k of Our Lady of the Rosary by
Blancas de San Jose printed at Bataan in 1602. Aduarte supported this
without mentioning a title, place or date of printing. If we are to
accept all these statements as incontrovertible, how can the apparent
contradictions be reconciled? The answer had already been hinted at,
but Retana solved the problem with amazing acumen, and arrived at
four conclusions, which are here printed in his own words:

"A--That the Doctrinas of 1593, though printed at Manila, were
not executed in type, but by the so-called xylographic method;

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

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

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 Fernandez." [51] Medina did
not comment further in his _Adiciones y Ampliaciones_ [52] of 1904,
yet when the same year Perez and Gueemes [53] published their additions
to and continuation of Medina, bringing his bibliography down to
1850, they resurrected the 1581 _Arte_, but added no new evidence
to prove their case. Blair and Robertson, in their trem