The Printing of the Second Part of Don Quijote and Ocho comedias: Evidence of a Late Change in Cervantes's Attitude to Print and of Concurrent Production as Practised by both Author and Printers

Abstract

Comparing the front matter of Cervantes's Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, nunca representados and that of the second part of Don Quijote, which were both published in 1615, reveals a fascinating connection. This paper explores that link, and in doing so, sheds new light on the printing process in Golden Age Spain and on Cervantes's working practices as a writer. Recently it has been stated that Spanish printers in this period worked on one project at a time. However, detailed analysis of the work schedules of Madrid printing houses during the period from 1613 to 1616, carried out as part of this research, shows that this was not the case, and that the same system of concurrent production that McKenzie discovered in a Cambridge print-shop at the beginning of the eighteenth century was in operation in Madrid almost a hundred years earlier. That system meant that books could be subject to inordinate delays in the printing process, and explains, for example, why the second part of the Quijote took significantly longer to produce than the first part. Here it will be argued that the sixty-seven year old Cervantes, who understood the print business well, had his own system of concurrent production in place, in order to realise his ambition of seeing as much of his work as possible published before he died.