This 1620 Mexican imprint – once in the library of AAS member and prominent Mexican bibliographer Joaquin García Icazbalceta (1825-1894) – arrived at AAS just in time to cause a stir among the students in the 2024 History of the Book in America summer seminar on multilingual cultures of print.
Printed well before there was even a printing press in what would become the United States, it is now the fourth earliest item at AAS printed in North America, after three sixteenth-century Mexican imprints. The author of this biography of William X of Aquitaine was a fellow Augustinian, Juan de Grixalva, who lived his entire life in Mexico.
This copy is one of only a handful of printed books outside of Mexico that survive with Icazbalceta’s engraved bookplate, and he presumably employed the book in his extensive bibliographical work on Mexico presses.
~Elizabeth Pope, Curator of Books and Digital Collections
