Wenceslao Emilio Retana’s Orígenes de la Imprenta Filipina is a landmark scholarly work that meticulously investigates the dawn of the printing press in the Philippine archipelago, specifically covering the years 1593 to 1640. The monograph was the winning entry in an international competition held in Manila in 1910 to commemorate the Third Centenary of the press's establishment in the islands. Retana, a preeminent Spanish historian and bibliographer of Filipino affairs, compiled this work after decades of research, building upon his own earlier publications where he first strongly defended the theory of the Philippine press's local, original development, independent of other colonial presses. The resulting work clarifies complex historical, bibliographical, and typographical problems surrounding the earliest printed materials from the islands, known as incunables, and includes a detailed, authoritative bibliography of these rare first prints. The book is considered a foundational text for the study of Filipino bibliography and the history of printing technology in the Spanish colonial sphere.
Orígenes de la Imprenta Filipina: investigaciones históricas, bibliográficas y tipográficas