History of Philippine press / Carson Taylor.

San Gabriel, off what was of old Calle Jolo, now Calle Juan
Luna, after the noted painter. It was on San Gabriel that
the Dominicans had a church and hospital, and a monastery
for the friars attached to the little Binondo mission.
The printshop was no doubt in the entresuelo of one
of the buildings. My data are from Retana, who gives the
probable date as about 1605. He feels sure that the Chinese, Juan de Vera, at whose pious expense the shop was
established, could not have bought the press and type in
Spain or elsewhere in Europe, and that they came either
from Japan or Goa (India), where printing had been established by the Jesuits in connection with their then flourishing missions.
The Dominican printshop on Calle San Gabriel was not
an establishment of great pretensions, naturally, but only a
little one devoted to the need for getting the precepts of
Christianity into the native language, and providing language texts for the missionaries. It could be, and was,
moved about; so that the oldest work of which copies are
extant was not printed on San Gabriel, but in the province
of Bataan, where the author of the text was carrying on
a mission work. This was Fray Francisco Blancas de San
Jose. His text was, Arte y Reglas de la Lengua Tagala,
a treatise on the Tagalo language, dated 1610. The fact
becomes the more remarkable when the date is compared
with those of the first British settlements in America. Of
course at that time Manila was thirty-nine years along in
her history, Spain had been in the Islands since 1565.
Her work here is imperishable.
-WALTER ROBB.
Manila, February 1, 1927..l