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Manuel Rivadeneyra
Manuel Rivadeneyra | |
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Manuel Rivadeneyra y Reig (Barcelona, October 9, 1805 – Madrid, April 1, 1872) was a Spanish publisher and printer whose work is considered fundamental to the dissemination of Spanish culture and literature in his time.
Biography
He was born on October 9, 1805, in Barcelona, the son of Cayetano Rivadeneyra, who was imprisoned during the Napoleonic Invasion of Spain and who eventually emigrated to France to settle in a small town near Bordeaux.
Manuel Rivadeneyra completed his primary education in France at a free school, learned the French language and studied ship piloting. When a planned voyage by ship to America fell through, he began working as a compositor, which allowed him to acquire knowledge of every subject related to printing. After the family returned to Catalonia in 1821, Manuel left Barcelona to travel to Cádiz, where he also worked as a compositor and relearned Spanish, a language he had practically forgotten during his stay in France. From Cádiz he moved to Seville, where he worked at the press of the newspaper El Universal, but he soon left that city because of the continual political revolts that followed the absolutist restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1823.
He set out on a journey to Madrid fraught with incidents, and in the Spanish capital he worked for a brief period at the Royal Press. Shortly afterward, at the age of 19, he decided to move to France and settle in Paris, where he worked, among other places, at the famous Didot press. In France he served for some time as secretary to Javier de Burgos and also worked as a proofreader at a press in Bordeaux.
In 1826 he moved to London and in 1829 to Geneva. After his time in France, Belgium, England and Switzerland, he returned to Spain in 1829 and settled once again in Barcelona. He worked for some time at the press of José Torner, where he befriended Antonio Bergnes de las Casas, with whom, among others, he founded a press that Rivadeneyra himself directed for four years and at which notable titles were published between 1830 and 1835, especially translations of foreign works, as well as the magazine El vapor, which appeared in 1833.
He took part as a Captain of a battalion against the Carlists, supporting the Barcelona revolts against the royalists, but he very soon abandoned political struggles to move to Madrid once again.
With the idea of publishing a collection of Spanish classics (the later famous BAE or Biblioteca de Autores Españoles), he did not hesitate to travel twice to America with the intention of making a fortune to finance his enterprise. He set sail from Tarragona bound for Montevideo on December 20, 1837. He passed through Buenos Aires and headed for Santiago de Chile, a city where he settled in July 1838. In Chile he set up a press in Valparaíso, bought the newspaper El Mercurio, published works by his friend Andrés Bello and introduced modern book-printing techniques. During one of his stays in Chile, in 1841, his son Adolfo was born.
In October 1842 he boarded a ship to begin his return journey to Spain, accompanied by his wife and his son Adolfo, and with a considerable fortune. After returning to Spain, he soon moved from Barcelona to Madrid, considering the Spanish capital a more favorable place to carry out his cherished project, the aforementioned Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. This project required a man with an in-depth knowledge of the history of Spanish literature, and the person chosen for this role was the writer Buenaventura Carlos Aribau, his friend and partner in the press La Publicidad, of which Rivadeneyra was appointed director. At this press the first volume of the collection, Obras de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, would see the light in 1846. The work was not very well received, due among other reasons to the fact that, in an attempt to lower costs, the size of the book and the typeface had been reduced excessively.
By the time the ninth volume was published, expenses far exceeded earnings and financial resources were running out. He asked his friend Nicolás González to carry on with his publishing projects and once again crossed the Atlantic with the intention of promoting his new collection in America. He set out from Liverpool at the beginning of 1848 bound for Buenos Aires, from where he again headed to Santiago de Chile. Using the contacts established during his previous stay in the Chilean capital, he sent numerous letters and obtained recommendations from important figures in all the Hispanic American republics, also resorting to selling books at the small bookshop he had opened in Santiago de Chile. In addition, he undertook a journey lasting a year and a half through Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Granada, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, during which he obtained a large number of subscribers for the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. Before his definitive return to Spain in 1850, he undertook a journey through the United States and Canada.
