Misprinted wall calendar recycled as (unrecorded) devotional woodcuts.
Almanaque ó Calendario del Arzobispado de SEVILLA para este año Bisexto de 1788, con los Santos, Fiestas fixas y movibles, Vigilias, Temporas, dias en que se saca Anima, Q[u]artos de Luna … [On verso:] Devocion a San Francisco de Paula. Devocion a Nuestra Señora de Belen. Con Privilegio: En Sevilla en la Imprenta Mayor de La Ciudad, [1787]. Full folio sheet [43.6 x 31.1 cm], [1] letterpress calendar with woodcut sun, moon, and zodiacal signs, [2] devotional woodcuts printed on verso. Minor wrinkling and edge wear, folded vertically at center, small tear without loss in center margin. Never bound, no sewing holes.
A striking witness to the workings (and little failures) of an 18th-century Spanish printing house: Very rare (1 copy worldwide) wall calendar printed in Sevilla for the year 1788 (January through June), here in an extraordinary example ‘recycled’ by the addition of 2 unrecorded devotional woodcuts on the verso. The calendar suffered from a printing error that evidently caused it to be withdrawn from copies intended for sale. Not wanting to waste the sheet, the pressmen saved the paper and later the blank side was printed with large woodcuts depicting San Francisco de Paula and the icon of Nuestra Señora de Belen, both images signed in the block “I. P.”
Calendars of this sort were intended to be pinned to the wall and, provided they survived the year, to be discarded come January 1st. Consequently, examples of such calendars only rarely survive today. OCLC and KVK locate only 1 copy of this 1788 Sevilla calendar, the example at the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid, which has a blank verso as intended.
Similarly, devotional woodcuts of the size seen here were meant for wall display and so they rarely survived the elements of the typical Spanish household. For reasons now unknown, these San Francisco de Paula and Nuestra Señora de Belen woodcuts were never divided and displayed, and so the ensemble survives intact today.
Why was this calendar reprinted with devotional woodcuts? Calendars by their very nature are time sensitive, and so if more copies are printed than can be sold, then the sheets rapidly become worthless as timekeeping instruments and remain useful only as recycled material. In this case, however, the sheet seems not to have been recycled through a miscalculation of the market, but because it suffered from a printing error: In the second line of text, at the center of the sheet, the word “Quartos” is missing its “u.” This seems to be an example of “pulled type,” i.e., the letterpress forme was not locked up tightly enough and a single piece of metal type (here a “u”) was accidentally pulled out by the sticky ink during printing. Sometimes a pulled piece of type fell back onto the forme and accidentally was printed over, resulting in the printing of a ghostly image of the piece of type in its full length, but here the “u” type seems to have fallen outside of the forme or to have become wedged into the printing furniture below the printing surface (see detail photo, and see also, as a comparison, the detail photo of the correctly printed word “Quartos” from the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid copy).
We must imagine that (1) either several erroneous copies were printed and when sheets were later inspected the error was found and the run was withdrawn and recycled in one way or another, or (2) the pressmen at once heard the clink of the pulled type or saw the “u” shifted out of place and repaired the forme after printing only this single sheet.
One might imagine that it would be an ingenious marketing strategy to add devotional images to the versos of all such calendars so that they might be of some further use at year’s end, but this seems not to have occurred (all surviving Sevilla calendars for this era have blank versos), likely because the printing of the verso negatively affects the legibility of the rather closely set information of the calendar.
OCLC and KVK locate only one example worldwide of the calendar (Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid) and no examples of the woodcut. For reference, a scan of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid copy can be found here: http://www.memoriademadrid.es/buscador.php?accion=VerFicha&id=300049&num_id=4&num_total=32