The priest, in Don Quijote, I, 6, clearly realizes this: «Estos [pequeños] no deben ser de caballerías, sino de poesía».
There are only two editions of the «indigenous» romances which were not in folio: the Venice, 1534 edition of Palmerín de Olivia, and the Louvain, 1551 edition of Amadís de Gaula, which was inexplicably chosen as the basis of the unreliable Aguilar «Libros de caballerías» edition by Felicidad Buendía.
Of most romances which I have examined the same could be said as of Claribalte: «La impresión del Claribalte es realmente primorosa: papel magnfico, tipos bellísimos, anchos márgenes, composición limpia, en suma, un conjunto tipográfico exquisito» (Agustín G[onzález] de Amezúa y Mayo, prologue to the facsimile of Claribalte [Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1956]).
Books were, as today, usually sold in paper bindings (Viaje del Parnaso, ed. Rodríguez Marín [Madrid, 19351, p. 127), although among the small stock of leather-bound books of Benito Boyer, partially reproduced by Pérez Pastor (see n. 259, infra), we find 2 copies of Cristalián and one each of the Caballero del Febo and the Amadís, at 102, 152, and 51 maravedíes for the binding, respectively, and in the order reproduced by Leonard (v. supra n. 238), most of the books are ordered «en pergamino».
Catalogue of the Library of Ferdinand Columbus, reproduced... by Archer M. Huntington (1905; facsimile, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1967). The items relevant to Spanish literature may be more easily consulted in Gallardo's Ensayo de una biblioteca de libros raros y curiosas, II (Madrid: Rivadeneira, 1866), Item No. 1870.
Arderique is a romance deserving of considerably more attention than it has received, which is, in a word, none whatsoever. None of the writers on Spanish Arthurian literature (Entwistle, Bohigas, María Rosa Lida), has realized that, superficially at-least, it is an Arthurian work. It was written some years before it was published, probably in the fifteenth century, and its original language may well not have been Castilian. Although the declaration on the title page -«traduzido de lengua estrangera en la comun castellana»- could merely be a topos (see my «The Pseudo-Historicity of the Romances of Chivalry», in this volume: but why did it mislead the compiler of Fernando Colon's catalogue to note that it was «en español»?), the names are foreign in origin, and a valuable document reproduced by José María Madurell Marimón, Documentos para la historia de la imprenta y librería en Barcelona (1474-1553) (Barcelona: Gremios de Editores, de Libreros y de Maestros Impresores, 1955), No. 179, provides us with solid evidence of a Catalan version, or possibly original, existing in 1500.
In the document, a book inventory, Arderique is given a low value, possibly because it was written on paper rather than parchment; it also might reflect the lack of interest in chivalric works in Cataluña, which Madurell found noteworthy: «Ni una vez tan sólo he visto citado el Amadís y el Tirant lo Blanc únicamente en el contrato de edición» (p. 103*).
As noted at the beginning, Tirante el Blanco does not, rigorously speaking, have a place in the present discussion, as it is not a Castilian work. Yet it is revealing to note how it is by quite a margin the most expensive of the romances of chivalry in Colón's library. Its cost may have contributed to its rapid fall into oblivion.
Reproduced by José Gestoso y Pérez, Noticias inéditas de impresores sevillanos (Seville, 1924), pp. 36-56; the Visión deleitable is valued at 40 maravedíes, unspecified «Amadises» are 150, Clarián is 108, etc.
José Enrique Serrano y Morales, Reseña histórica... de las imprentas que han existido en Valencia (Valencia: F. Doménech, 1898-99), pp. 548-59.
El libro, la imprenta y el periodismo en América durante la dominación española, Publicaciones del Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, No. 74 (Buenos Aires, 1940); his document No. 30, dated 1594, is an inventory of a shipment to Indies, with prices; see also No. 24.
The standards used in assigning the values, as well as the prices charged Colón, need some discussion. In a similar document reproduced in part by Cristóbal Pérez Pastor, La imprenta en Medina del Campo (Madrid, 1895), pp. 456-62, the inventory of the possessions and stock of the wealthy bookseller Benito Boyer, who died in 1592, we find book values assigned exclusively on the basis of number of pages. It is likely that the cost of the paper exceeded the value of the printing, and that both of them exceeded any factors such as the book's subject, or rights due the author, which affect modern prices (see Agustín G[onzález] de Amezúa, Cómo se hacía un libro en nuestro Siglo de Oro [Madrid: Imprenta de Editorial Magisterio Español, 1946], pp. 22-31; reproduced in his Opúsculos histórico-literarios [Madrid: CSIC, 1951], I, 348-59). Similarly, the concerns of modern bibliophiles about a book's printer or edition were completely irrelevant (Colón never or rarely bought more than one edition of the same text, although in many cases he could have); the age of a book was a negative, not a positive factor, which could perhaps explain why, in a seventeenth-century inventory, we find reasonable, but not high, values assigned to Policisne de Boecia and to the 1588 edition of the Sergas de Esplandián (inventory of the books of Pedro de Párraga by Martín de Córdoba, published by the Marqués de Saltillo, «Bibliotecas, libreros e impresores madrileños del siglo XVII», RABM, 54 [1948], 261-63).
The inventory of Boyer, which can be taken as indicating the stock-in trade of a large peninsular bookseller of the time, whose trade with the new world was only a small portion of his business, provides evidence that the romances had not completely fallen into disfavor in the peninsula as the century drew to a close, but still retained some popularity. In his unbound stock, he had 70 copies of Palmerín de Olivia, a book which, like the «cuatro del Amadís», had lost much of its earlier popularity, 43 of Primaleón, 64 of the Sergas de Esplandián, 34 of the «segunda de la quarta» of Florisel (Amadís, Book XI), 53 of both parts of the Caballero de la Cruz [Lepolemo], and 31 more of the first part alone, 59 of the Tercera Parte of the Caballero del Febo [Espejo de príncipes], and 18 of Cristalián; on the other hand, he only had 13 copies of the Amadís, 2 of Belianís, 3 of Parts I and II of the Caballero del Febo, and 6 of Celidón de Iberia. (My attempts to identify the editions from the number of «pliegos» have not been overly successful). The quantity of romances of chivalry contrasts with lesser qualities of works one would have thought to be more popular; 8 Dianas of Montemayor, 16 of the Lazarillo, 2 of the Flos Sanctorum, 10 of the Jardín de flores curiosas, 2 of the Chronicle of Ocampo, 24 of Garcilaso and 27 of the Celestina.
It may be objected that these figures represent the books that Boyer did not sell, rather than those he did, and perhaps this is why he had 19 copies of Olivante de Laura, whose unique edition appeared 25 years previously (though it is also found in document No. 30 of Torre Revello). Yet the same pattern is found in the inventory of the books of Juan Cromberger (Gestoso Pérez, pp. 90 ff.), and it can be safely assumed that Boyer would not have been as successful as he was if he had not been possessed of shrewd business sense (some idea of his business methods may be found in documents reproduced by [Francisco Fernández del Castillo], Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI, Publicaciones del Archivo General de la Nación, 6 [Mexico City, 1914], pp. 260-88, in which is also found an inventory including some romances of chivalry), and at the same time other booksellers were underwriting editions of romances of chivalry, as Benito Boyer himself had underwritten the 1563 edition of Primaleón: among them his cousin Juan Boyer, who had printers bring out the 1586 edition of Espejo de caballerías, and the 1583/86 edition of the Espejo de príncipes.