Biblioteca Turriana (Mexico City, 1788): a cathedral chapter's public reading room, eleven years after Paris opened its own
Three churchmen of the Torres family left their joined libraries and 20,000 pesos of silver to the cathedral of Mexico on condition it be opened to the public. The Latin inscription over the first room says what the endowment was for - ad publicam utilitatem. By 1844 it held 12,295 volumes in 88 cases; it opened three hours a day, had one attendant, and the writer who praised it in 1853 printed its defects and a table of European libraries beside it.
Why this wins its question: English writing on colonial Mexican libraries stops at the Palafoxiana of Puebla; the cathedral library of Mexico City, the largest and busiest in the country for most of the nineteenth century, is barely described at all. This entry gives it from two Mexican compilations read page by page: the three churchmen from the isthmus of Panama who built the collection across two generations, the 20,000 pesos of silver left with it for the building and for the salary of an attendant, the Latin inscription Beristáin composed - printed here in the Latin and in the Spanish the 1853 volume set beside it - whose operative words are ad publicam utilitatem, and the autograph of Eguiara y Eguren's unfinished Biblioteca mexicana that ended up on its shelves. It refuses the celebratory shape by keeping the working figures in view: 12,295 volumes by the index of 1844, one attendant who had served fifty-one years and was by then bedridden, three opening hours a day, a locked room for prohibited books, and the writer's own verdict that the place could not be called a good establishment of its kind for want of funds. And it uses the table of European libraries printed on the facing column - Paris 824,000 volumes, opened to the public only in 1777; the British Museum opened in 1757 - so that the comparison is drawn from the source rather than asserted.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The collection was built by three men of one family across two generations. Dr Luis Antonio Torres Quintero, a native of Santiago de Veraguas, "murió de chantre de la metropolitana de México en 29 de octubre de 1756, dejó una numerosa librería, que aumentaron considerablemente en mas de la mitad, sus dos sobrinos" - Dr Cayetano Antonio Torres Quiñón, born at Natá de los Caballeros in the bishopric of Panamá, colegial of San Ildefonso, abad de San Pedro and maestrescuelas of the same cathedral, and his brother Dr Luis Antonio Torres Quiñón, archdeacon of the church. All three came from the isthmus and made their careers in Mexico.
The bequest carried a building fund and an endowment for staff, not only books. The archdeacon, acting "en conformidad de las disposiciones de su tio y hermano, consonas á la suya, hizo por su muerte, acaecida en 12 de diciembre de 1788, donacion de la famosa triple biblioteca de que hablamos á su iglesia, con mas la considerable suma de 20.000 pesos, para la construccion del edificio capaz y hermoso en que está colocada y para la manutencion del dependiente necesario, conservacion y aumento de la obra pia". His executor Dr Ambrosio Llanos Valdés, later bishop of Nuevo León, carried out the wills, "y luego que estuvo concluida la fábrica material, se ordenó la biblioteca, y se abrió al uso público".
The two sources that survive disagree about which brother acted, and the disagreement is left standing. Orozco y Berra's 1867 survey has the chantre dying in 1756 and leaving the library to his two nephews, and then makes the surviving brother the donor: "A la muerte de D. Luis, acaecida el 12 de Diciembre de 1788, conforme á las disposiciones de su tio y de su hermano, hizo donacion de los libros acopiados por los tres á la iglesia catedral, para establecer una biblioteca pública, con mas 20,000 pesos para construccion del edificio y manutencion de los dependientes." The date, the sum and the public purpose are the same in both; the agent is not.
The founders' purpose is on the wall in their own century's words. The dean Dr José Mariano Beristáin, superintendent of the library, composed a Latin inscription for the first room, which the 1853 article prints with its Spanish translation beside it. It reads in part "QUAM LUDOVICUS TORRES ECCLES. MEXIC. PRECENTOR. PRIVATAM SIBI PARAVERAT BIBLIOTECHAM ... AD PUBLICAM UTILITATEM. UNA CUM VIGINTI MILLIA VNCIAL. ARGENT. TESTAMENT. LEGARUNT. QUICUMQUE TANTO BONO FRUERIT DICITO REQUIESCANT IN PACE", rendered as: the library which Luis Torres had prepared for his own use, augmented by more than half by his nephews the archdeacon and the maestrescuelas, "por su disposicion testamentaria, juntamente con 20.000 pesos de plata, legaron para la pública utilidad á la misma iglesia metropolitana. Todo el que gozare de este singular beneficio, diga: descansen en paz."
