Chapter 1 presents the contexts for the making and circulation of books in late colonial Peru. It analyses three limiting factors related to society, legislation, and materiality, and concludes that circulation was never unfettered owing to various barriers imposed by the colonial administration. Addressing illiteracy, this chapter shows how educational reforms promoted by contemporary theories of Enlightenment pedagogy and alternative ways of acquiring reading skills created potential book customers. Although a double mechanism of control – before as well as after the publication – determined the book market, actual practice differed from legislation. Finally, an analysis of the material constraints reveals how dependence on paper and printing types restricted Peruvian print production. Notwithstanding these confines, an increasing number of people learned how to read, regulations were not always fully enforced, materials were re-used, and tools were invented, allowing printed commodities to enter the colonial market.

Chapter 4 focuses on a selection of bestselling genres on the colonial book market in Peru by analysing them in terms of production modes, materiality, and potential users. It exposes how a focus on the colonial market must necessarily include the entire array of print publications and, in particular, the small printing jobs relating to local affairs that penetrated various spheres of urban life. While the many small-format reprints of prayer booklets prove that religion was a popular subject for books, an unpublished calendar enterprise serves as a case study to assess knowledge of religious and scientific nature in print. In line with hypotheses of a Catholic Enlightenment, the chapter turns from religion to practical knowledge with an analysis of manuals and how-to books, revealing a shared canon of reading material within the empire. Depending on local relatedness, titles of each of the genres originated either from local workshops or as imports.

When José Eusebio Llano Zapata travelled from Peru to Spain in the middle of the eighteenth century, he remarked on the difference between the book markets. The Peruvian scholar who had travelled across the Atlantic, and had experienced both places, clearly judged the colonial book market favourably, and saw it as as bearing comparison with Europe's. In characterising the trade, he emphasised the wide variety of books that were available. In addition, he outlined a broad readership composed of both men and women, conveying the impression that books were an accessible object. In the following decades, more and more people in colonial society gained access to locally printed and imported books. This Introduction sets the historical and historiographic scene. It calls for a social history of books and prints, and reflects the status of Lima as a ‘Lettered City’ with social and spatial hierarchies.

Chapter 3 locates books on the market to assess questions related to access. Against notions of books as selected objects in colonial society, this chapter aims to demonstrate their everyday presence in the marketplace. Through examples of careers and stocks of traders, it provides a synopsis of the variety of professions and bookselling ventures in the Peruvian capital. While the urban commerce of books had developed into an established business with a number of specialised booksellers in Lima after the turn of the nineteenth century, the regional trade worked quite differently, relying above all on small and individual commissions sent with muleteers into other parts of the viceroyalty of Peru. A focus on used books for sale and an analysis of book prices combined with wages indicates the affordability of books. At various sites, and especially in cities, reading material had become a ubiquitous and accessible commodity.