"The early promoters of education and missions did not rely upon the distant European presses for the publication of their manuals. The printing press was introduced into the New World probably as early as 1536, and it seems likely that the first book, an elementary Christian doctrine called 'La Escala Espiritual' (the ladder of the spirit), was issued in 1537. No copy of it, however, is known to exist. Seven different printers plied their craft in New Spain in the sixteenth century. Among the notable issues of these presses, besides the religious works and church service works, were dictionaries and grammars of the Mexican languages, Puga's 'Cedulario' in 1563, a compilation of royal ordinances, Farfan's 'Tractado de Medicina.' In 1605 appeared the first text-book published in America for instruction in Latin, a manual of poetics with illustrative examples from heathen and Christian poets." (Bourne.) With the light thrown on the early history of printing on this continent by a paragraph like this, how amusing it is to be told that the tradition among the printers and the publishers and even the bibliophiles of the United States is that the first book printed in America was the Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book printed, I believe, in 1637. There were no less than seven printing presses at work in Mexico during the sixteenth {321} century, fully fifty years before the Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book was issued. How interesting it is for those who still like to insist that the Catholic Church is opposed to the distribution of the Scriptures to the people or its printing in the vernacular, to find how many editions of it were printed in Mexico and in South America during the sixteenth century. This story of the printing press in Spanish America in the early days would of itself make a most interesting chapter in a volume on American origins, which could probably be extended into a very valuable little manual of bibliography and bibliophilic information that would arouse new interest in the accumulation of early American books.