Books and Readers in Late-Fifteenth-Century Valencia: The Inventory of Joan Rix de Cura (1490)

As with so many of his colleagues working elsewhere in the Crown of Aragon, the Valencia-based printer and bookseller Joan Rix de Cura (ca. 1450–90) is typical of those figures responsible for the introduction of the printing press in the Iberian peninsula. By a stroke of good fortune, the inventory of Rix de Cura's bookshop holdings, totalling 5,261 volumes, has been preserved. An invaluable source for the circulation of classical and humanistic texts in late-fifteenth-century Valencia, the inventory includes an astonishing number of Latin books (with an indication of the number of copies held at the bookshop), mostly imported from Venice.