La Mujer. Apuntes para un Libro por D. Severo Catalina.
Puebla: Imp. de N. Bassols dirigida por I. Boclar, 1868. 316,[2]pp. Contemporary light green cloth, gilt spine titles. Minor edge wear, light soiling to boards. Sam black ink signature to title page, last page of text, and Index leaf. Very good. Item #13053
The very rare first Mexican edition of a popular Spanish work authored by Don Severo Catalina del Amo (1832-1871), a Spanish professor of Hebrew studies who was admitted to the Royal Spanish Academy in 1861. In his "Notes for a Book" on "The Woman," Severo Catalina expounds on various aspects of the character of women in chapters on education, modesty, pride, "virtue and mysticism," love, marriage, maternity, widowhood, "the religious profession," charity, poverty, social gatherings, and more. The work opens with the 1858 prologue to the first Madrid edition, written by Ramon de Campoamor which begins with a question that seems to go to the heart of the work: "Is this book an apology for women, or a libel against the female sex?" A decade passed before the work appeared in Mexico, interesting for studying the transmission of popular Spanish works to Latin America in the latter half of the 19th century.
Early Spanish editions of La Mujer are rare, but this "Primera edicion Mexicana de la Tercera Espanola" is almost unheard of. OCLC reports just a single institutional copy, at the Daniel Cosío Villegas Library of El Colegio de México. This Puebla imprint is a somewhat shaky production, with numerous mistakes in the page numbers, but nonetheless interesting bibliographically.
Price: $1,250