Juan Tomás Favario and the Paper Trade in Early Modern Spain or the Supply of Paper as a New Modality of Publishing

Abstract

The study of paper extends across several disciplines, but in none of them has it reached the point where its relevance for studying printing and publishing is immediately obvious and can be easily interpreted. On the one hand, librarians and bibliographers often catalogue and list paper watermarks, specifying their origins and working towards a common nomenclature and consistent procedures and measurements for recording paper’s properties. On the other hand, historians have mainly been concerned with the production, marketing, and sale of paper as a wholesale commodity. Spanish scholarship has not been an exception to these approaches, but, as is the case with so many other aspects of book history, much research still remains to be done on early modern Spain’s paper and paper trade. A relevant number of documents about paper purchases, traders, and names have been discovered and mentioned in different academic works, but we still lack a monograph on paper in early modern Spain. We therefore only have an unclear picture of what kinds of paper Castilian paper mills made, papers traders sold, and printers used.