Scarce:  Not traced via OCLC, RLIN, NUC-1956, METABASE. One copy in the OPAC of the Bibliotheque National.

•  Not in Palau.   20th-century quarter leather. Private ownership stamp on title-page. Clean. (21259)

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for an enlargement.

Rare.  The only copy we located in Latin America via METABASE is in the Biblioteca Monseñor Sanabria Martínez (Biblioteca Asamblea Legislativa de la República de Costa Rica). In the U.S. we locate only the copies at Bancroft and Harvard Law libraries.

Wrapper title is “Decretos y constitución política de la República de Costa-Rica, emitida en 1871 y adoptada en 1882.”

•  Not in Palau.   Original printed wrappers, wrappers dusty and with old pencil writing. (21258)

The document we here offer is a cabildo (i.e., town council) act. Bernal Díaz served as a member of the cabildo of Santiago de Guatemala for a number of years, an honor bestowed on him as a conqueror and early settler of the region. In this document the cabildo acknowledges receipt of a royal decree, reads it verbatim into its minutes, and formally agrees to comply. The king writes that he is informed that the post of notary public and "del número" in Santiago is vacant because Juan Núñez de Soria, who held the royal appointment to that position, "is gone to Our kingdoms of Peru." On the advice of the Royal Audiencia (i.e., High Court) the king appoints Juan de Rojas to be notary public and "del número."

•  The document is housed in a red half morocco slipcase with an internal corset. Six small wormholes in each leaf affect one or two letters each, but not the signature of Bernal Díaz.

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•  On Gage, see: The Dictionary of National Biography, XX, 353–55. Recent marbled paper over light boards. Second and third blank leaves pasted together. Some light soiling, and some chipping and tears without apparent loss of text. Rubber-stamps from a now-defunct library. The paper here is decidedly blue; the hand is very readable.

This document is one of the very few printed in the temporary capital of Mixco, a press having been salvaged from the ruins in the former capital. Thus, Mixco was the second city/town to have a press in Central America, and then, for only a short time—appoximately two years.

In addition to being important for its contents and in the realm of printing history, the González Bustillo report is uncommon: We trace only half a dozen copies in U.S. libraries.

•  Medina, Guatemala, 384; Palau 105113; Sabin 27811. Modern full calf, very plain style. Without the final leaf with one erratum on it.

The first audiencia was established in Santo Domingo in 1508 with others springing up as the Spaniards discovered and settled North and South America. The Audiencia of Guatemala came into existence on 20 November 1542 through the New Laws and had a troubled and peripatetic beginning: The documents that compose this collection do not deal with things quite as dramatic as either the judicial insanity or the big-time smuggling of those earliest years, but they do, nonetheless, document various unstudied aspects of the presidencies of Dr. Alonso Criado de Castilla (1598-1611), Don Antonio Pérez Ayala Castilla y Rojas (1611-26), and Dr. Diego de Acuña (1626-33). The royal cedulas fall into three broad categories: requests for information, demands for action, and orders ending existing practices.

An example of the Crown's requests for information is a decree of 4 December 1601. The king would sometimes receive complaints that were best handled extrajudicially, often involving political activities of clerics, over whom the civil and criminal courts did not have jurisdiction and with whom, the authorities felt, the ecclesiastical courts would deal ineffectively. In one case, the governor of Honduras had complainedæ to the king that the dean of the church in Comayagua was disrupting attempts to recruit men for the defense of the port of Trujillo: The king, investigating, expects that the audiencia's information will be unbiased because of its physical and emotional distance from Honduras and its local politics and squabbling.

Another, much more ominous, request was handed down on 28 June 1621. The king has "discovered" that "foreigners" are living in the New World. Since they are there illegally, he wants a list of them and correlated inventories of their possessions and land holdings. This was the beginning of the oppression of Portuguese settlers who had moved to the New World during the "Babylonian captivity" of Portugal by Spain.

The royal demands for action were usually grants of royal patronage or largesse. On 10 July 1600 the king orders the audiencia to administer the terms of his decree granting a one-time-only gift of money to the cathedral in Santiago, and on 4 July 1601 he orders the court to give the mission church in Trinidad de Sonsonate a chalice and a bell.

The Crown was fully aware that the physical distance between it and its New World provinces would result in the development of local customs and practices, and to a large extent it tolerated these deviations from "the norm." For example, on 31 May 1600, Felipe III officially accepts the local custom of the audiencia's appointing the majordomo of the Royal Hospital. But at other times the Crown felt put upon and ordered the end of "local practices." On 12 December 1619 the king orders the audiencia to stop subdividing encomiendas and parcelling the subsections out as parts of government pensions.

The documents in this remarkable collection are unpublished.   They are an important unused source for the history of the high court during the first quarter of the 17th century. Through them we find out what the "local customs" of patronage and of usurpation of royal prerogative were. Through the reiteration of previously issued decrees we discover which decrees the court was ignoring, using the famous doctrine of "obedezco pero no cumplo." Through these decrees we glimpse royal patronage and royal displeasure.

A detailed calendar of the documents is available upon request.

