B--That the initiative for the establishment of _typography_
is owed to P. Fr. Francisco Blancas de San José;

C--That the first _typographer_ was the Chinese Christian
Juan de Vera at the instigation of the said Father San José;

D--That the first _typographical_ printing of this Dominican
author is of the year 1602." [49]


It is not difficult to say with the book itself in front of us,
that it is an example of xylographic printing, but it was a great
feat on the part of Retana, who had never seen a copy, to resolve
apparently irreconcilable differences of opinion on the part of
several unquestioned authorities by deducing that it was all a
matter of semantics--what did _printing_ mean? As for the sprite of
1581 introduced by Beristain, Retana dismissed it on the grounds of
insufficient evidence. In a word, he concluded that the first book
issued in the Philippines was a Doctrina printed from wood-blocks
in 1593.

All subsequent writers on the subject have derived their information
from the sources we have already mentioned, and to a great degree
have been influenced by the findings of Medina and Retana. The
Rev. Thomas Cooke Middleton [50] in 1900 confessed that he did not
know what the first book printed was. Pardo de Tavera maintained his
old intransigence, when in the introduction to his bibliography for
the Library of Congress in 1903 he wrote that Medina's affirmation
that printing took place in 1593 "loses all validity in the face of
the categorical statement of F. Alonso Fernández." [51] Medina did