The manuscript of Don Juan Tenorio de Zorrilla, full of almost poetic erasures. The verses of “Youth, divine treasure” by Rubén Darío in his own handwriting. Autograph books by Lope de Vega such as La desdichada Estefanía. A first edition of Don Quixote. One of three handwritten copies of the Archpriest of Hita’s Book of Good Love. Another from Buscón de Quevedo. The fabulous Book of Lots of 1515, later banned by the Inquisition, and with which the court of the time played to predict the future with dice and constellations. And of course the first dictionary made by the RAE and published in six volumes between 1726 and 1739. These are some of the treasures that all Internet users can enjoy from today, consulting them online or downloading them for free, thanks to the opening of the new Digital Library of the RAE, which can be consulted on the institution’s own website (www.rae.es/biblioteca-digital).
Thanks to the patronage of the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation, the Royal Spanish Academy has already digitized more than 4,800 works kept by the institution, for now mainly the printed collection, but also some manuscripts, a more arduous and delicate task in which submerge now. “Today is an especially happy day for the Academy,” stressed its director, Santiago Muñoz Machado.
Muñoz Machado has highlighted that the RAE Library has “close to 300,000 volumes, but it is not about digitizing the entirety, but about putting in the public domain the most exquisite, the best, what cannot be found in other libraries that already exist.” are digitized. A set of works that are not found anywhere else or of which here we have an alternative that can be very interesting for whoever wants to know it. And all digitized with the best technology so that they can be handled as a book, page to page. And with the possibility of searching for concepts, searching for words, searching for expressions in the texts so that scholars have to waste less time.”
The first phase of digitization, started in 2021, has focused on the printed book from the time of the incunabulum – the second half of the 15th century – until 1830, the entire period in which the book was a product of manual printing. It includes the collection of 1,318 loose comedies kept by the RAE Library, with titles dated between the 17th and 18th centuries, and 209 sheets of cordel, popular, ephemeral literature, mostly between two and four pages long, published between the 16th and 19th centuries. The second phase of digitization went from 1830 to 1900, in which the copies were already part of the mechanical printing press. Among them there are copies of On the banks of the Sar by Rosalía de Castro or Zaragoza by Benito Pérez Galdós, one of his National Episodes. The manuscripts are the subject of the third phase, now underway and perhaps the most spectacular to observe given the high definition of digitization.
1.5 million pages have already been digitized and priority has been given to works of interest to regular users of the RAE library, specialists in Spanish language and literature and bibliography, such as spellings, syntax treatises, primers or histories of Spanish. . Works by the most prominent Spanish authors from the 15th to the 19th centuries have also been included, as well as the main Latin classics and foreign authors present in the library.
