Alonso de la Vera Cruz, Recognitio Summularum and Dialectica Resolutio (Mexico, 1554)

In the spring and summer of 1554 a press in Mexico City printed two folio volumes of logic by an Augustinian who had spent years teaching it in New Spain. They were the first books of philosophy printed anywhere in the Americas. Their author's stated purpose was to cut away what he called the useless subtleties he had himself wasted years learning — an aim his nineteenth-century cataloguer judged he pursued with far too much timidity.