The Seville printer Juan de Cabrera (1623-1631): the production of serial news pamphlets in 17th century Spain

Abstract

In this paper, the production of the Seville printer Juan de Cabrera and his contemporaries (second and third decades of the 17th century) will be analysed to determine the strategies with which they managed to keep their readership supplied with news about international political developments (particularly about the War of Flanders): the use of the accounts of anonymous gazetteers – still unsubstantiated for this period – and the design innovations that allowed the serial nature of these publications to be recognised and which foreshadowed the elements typical of subsequent newspaper formats. To this end, old press collections, which have received scant attention hitherto, have been recovered in order to analyse the content and cover design of a corpus comprising 78 news publications printed by Juan de Cabrera in Seville during the first half of the 17th century.