Breaking Bread and Building Catalogs: How an RBS Course Led to a Years-Long Bibliographical Collaboration

On a summer day in 2017, Szilvia Szmuk-Tanenbaum and Jay Moschella sat down to discuss Spanish plays over lunch at a Korean restaurant near the grounds of the University of Virginia. 

The two were in Charlottesville for the week, attending Stephen Tabor’s Rare Book School (RBS) course G-45 Analytical Bibliography. For Szmuk-Tanenbaum, a longtime RBS supporter, one of the School’s great strengths is the way it brings people together, not in a commercially minded way, but rather for “something much more familiar and casual and friendly,” fostered through shared meals and breaks with other RBS students. 

During her RBS course week, Szmuk-Tanenbaum was particularly delighted to have lunch with her classmate Moschella, who is Manager & Curator of Rare Books at the Boston Public Library (BPL). The library is home to one of North America’s largest Spanish and Portuguese literature collections thanks to a bequest by collector, Hispanist, and BPL co-founder George Ticknor. Ticknor’s original 1871 gift of several thousand Spanish and Portuguese printed books and pamphlets included many ephemeral comedias sueltas—singly printed plays published in Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The 1879 printed catalog of the collection was the only access point to many of these pamphlets, which were gathered in tightly bound tract volumes that Moschella describes as “very, very, very minimally cataloged,” making them not only challenging to study, but difficult even to find.

 

For more than four decades, Szmuk-Tanenbaum has dedicated her career to cataloging such plays, working closely with the collections at the New York Public Library and the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. In 2015, she launched the website Comedias Sueltas USA with the aim of broadening and streamlining access to collections of comedias sueltas in institutions across the United States. Being in an RBS class with Moschella was thus a perfect opportunity for Szmuk-Tanenbaum, who hoped to expand her online catalog to include the Ticknor collection of comedias sueltas at BPL.

Moschella recalls that at the beginning of his collaboration with Szmuk-Tanenbaum, Boston Public Library only knew details of “a few dozen examples” of the genre in its collections. “But working with Szilvia and talking about what exactly we’d be looking for and where to look for them,” he says, they have identified 1,337 discrete comedias sueltas at BPL, “many, many of which are otherwise unrecorded.”  

At Szmuk-Tanenbaum’s request, Moschella began photographing the title and final pages of each individual play printed before 1834 from the Ticknor volumes. His progress was slowed by a major renovation at BPL followed by the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns. Once photography could resume, Szmuk-Tanenbaum enlisted the help of seasonal RBS Session Assistant Hannah Goeselt, then a graduate student pursuing an M.L.I.S. in Cultural Heritage Informatics at Simmons University. Cataloging the plays, Goeselt says, “provides great opportunities for the human processes to come through. The labor of the printer becomes visible in the instances of broken type or misalignment of the forme, whereas past readers show themselves in the copious marginalia such as ownership inscriptions, pen trials, and the occasional doodle on blank leaves.” Goeselt was able to bring the BPL cataloging project to completion, creating an extensive spreadsheet of bibliographical data about the Ticknor collection as well as photographing the remainder of the comedias sueltas at BPL. 

“This was an amazing opportunity” for Boston Public Library, Moschella emphasizes, because Szmuk-Tanenbaum and her team used their resources and expertise to catalog the plays, “then shared that data with us, and we were able to bring that into our catalog. From that, we’ve been able to send these through to digitization.” Some 800 documents from the BPL’s Ticknor collection are now fully available on Internet Archive, with more on their way, creating an online archive that can be accessed and used by scholars around the world. 

The BPL’s plays are also cataloged on Comedias Sueltas USA, which as of March 2025 houses entries from 88 libraries with an additional 20 in the pipeline. “This searchable union catalog will eventually be a comprehensive source for locating all comedias sueltas held in U.S. academic and research institutions,” says Szmuk-Tanenbaum. The images of specific plays accompanying each record make this census particularly useful for researchers of printing history. She hopes that her collaboration with Moschella serves as a model and inspiration for other libraries looking to add their collections to this extensive bibliographical database. 

“All this,” Szmuk-Tanenbaum concludes, “is because RBS courses offer the time, space, atmosphere, ambience, and sustenance—both intellectual and caloric—that allow for valuable networking with like-minded, intelligent, and generous people.”