It went on receiving what other people wanted preserved, including a famous unfinished manuscript. Later donors named are the dean Dr Juan Francisco Campos, who gave his own library and died in March 1810; Juan Manuel Irrizarri; Lucas Alamán, who gave the works he had written; Carlos María Bustamante; and Ignacio Rayón, who sent the publications issued as the Archivo. The library also held "131 tomos encuadernados de manuscritos pertenecientes á las rentas de la hacienda pública, principalmente de la del tabaco", formed by Silvestre Díaz de la Vega, who had administered that revenue; abundant legajos of the Filipino father Pichardo; "y posee tambien el autógrafo de la 'Biblioteca mexicana,' que dejó incompleta el Illmo. Sr. D. Juan Eguiara y Eguren".
The size is given from a real index and is confirmed independently in the round. "En el año de 1844, segun el índice que se formó, constaba de 12.295 cuerpos, sin los manuscritos ..., repartidos en 88 estantes de muy buena construccion y gusto, todos con sus llaves y alambrados correspondientes, y sus targetas de las materias que contienen." The building had two large well-lit rooms with tables and furniture, allegorical paintings, an old plan of Mexico and portraits of the three founders; two smaller rooms held more books, one of them the prohibited books "con la reserva conveniente". Orozco y Berra gives the same figure for the same year: "En 1844 contaba la biblioteca 12,295 volúmenes, sin contar los manuscritos."
Access was real and narrow, and the source measures it. Two staircases served the building, "una interior del lado de la Clavería para los señores capitulares, y la otra que se franquea al público". A capitular superintendent governed it, the Seminario Conciliar assigned a scholarship carrying the obligation of attending in it, and there was one dependent for handing out and collecting the books - a man who by then had served fifty-one years in the post and lay bedridden. the hours set aside for public use were "de las nueve á las doce" - three hours a day, and all of them before noon.
Its warmest contemporary defender printed its failures in the same paragraph as its praise. "Esta biblioteca es ciertamente la mas copiosa y mejor que en la actualidad hay en México; es tambien la mas concurrida. Sin embargo, no carece de muchos defectos, que impiden el poderlo llamar un buen establecimiento de su especie: las pocas horas en que se abre son de las mas ocupadas, faltan los dependientes necesarios y carece de las suscriciones y aumento de nuevas publicaciones por la carencia lamentable de fondos." The same writer, signing "M. B.", uses the entry to argue that the republic should found a national library.
The scale is best judged against the table the same source prints on the facing column. Its ranking of the principal public libraries of Europe gives Paris 824,000 volumes, Munich 600,000, St Petersburg 446,000, the British Museum 435,000, Copenhagen 412,000, Berlin 410,000, Vienna 313,000, Madrid's Biblioteca nacional 200,000 and the Vatican 100,000, for a total of 6,630,000. Twelve thousand volumes is a small library on that scale. The same passage supplies the other half of the comparison: the Bibliothèque nationale, "aunque fundada en 1595, no se abrió al público hasta 1777", and the British Museum, founded 1653, "se abrió al público en 1757 con unos 40.000 volúms". Measured by the date a reading room was opened to the public rather than by its size, Mexico's cathedral library of 1788 stands eleven years after Paris and thirty-one after London.
The limits of this entry are two compilations and one editorial project. Everything here comes from the Mexican Diccionario universal of 1853, whose article is signed "M. B.", and from Orozco y Berra's memoir of 1867; Orozco y Berra is named among the Diccionario's Mexican editors, so their agreement on the 1844 figure is weaker than two independent witnesses would be. No will, no chapter act, no catalogue and no reader register was opened here; there is no evidence about who in practice used the public staircase, and the claim sometimes made that this was the first public library in the Americas is not made by either source and is not made here.