Imagining Public Libraries in Sixteenth-Century Spain: Juan Páez de Castro and Juan Bautista Cardona

This article analyzes two sixteenth-century proposals for a library that would be placed under the control of the king of Spain and accessible to the public. The first is Juan Páez de Castro’s 1556 Memorial, often read as a blueprint for the institution that Philip II eventually founded at El Escorial. The second is Juan Bautista Cardona’s Traza for El Escorial, addressed to the king in 1579, when that project was already in progress. Páez and Cardona dreamed of a library that would overcome the dangers of loss and dispersion associated with collections owned by flesh-and-bone individuals destined to die at some point. This article will show that Páez and Cardona drew inspiration from previous and ongoing projects in Italy, France, and Spain to conclude that the preservation and dissemination of books required the association with a printing press. This was a plan that, to the chagrin of Cardona’s contemporaries, failed to adequately materialize for El Escorial.