Sixteenth-Century Spanish Bookstore

An article pub. in 1952 on early foreign printers in Burgos mentioned the existence in that city’s archives of a 1556 document concerning the shop of the printer-bookseller, Juan de Junta, an Italian by birth, son of the famous Florentine publisher Filippo di Giunta. The document is a legal contract written in 1556 by the notary Pedro de Espinosa for the lease of the Junta bookstore and print-shop in Burgos and also contains “a very interesting inventory of everything which was in the shop in that year.” Few contemporary documents give us as much primary evidence for the kinds of materials a 16th-cent. Spanish bookstore contained as this document does, for it provides the titles of all the books in the stock, the number of copies of each title, the costs of the individual books, in most cases the format of the book, and, in many cases, the city of publication or the name of the publisher.