A very rare instructional guide to playing the guitar explained in both written and illustrated form. No other copies of this broadsheet have been found.
Pablo Minguet y Yrol (1733–1778) was not only a prolific author, mapmaker, engraver and publisher but also a talented musician responsible for various works on musical composition and instruments as well as dance which, like this broadsheet was intended to do, sought to promote Minguet’s philosophy. His Reglas y advertencias generales par tañer la guitarra … (Madrid, [1752]) was ‘perhaps the most widely dispersed’ instructional manual of the period. He ‘was perhaps “the first editor to understand fully that the true editorial market was not made up of professionals, but of apprentices and amateurs.” His method thus consisted of a series of notebooks “dedicated to instruments or instrument families that could be acquired individually …” The complete work was reprinted on various occasions until 1774, which sheds light on its significance’ (A. Vera, The Sweet Penance of Music: Musical life in colonial Santiago de Chile, Oxford University Press, 2021, p. 189).
‘Minguet also wrote about dance. In 1733, he edited a Quadernillo curioso de veinte contradanzas nuevas, and later he would publish his Arte de danzar a la francesa, whose first printing took place in 1755’. ‘The book is composed of sheets that demonstrate how to perform some basic steps, as well as the entire choreography of the “minuet” and “passepied.” However, beyond merely teaching one to dance, these books were designed to promote a model of social behavior in line with the ideals of Enlightenment and good taste’ (Vera, pp. 189, 225).