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On 19 April 1684, Pedro Disses, former servant of the house of don Juan José of Austria, presented a report to the Diputación General del Reino de Castilla in which he offered the series of punches he had made, and could continue making, for the cutting of typographical molds. In doing so, he hoped to receive an official commission to continue his work; something which, given the difficulties encountered in printing at the time due to the absence of such instruments, he considered vital. The present article, accompanied by the relevant documentation, analyses the successive steps in the relationship between Pedro Disses and various Castilian institutions up to the 14 January 1690 when, following the concession of royal approval for Disses’ project, the Cámara de Castilla requested that the king order on-going assistance for Disses in the light of the importance of his work. Amongst the documentation analysed here, of particular importance is the the report of the Madrid printer Luis Antonio de Bedmar on the official meeting with the printers and Disses in October 1685. Bedmar reports on, and praises, the examples of letrerías presented by Disses and describes in somewhat exaggerated fashion, the critical situation of printing in Madrid, referring to the lack of punches and molds which would allow the printers to renew their typographies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The three generations of the Cromberger family were printers, publishers and booksellers largely in Seville. They were enterprising businessmen and women who ran the most important printing office in Spain during the first half of the sixteenth century, a period when Seville was the principal centre for book production and distribution in the Iberian Peninsula. This was before the centre of gravity of Spanish printing shifted to Salamanca and of the trade to Medina del Campo. This article records and describes twenty extremely rare Seville editions printed, or possibly printed, by the Cromberger press and nowadays conserved in a wide variety of collections spanning two continents. The books described testify to the diversity of the Crombergers’ production (primarily of religious works, but also of practical manuals, books of entertainment, etc.); such diversity tells us much about the state of the printing industry in sixteenth-century Spain and the strategies used by leading and innovative printers there to stimulate and satisfy demand. It transpires from the study of the editions described in this article that when the press was in the hands of Brígida Maldonado, who had married into the Cromberger dynasty, it was particularly active and entrepreneurial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]