In 1850 Rivadeneyra became the owner of a small press, which would serve him as a source of funding to continue publishing the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, since he had been swindled by the agents responsible for sending the remittances from the considerable sales in Hispanic America. He received help, through the mediation of his friend José Gutiérrez de la Vega, from the then Director General of Infantry, Fernando Fernández de Córdoba, and later, in 1856, from the deputy Cándido Nocedal, who submitted a proposal to the Cortes requesting that the Government acquire copies of the collection for various public bodies; the motion was approved, after Nocedal's own speech before the plenary session, on January 16, 1856, by one hundred ninety-nine votes in favor and thirty-two against. In Rivadeneyra's testimony of gratitude toward this Spanish politician, whom he made executor of his will and guardian of his daughter, which appears in the dedication of volume 38, he describes the publishing adventure of the collection in the following terms: "truly national, conceived with more faith than resources, undertaken with more determination than strength, pursued with more perseverance than good fortune and crowned with more applause than material proceeds."
Rivadeneyra was invited by the Infante Sebastián Gabriel de Borbón, Prior of the Order of Saint John, to move his press to the Cueva de Medrano (which had supposedly been Cervantes's prison) in Argamasilla de Alba, in order to produce the complete works of Cervantes in twelve volumes, and the famous 1863 edition of the Quixote, with a prologue by the Spanish playwright Hartzenbusch, for which he had to move not only the presses but also the corresponding specialized staff.
He obtained considerable financial gains and a strong boost for his press when he secured a contract to print the publications of the Madrid, Zaragoza and Alicante Railway Company. His work and his age did not prevent him from continuing his love of travel, and he toured all of Europe and part of Asia. In 1867 he began a family trip to Jerusalem, extending it to the Dead Sea and Damascus.
In 1868 he made a trip to Iceland, but while he was in the Scottish city of Glasgow an asthma attack made him give up, and upon his return to Madrid he sold the press and devoted himself to a quiet, home-centered life, in which his only professional pursuit was seeking the most suitable way to complete the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. The initial plan for the collection envisaged thirty-three volumes, but the number grew first to fifty and later, thanks to the injection of money obtained from the Cortes, Rivadeneyra considered that it could be expanded to eighty volumes, to which another six would be added with selected texts by French, Italian and Portuguese authors, plus a general index that would bring the collection to a close.
But before this gigantic project could be completed, while the printing of volume 66 was being finished, Manuel Rivadeneyra died on April 1, 1872, in Madrid, and was buried in the Cemetery of San Isidro in that city.
After his death, his son Adolfo Rivadeneyra, an orientalist and consul of Spain in Chile, continued the collection, committing himself only to publishing the volumes already commissioned, which went up to number 70, to which he added a final volume 71 with the general indexes, a task that his grandsons carried on until its completion in 1888.
A year before his death, Manuel Rivadeneyra had been awarded the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic, through the intercession of the former Director General of Public Works, Eduardo Saavedra. On September 29, 1977, Spain issued a seven-peseta postage stamp reproducing a portrait of Rivadeneyra by the painter Federico Madrazo.
The Biblioteca de Autores Españoles
On his return to Spain he settled in Madrid, from where, beginning in 1846, he promoted the publication of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, which he placed under the direction of Buenaventura Carlos Aribau. The aim of the enterprise was to reprint, in quarto and with high typographical quality, the classic works of Spanish literature, sometimes adding unpublished works or recovering forgotten ones.
This collection shaped an entire generation of critics and editors of classical Spanish literature (Cayetano Rosell, Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, Agustín Durán, Enrique de Vedia, Aureliano Fernández Guerra, Pascual de Gayangos, Adolfo de Castro, Ramón Mesonero Romanos, Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto, Justo de Sancha, Eugenio de Ochoa, Pedro Felipe Monlau, José Joaquín de Mora, Florencio Janer...) with uneven ecdotic criteria. The Government supported the publication of this work by acquiring copies worth 400,000 reales for the State libraries.
The full title is Biblioteca de Autores Españoles desde la formación del lenguaje hasta nuestros días, Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1846–1888. Rivadeneyra systematically undertook the publication of the complete works of the authors, although this endeavor was frustrated on many occasions; moreover, the texts are not always edited with due rigor. The preliminary studies are useful but have sometimes become outdated, which, on the other hand, is understandable.
In some cases, and until very recently, the collection was an essential reference for knowing the literature of a period (this was the case of 17th- or 18th-century poetry, for example).[citation needed]
Continuations of the BAE
In 1905 Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo sought to expand the collection under the title Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (directed by Menéndez Pelayo up to vol. XX), Madrid: Bailly-Baillière, 1905–1918 (26 vols.).
Beginning in 1954, Editorial Atlas continued it up to a total of 305 volumes.
External links
- Manuel Rivadeneyra Fernando de la Fuente Arranz at the Real Academia de la Historia
- Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. Rivadeneyra
