MANUAL FOR SPANISH ARCHIVES & LIBRARIES.: Historia y Organizacion de Archivos y Bibliothecas.

8vo. 215 x 160 mm., (8 ½ x 6 ¼ inches). 306 leaves, chapters separated by blanks. 19th century leather backed marbled paper boards; inner hinge cracked, edges bumped, some abrasion to the head of the spine; sound.

Beautifully written manuscript volume containing an extensive discussion of library management and practices, written by an anonymous Spanish author in the middle of the 19th century.

This dissertation, organized in 70 chapters, begins with a discussion of the library profession and its importance to civil society. His first chapters describe the "Archive", with reference to Spanish monastic, governmental, and diplomatic collections that have been preserved. He focuses his attention on Aragon, Mallorca, Navarra, and Santiago. He turns to France to furnish some interested information on the archives in Paris before getting into the chapters on classification of materials and the creation of inventories.

After nearly 200 leaves of text on the subject of archives, the authors turns his attention to libraries. From the beginning he takes a historical approach focusing his attention on both books and manuscripts, mentioning the collections at Cambridge University. Paleography is a subject he spends some time describing and then he moves into the history of printing, typography, Gutenberg, and the spread of printing to Spain. The final dozen chapters are devoted to the rules for managing a library, lessons in classification and inventory control. He quotes from both DeBure and Brunet in his lessons on cataloguing.