The fourteen essays collected in this book bring together the contributions of a cross-disciplinary group of scholars who gathered in 2014 at University College Dublin to mark the publication of Books Published in Spain, Portugal, and the New World or elsewhere in Spanish or Portuguese between 1601 and 1650 (2014). The remarkable bibliographic achievement represented by that volume, second in a series aimed at compiling the first unified catalogue of Spanish and Portuguese books printed in the early modern period, is nicely complemented by the essays collected in A Maturing Market, which explore from a variety of perspectives the complex relation between print and culture in the Iberian world in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Neatly organized in four sections, the essays contained in A Maturing Market offer a selection of both broad and subject-specific studies centered on various aspects of the production, distribution, and circulation of books in seventeenth-century Iberia. The first group of essays sketches the general dynamics of publishing in Spain and Portugal between 1600 and 1650 and examines the specific role of printers, booksellers, and merchants in the production and dissemination of vernacular books. The evidence these opening essays provide of active female participation in the running of presses and of well-established international networks for the importation and exportation of books make it abundantly clear that the early modern Iberian book market was more complex and diverse than scholars and bibliographers have traditionally assumed.

This is also true, as the next group of essays demonstrates, of the ways in which authors interacted with the reading public. The picture of that interaction that emerges from highly self-conscious texts like Don Quixote and from the paratexts of other literary and humanistic works of the period reveals a sustained and diversified effort on the part of authors to shape the contours of their readership and to assert their authority as creators. In the case of theater plays, however, those efforts were constantly thwarted by the shady practices of editors, printers, and booksellers, who frequently resorted to pirated editions, false imprints, and other strategies to satisfy the public's demand for drama. The studies that Donald Cruickshank and John O'Neill devote to several collections of classical Spanish theater texts (including Cervantes's Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses), in the third section of the book, masterfully analyze some of the challenges those strategies still pose to modern editors and readers.

The closing segment of A Maturing Market focuses on what their editors call “market specialisms,” which comprise chivalric literature, medical books, and the publication of news. While the chapters on chivalry and medicine point to a shrinking market struggling to adapt to the new literary and scientific trends of the period, the chapters devoted to news publishing stress the extraordinary growth of publications such as gazettes, pamphlets, and newsletters. Readers interested in these early forms of news communication should not miss the essays by Henry Ettinghausen and Ricard Expósito, which close A Maturing Market and provide insightful analysis on the circulation and consumption of news in early modern Iberia.

Although A Maturing Market contains some gaps and imbalances (the presence of Spain in the volume is much greater than that of Portugal, and there are no essays devoted to the printing of legal texts, which accounted for one third of all items published in Spain in the seventeenth century), readers will find in this edifying collection an expanded perspective on the Iberian book market that illuminates the data collected in various bibliographic sources and catalogues. As such, it is a welcome addition to studies on the history of printing and the book in early modern Iberia and on the impact of the press in its societies.