The full story of the early typographical products of the Philippines must wait upon another occasion, for the questions posed by the scanty records and the handful of surviving books are extremely knotty. Where did the type come from? Medina suggested it was imported from Macao; Retana believed it to have been cut in the Philippines. Fernández said that the first works of Blancas de San José were printed at Bataan and the two 1610 books have that place of printing, yet in 1604 the Ordinationes issued from Binondo. Remesal wrote that this book was printed by Francisco de Vera, and the book itself bears the name of Juan. Indeed, the history of the early typographers and the output of their presses, as it has so far been written, presents many problems, but they are problems which we feel are outside the scope of this study.
To summarize what we have learned of the earliest printing in the Philippines: we have the possibility, but not a likely one, that an Arte by Juan de Quiñones was printed xylographically in 1581; we know that in the first half of the year 1593 two Doctrinas were printed xylographically—although we have no way of telling which came first—one in Tagalog from the Talavera-Plasencia-Oliver text, and one in Chinese written by Juan Cobo, both edited and printed under the supervision of Domingo de Nieva and Juan de San Pedro Martyr; we surmise that between 1593 and 1602 other works were also printed xylographically, such as the small tracts of Juan de Villanueva and some of the books of Blancas de San José, Nieva and others; and in 1602 was printed by Juan de Vera, in all likelihood from movable type, the book of Our Lady of the Rosary by Blancas de San José. The known facts are not many, and we can only hope that time and further research will discover new ones to make the history of the earliest Philippine imprints more complete and more satisfactory.
Philadelphia, January 20, 1947 Edwin Wolf 2nd.
[1] Tagalog characters are said to be similar to old Javanese, Ignacio Villamot, La Antigua Escritura Filipina, Manila, 1922, p. 30. They were replaced under the Spanish occupation by roman letters, and are not now used. The best definitive grammar is Frank R. Blake’s A Grammar of the Tagalog Language, New Haven, 1925, where, p. 1, he defines the language as follows: “Tagálog is the principal language of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippine Archipelago. It is spoken in Manila and in the middle region of Luzon. Tagálog, like all the Philippine languages about which anything is known, belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian family of speech, which embraces the idioms spoken on the islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Malaysia, on the Malay peninsula, and on the island of Madagascar.”
[2] The woodcut, showing St. Dominic beneath a star holding a lily and a book, the usual symbols of this saint, and clad in the white habit and black cloak of his order, seems to be of oriental workmanship, differing vastly from contemporary Spanish and Mexican cuts of the same type. The clouds, for instance, are characteristically Chinese, and the buildings in the background more reminiscent of eastern temples than European churches.
[3] T.H. Pardo de Tavera, Noticias sobre La Imprenta y el Grabado en Filipinas, Madrid, 1893, pp. 9–10. Dard Hunter in Papermaking through Eighteen Centuries, New York, 1930, pp. 109–16, describes papermaking in China, and mentions the use of “makaso” or “takaso,” both species of the paper mulberry, as material for the making of paper. The paper mulberry’s scientific name is Broussonetia papyrifera. Later, on p. 141, he speaks of the use by the Chinese of gypsum, lichen, starch, rice flour and animal glue for sizing.
[4] The best short summaries in English of the beginnings of printing in Mexico are Henry R. Wagner’s introduction to the exhibition catalogue of Mexican Imprints 1544–1600 In the Huntington Library, San Marino, 1939, pp. 3–10; and Lawrence C. Wroth, Some Reflections on the Book Arts in Early Mexico, Cambridge (Mass.), 1945.
[5] J.B. Primrose, The First Press in India and Its Printers, The Library, 4th Series, 1939, XX, pp. 244–5.
[6] José Toribio Medina, La Imprenta en Lima, Santiago de Chile, 1904–17, no. 1, p. 3.