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Pedro Vindel, bibliophile

Olmeda de la Cuesta, La Alcarria Conquense, Cuenca

1 Villages · 1 Monuments · 2 Curiosities

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Pedro Vindel, bibliophile

Curiosity · Olmeda de la Cuesta, La Alcarria Conquense, Cuenca

Image of Olmeda de la Cuesta, not of the place itself.

Alongside the 18th-century Jesuit Juan Manuel Blanco, Olmeda de la Cuesta was also the birthplace of the bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller Pedro Vindel Álvarez (1865-1921), who moved to Madrid as a child after being orphaned and learned to read and write at the age of sixteen. He devoted himself to the buying and selling of books and opened his own bookshop in 1893. Among his finds, the discovery stands out of two 13th-century Galician parchments containing the seven love cantigas of Martín Códax, known as the Pergamino Vindel, which after his death ended up in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. He also published several bibliographic works, including a catalogue of covers and colophons of rare books.

Photo: Vitalij Fleganov, on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

What to see and do in Olmeda de la Cuesta