•  Clarence H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, pp. 126, 75-76, and 113-14; Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, pp. 390-91, on the audiencia's earliest years. The decrees have been very carefully removed from a bound volume and, now stored in Mylar sleeves, are housed in a blue cloth slipcase with blue morocco spine labels. This major source for the study of the Royal Audiencia of Guatemala is in very good condition.

•  Vicaire, Manuel de l'amateur de livres du XIXème, I, 772. Uncut, mostly unopened copy. Publisher's wrappers, printed in black and red; expectable chipping and with soiling. Some pages lightly spotted; mostly, clean. A decent copy of this (rather fragile!) work.

Signed by Mayorga in type and with his rubric (i.e. paraph).

•  Medina, Guatemala, 400 (having seen only a copy in a private collection).   Upper margin irregular with loss of paper due to damp damage, not touching text or printer's ornament. Three small wormholes in lower margin. A good exemplar of a rare and romantic item.  (3832)

•  Not in Palau. Recent wrappers. Number in old ink on first page and another stamped in margin of another. Good condition.

Limited to 100 copies, according to the limitation statement on of the half-title; nicely printed on good paper, with wide margins.

•  Nicaraguan National Bibliography 15827.   Uncut copy bound in late 19th-century half red calf, gilt spine extra; bottom and fore-edges of boards abraded with loss of paper and some small abrasion of leather. Handsome pressure-stamp on title-page of the American Antiquarian Society and its small discreet deaccession stamp on verso of front free endpaper. Internally very white, crisp, and clean.  (23074)

•  Very good condition. Sewn.

•  Very Good condition, in recent wrappers.

Guatemala was the fourth Latin American city to have a printing press (after Mexico, Lima, and Puebla de los Angeles); the press was brought at the instigation of the bishop of Guatemala, Payo Enríquez de Ribera, who wished to have a work of his own published. In reply to the bishop's appeal for a printer, José Pineda Ibarra arrived at Antigua in 1660. He had worked as an assistant to several printers in Mexico, but according to Medina did not have his own press; when Payo de Ribera's representative found him, he had moved to Puebla, but was apparently not doing well there. (Medina does not list him as a printer in Puebla—presumably he was again working for others.) The bishop apparently paid for the press that was taken to Guatemala, and Pineda Ibarra later purchased it from him. Torre Revello (quoted in Furlong) remarks that despite the dearth of materials, Pineda Ibarra managed to print exceedingly well: "Ningún tipógrafo de los que le sucedieron, durante el periodo colonial, logró superar la pulchritud y elegancia de sus trabajos." This example shows not only several sizes of type, but a woodcut of a papal tiara, at the top of the edict, flanked by typographical ornaments; a line of typographical ornament also appears on either side of the date of the edict, near the bottom of the page.

The various religious orders in Guatemala had promised to make it worth the while of a printer to come, by giving him commissions. Judging from the list of over 30 works Pineda Ibarra printed before 1673—eulogies, sermons, constitutions, regulations, descriptions of religious festivities—the orders fulfilled their promise; his major productions, however, were Bishop de Ribera's Explicatio apologetica nonnullarum propositionum . . . , 1663, and Diego Saenz Ovecuri's La Thomasiada, 1667. Also a bookseller and binder, Pineda Ibarra died in 1679. He was succeeded in 1681 by his son, Antonio de Pineda Ibarra, under whom the press operated until 1721.

The text in hand, a papal edict of 23 July 1672, changes the office for St. Peter Nolasco used by Mercedarians from semiduplex to duplex, at the request of the Queen of France. The Orden Real de Nuestra Señora de la Merced, Redemción de Cautivos, was already established in Guatemala (cf. Medina, Guatemala, 38), and probably paid Pineda Ibarra to print this work.

•  Not in Medina, Guatemala; on the printer, see: Medina's introduction, pp. xviii–xx. Not in Valenzuela, Imprenta en Guatemala; O'Ryan, Bib. Guatemalteca; NUC; BMC. See, however, Oswald, p. 539; Furlong, Orígenes, p. 91; and Woodbridge and Thompson, Printing in Colonial Spanish America, pp. 81–84. This is stored in a mylar folder, for its protection; we did not remove it to photograph it.  But it CAN be removed — it is not (we shudder to type it!) laminated as it may appear to be, on your monitor.

Bedmar y Narvaez printed the title-page in black and red and the text is in double-column format. This copy bears both the engraved “frontispiece” and the black and red title-page, but, as usual, not the very rare colophon.

Although touted as “Primera parte” on the title-page, there were no further parts; this Historia is complete, “all published.”

•  Palau 366681; Medina, Biblioteca hispano-americana, 2051; Sabin 99643; Leclerc 1546; Salvá 3422; Heredia 3407; Alden & Landis, European Americana, 701/262. On Villagutierre, see: Archivo biográfico de España, Portugal, e Iberoamérica, fiche 1019, frames 213–16. 19th-century Spanish sheep (“pasta española”), covers abraded and with pinhole-type worming to spine; loss of lower inch of spine leather to insects. Browning to text due to impurities in water during paper manufacture. Small insect damage to margins of first four leaves, not touching any text; similar small damage in inner margins of last four leaves. Over all, a decent copy of a scarce work.