The Spanish Letter of Columbus: A Facsimile of the Original Edition Published by Bernard Quaritch in 1891

Abstract

As early as April 1493, when the Spanish monarchs, then holding court in Barcelona, received Columbus, back from his first voyage to “Cathay,” they decided it was time to make widely available news about the recent discoveries of the Genoese, lest the Portuguese king, whom Columbus had visited first on his way back from the New World, might feel tempted to claim the new lands in the east as his own. Agents of the crown rushed to print thousands of copies of a letter allegedly written by Columbus to an anonymous “escribano de ración,” an officer in the treasury of the crown of Aragon. The prominent Barcelona printer Pere Posa hastily put together a poorly crafted document in Spanish in two folio sheets; it was full of Catalan idioms, typographical errors, ill-separated words, and poorly justified margins. This document is what historians know today as the Spanish Letter of Columbus, or the Letter to Santángel.Like most ephemeral literature produced in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish Empire, this propaganda sheet issued by the thousands would have left no trace had a printer of incunabula not used copies as endpapers in binding. In 1889 the owner of the Parisian Librairie Maisonneuve came across these leaves, steamed them off, and identified them as the first Spanish edition of Columbus’s letter. Seizing on the opportunity, the London book dealer Bernard Quaritch acquired the sheets in 1891 at a bargain price and began to look for a buyer in an American market about to celebrate the fourth centenary of Columbus’s “discovery” and thus flooded with forgeries of Columbiana. To persuade the large cadre of American collectors, Quaritch put together in 1891 a facsimile of the letter along with a study by his learned employee Michael Kerney.By a careful analysis of the contents of the letter, Quaritch and Kerney determined that the sheets should have been produced in Barcelona by Johann Rosenbach, a Catalan-speaking printer. They also concluded that Columbus was the author and that Luis de Santángel was the anonymous officer of the exchequer to whom the letter was addressed. The edition allowed Quaritch to find a buyer in the United States, James Lenox, whose library would eventually become the cornerstone of the New York Public Library. Later generations of scholarship have proven many of Quaritch and Kerney’s assumptions wrong. In 1899 the German incunabulist Konrad Haebler already proved that the printer was Posa, not Rosenbach. In 1986 Demetrio Ramos Pérez conclusively demonstrated that propaganda agents of the Spanish crown were the authors of the letter, not Columbus.The booksellers “Quaritch Ltd” have reissued the original 1891 edition, including the facsimile of the Spanish Letter of Columbus and the commentary by Quaritch and Kerney. The new edition, however, also includes valuable studies by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, on the post-1891 scholarship on the letter; Martin Davies, on the printer Pere Posa; and Anthony Payne and Katherine Spears, on the strategies Quaritch used to persuade U.S. collectors of Americana to buy the letter from him in the early 1890s. This is a marvelous contribution to the history of both early modern Spanish print culture and U.S. collections of Americana in the Gilded Age.