The Real Imprenta de Niños Expósitos of Buenos Aires (1780)
The first printing press of Buenos Aires was not owned by a printer, a university or the crown's treasury: it was assigned to the city's foundling home, which took its profits. The types were the disused Jesuit press of Córdoba, transferred under the rule that expelled Jesuit property must go to schooling and charity, and for thirty years every book, bando and newspaper printed in the Río de la Plata carried the foundlings' name in its imprint.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the first press of Buenos Aires give the year and the viceroy's name and stop; almost none explain the thing that makes it worth knowing, which is that the press was a charitable endowment — the confiscated Jesuit types of Córdoba, assigned under the rule that expelled-Jesuit property must fund schooling and charity, to a foundling home that then printed at its own cost and kept the proceeds. This object quotes the 1866 catalogue that transcribes those imprints word for word, gives the viceroy's own justification with the revenue named before the public benefit, and pins the arrangement to a surviving 1784 volume whose publisher line is the press itself. It also states the limits rather than the legend: seven titles a year and almost all devotional, a press running before the cédula that approved its owner, and a witness who is a partisan liberal writing eighty years later.
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 press kept the name Imprenta de Niños Expósitos into the 1820s and was the first of Buenos Aires. Juan María Gutiérrez, cataloguing its output in 1866, writes that it "conservó el nombre de Imprenta de Niños espósitos y fué la primera de Buenos Aires".
Its types were second-hand and in poor condition. The press "se formó de la que poseian los jesuitas en el Colejio de Monserrat de Córdoba en donde habia permanecido arrumbada por muchos años. Sus tipos y enseres estaban muy deteriorados y fué costosa su recomposicion", a statement Gutiérrez attributes to the viceroy Juan José de Vértiz's own Memoria.
The legal mechanism that put a press into a foundling home was the rule governing the expelled Jesuits' estate. The Monserrat press passed, on the expulsion, into the property administered by the Juntas de Temporalidades, and, in Gutiérrez's words, "segun la voluntad espresa del monarca español, los bienes de los espatriados debian aplicarse esclusivamente, al fomento de la instruccion pública y á la creacion de establecimientos de beneficencia".
The viceroy stated both purposes at once, and put the revenue first. Gutiérrez quotes Vértiz's Memoria: "Este arbitrio, (el establecimiento de la imprenta) á mas de rendir algunos ingresos á la casa de espósitos, tambien proporciona al publico los útiles efectos de la prensa." The press was a funding instrument for the foundling home that happened also to give the city a press.
The dates do not line up neatly and the source says so. The royal cédula approving the foundation of the casa de expósitos is of 1783, "y esta fecha seria la mas aproximativa para señalar la introduccion de la imprenta en esta ciudad si no existiesen publicaciones hechas en Buenos Aires en el año 1781". The press was working before the institution that owned it was formally approved.
The arrangement is legible in the imprints themselves, which name the beneficiary as the payer. Catalogue entries for 1785 read "Con licencia. Buenos Ayres en la Real imprenta de Niños Expòsitos y à su costa. Año 1785" and "Reimpresa en Buenos Ayres, en la Real imprenta de los Niños Expòsitos, y à su costa. Año 1785" — the house printed at its own charge and kept what the sales returned.
A surviving imprint confirms the press independently of the catalogue: the Carta pastoral of José Antonio de San Alberto, bishop of Córdoba del Tucumán and later archbishop of La Plata, addressed to his curas on entering his government, is a 220-page volume of 1784 whose publisher is the Real Imprenta de Niños Expósitos of Buenos Aires.
The press printed the first newspaper of the Río de la Plata. The catalogue's entry 106 is the "Telégrafo mercantil rural politico económico, é historiògrafo del Rio de la Plata. Por el coronel don Francisco Antonio Cabello, y Mesa ... Con privilegio exclusivo. En la Real imprenta de Niños Expósitos de Buenos Aires", four volumes, from 1 April 1801 to number 3 of tome 5 on 15 October 1802. Its declared object was "adelantar las ciencias y las artes, fundar una escuela filosófica que desterrase las formas bárbaras del escolasticismo, estender los conocimientos de los agricultores, é informar á los lectores de todos los progresos y descubrimientos nuevos".
The output was small and mostly devotional, which is the honest limit of the achievement: Gutiérrez counts that "el número de producciones hasta 1806, no pasa, término medio, de 7 por año, y casi todas versan sobre asuntos de devocion". Novenas, devotions and pastoral pieces fill the catalogue; the newspapers come at the end of the period.
The counterpoint is that Buenos Aires had waited two centuries for this, and the comparison Gutiérrez reaches for is a Spanish American one. He notes in a footnote that printing "no se introdujo en Chile hasta despues de su revolucion de la independencia", quoting an 1813 Chilean school regulation that "Apesar de las solicitudes del Ayuntamiento de Santiago, no se quiso permitir una imprenta"; Chile's first press was ordered from the United States in April 1811 and reached Valparaíso from New York at the end of that year. A crown that could endow a press out of confiscated estates could also withhold one for generations.
The witness is partisan and late. Gutiérrez was a nineteenth-century Argentine liberal writing the pre-history of his own country's press in 1866; his framing of Spanish rule is hostile, his account of the viceroy's motives comes through his own reading of a Memoria he summarises rather than reproduces, and no eighteenth-century document was consulted directly for this object. The catalogue entries, which transcribe imprints he had in front of him, carry more weight here than his narrative sections, and the confidences above reflect that.