I recently defended my dissertation titled “Reading Between the Lines: Mapping El Orinoco Ilustrado” at the University of Arkansas. El Orinoco Ilustrado (1741), written by the Jesuit Joseph Gumilla, has been studied from different disciplinary perspectives, including history, literature, anthropology, and theology, but almost never from the lens of book history. One of the most notable gaps in the scholarship is the absence of detailed information about the printer Manuel Fernández, who played an important role in the production and circulation of Gumilla’s work. With the support of the fellowship, and thanks to the assistance of Gabriela Martínez Dorantes in Madrid, I was able to locate and obtain a number of key archival records, including the baptism records of Fernández’s children, his marriage certificate, his death certificate, and a detailed inventory of his estate. These findings contribute significantly to our understanding of Spanish book history by clarifying the identity of two women printers previously thought to be separate individuals: Viuda de Manuel Fernández and Angela de Apontes are, in fact, the same printer.

The estate inventory also contains valuable information about the types used in Fernández’s printing house, as well as the names of his collaborators, such as paper suppliers and book distributors (mercaderes de libros), providing insight into the material and commercial networks that sustained the book trade in eighteenth-century Madrid. Some of the material I have gathered has already been incorporated into an article proposal that I recently submitted. In this article, in addition to presenting the archival records described above, I also analyze La Gaceta de Madrid and the colophons of Fernández’s books printed between 1726 and 1750 in order to map the locations where the books were sold, to trace collaborations with other printers, and to evaluate the importance of those locations for the distribution and sale of printed works. Although the transcription of all the documents I collected is still in progress, I plan to continue working on them in order to expand this research into future projects.

Read Pernet’s recently published work here: https://journals.uco.es/creneida/article/view/18193.