We missed our "Rare Book of the Month" in November, so we’re treating you to a double feature for December. The two books are among the earliest printed in the New World and highlight Mexico’s important contributions to the history of books and printing.
The first book printed in what is now the United States, the Bay Psalm Book, has gotten a lot of attention since 2013 when one of the eleven surviving copies sold at auction for $14.2 million, a staggering sum that would have shocked and probably offended the plain-living Puritans who printed the book in Boston in 1640. Scholars have emphasized its historical significance, while the media has turned to the book's monetary value for "wow factor."
Amid all the hype, hardly anyone has stopped to consider the fact that seventeenth-century Mexican printers were almost exactly 100 years ahead of their counterparts in Massachusetts.
Juan de Zumárraga, the first Bishop of Mexico, introduced printing to the Americas in 1539, hiring an Italian-born printer, Juan Pablos (Giovanni Paoli), to run the press. By the time of Pablos' death in 1560, he had produced at least thirty-five books in addition to training Mexico's first generation of printers, including Antonio de Spinosa, who in 1571 printed the oldest Mexican book currently in UNM’s Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections. Written by Alonso de Molina, the Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana is the first dictionary printed in the New World as well as the first printed vocabulary of an indigenous American language (Nahuatl).
Another milestone held by the Center is Juan de Palafox y Mendoza's Historia real sagrada. Dating from 1643, it is the oldest known book printed in Puebla, the "second city" of Mexico. Palafox, who served as Bishop of Puebla (or, as it was called at that time, Puebla de los Ángeles), retells Bible stories as part of a discussion on humane government. Love and kindness, he argues, is a more effective policy than force and intimidation, a message he hoped would ameliorate the treatment of Mexico’s indigenous peoples.
The humanitarian bishop would go on to found the Biblioteca Palafoxiana in 1646. Sometimes considered the first public library in the New World, it originally contained about 5,000 books, a sizeable number at a time when Harvard University’s library, still in its infancy, held little more than the 400 books bequeathed in 1638 by the university's namesake, John Harvard. Still operating today, the collection has grown to 41,000 titles and is included on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, a program designed to protect and raise awareness of libraries and historic documents around the world that "transcend the boundaries of time and culture."
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