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1. Perhaps unsurprisingly, cheap ephemera stuff appears to have been lifeblood of Navarre book ecosystem. Hospital General was given exclusive privilege of printing and selling several different small grammar works (e.g., cartillas para enseñar a leer) and religious works (e.g., doctrina cristiana) within Pamplona (and possibly Navarre?). Prices for said works set by the Consejo de Navarra, and printers/booksellers of Pamplona notified by a scribe, including the bookseller I did my MA thesis on!

2. Permanent booksellers are *not* fans of traveling booksellers. Booksellers in Pamplona, Estella, and Tudela complained about "marchantes" and "buhoneros" coming to their cities to sell the same sorts of ephemeral works that the Hospital General was cranking out. And these "outsiders" were undercutting them. Estella bookseller managed to get privilege for selling works in the city; Tudela bookseller it's unclear if he got it, but he used the Estella bookseller's case to support his own.
#BookHistory #Books #Bookselling #Navarre #Navarra

3. Traveling booksellers still had a legitimate role to play in the ecosystem though at least from the government's standpoint. In Estella case, while that bookseller was able to get the privilege for the city, and no one else was allowed to sell particular items except him, everywhere else in the surrounding "county" (merindad) things were to proceed as normal, which I understand to mean that anyone could sell them. So travelling booksellers were serving the rural parts of the merindad where a permanent bookseller might not have enough business to survive.
#BookHistory #Books #Bookselling #Navarre #Navarra

4. Miscellaneous nice things:
- nice descriptions of the ephemeral texts under consideration
- price/valuation data of the same texts by different people in different places
- was only slightly thwarted by bad handwriting
- archives staff are so lovely as normal. It's nice to go to an archive where they know you by name! (cue Cheers theme song)
#BookHistory #Archives