P, 1999), p. 26-43. Lisa Surwillo, “Paratextual Performances in the ‘Galerías dramáticas’,” in her The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007), p. 124-46.

⁴Antonio Castillo Gómez, “‘Véndese en la tienda de . . .’ Apuntes sobre la publicidad del libro en la España moderna,” in La publicidad del libro en el mundo hispánico (Siglos XVII-XX): Los Catálogos de venta de libreros y editores, ed. Pedro Rueda Ramírez Lluís Agustí (Barcelona: Calambur 2016), p. 87-113.

Christophe Couderc, 'Sociabilidad y solidaridad profesional en el paratexto teatral' in Ámbitos artísticos y literarios de sociabilidad en los Siglos de Oro, (Edition Reichenberger, 2020), p. 75-89.

⁵The close and personal relationship that I have had with my own collection and with those of the HSM&L and NYPL collections would have enabled me to mount such an exhibition at the Grolier Club, but it seemed to me that the time and expense of such an endeavor could be more profitably invested in something more permanent and for a wider audience. Moreover, given the monochromatic look and less-than-elegant printing of the comedias—not to mention the language barrier that an entire collection in Spanish would have presented to Grolier members—it seemed prudent not to go forward with a physical exhibition but rather to create a virtual one. Although not on view within the recently renovated Clubhouse, such an exhibition carries on the longstanding and storied tradition of its members mounting exhibitions of items primarily or exclusively from their personal collections. Traditionally, a printed catalogue became the permanent record of the event; this virtual exhibition is both the event and the permanent record of it.

⁶Bergman, Hannah E., and Szilvia E. Szmuk. A Catalogue of Comedias sueltas in The New York Public Library. 2 vols. Research Bibliographies and Checklists 32. London: Grant and Cutler, 1980–81.

⁷Szilvia E. Szmuk, “A descriptive catalog of a collection of "comedias sueltas" in the Hispanic Society of America.” Dissertation. City University of New York, 1985.

⁸Asociación Internacional de Teatro Español y Novohispano de los Siglos de Oro, October 20-24, 2015