The Book of Saint Cyprian: Maucci's Barcelona edition

A Barcelona address sits beneath an extraordinary promise. The title page of Maucci's Book of Saint Cyprian announces magic, ancient parchments and a German monk; below are the publisher and its Carrer de Mallorca address. Fabulous provenance and recognisable commercial infrastructure coexist on one page. Digital edition, cover.

The address changes the scene. The book may speak of secrets transmitted by spirits, but readers receive something produced, advertised and distributed. Before reaching a library, home or conversation, it passed through typesetters, printers and sellers. The promise needs paper.

A copy with a question

The Biblioteca Nacional de España records this Maucci edition as published in Barcelona around 1920, with the date in square brackets and a question mark. It describes a new illustrated edition of 190 pages, 21 centimetres high, and holds a copy under shelfmark 1/83010. The title identifies Jonás Sufurino as the person the work presents as responsible for it. BNE, bibliographic record.

These data offer another way of approaching the object. The approximation of the date does not make it less real: it indicates how far the description goes. A book can have a title that promises absolute certainty and, at the same time, needs a cautious dating in the catalog that retains it.

The formula “new edition” also tells something, even if it doesn’t tell everything. It is addressed to a reader who is able to recognize a name and value that will be enlarged, renewed or illustrated. It is not enough to reconstruct all previous editions. It does show a strategy: to present the volume as part of a continuity that precedes it.

In this imagined continuity there is a commercial advantage. The buyer does not seem to acquire a recent occurrence, but to gain access to an accumulated reputation. The editorial novelty and the promised antiquity can collaborate: the copy is new precisely to deliver better a knowledge that is announced old.

The saint who signs without signing

In proceedings of the Asociación de Escritores en Lingua Galega devoted to the devil in oral tradition, Félix Castro Vicente distinguishes legendary Cyprian of Antioch from the bishop of Carthage with the same name. He explains the attribution of ciprianillos to the saint traditionally associated with magic and studies their place in Galician narratives, including stories about the book itself. This attribution belongs to the volume's cultural history; it does not certify a modern edition's authorship. Castro Vicente, Libros do demo, grimorios e ciprianillos.

A name can work as a signature without behaving like the signature of a modern author. Here it opens a genealogy of prestige, danger and conversion. The cover page invites you to recognize an authority before asking who wrote each page, who selected the materials or what changes the editor introduced.

The additional monk supplies another link. Readers receive not only a famous name but a story of how knowledge supposedly reached the book. That scene of transmission makes reading an encounter with something rescued. Buying is wrapped in the feeling of discovery.

A single label of deception or credulity does not explain this framing. The book may attract through its repertoire, literary curiosity, material value or family stories. We do not know every Maucci reader's motives. One promise can encounter many uses.

The cover as a showcase

The digitized edition lists a wide repertoire of subjects and titles associated with magic. Along with this abundance, the Maucci house exhibits awards obtained in exhibitions, including one from Buenos Aires in 1910. The page thus brings together two ways to claim confidence: the extraordinary provenance of the content and the public recognition of the company that prints it. Title page of the digitised copy.

This encounter is more revealing than any formula isolated from the interior. The editor does not need to choose between secrecy and advertising. He can announce the secret with all the resources of a commercial page. The accumulation promises that the volume will be sufficient, that it will not be necessary to search in many places what he offers gathered.

'Treasure' participates in this double logic. It can suggest hidden wealth while presenting the book as a store of knowledge. Abundance moves from an imagined landscape into an object held in the hands. In its promotional language, opening the volume means opening a storehouse.

A journey preserved in catalogues

Another edition appears in the Central American university catalogue SIIDCA: Gran libro de San Cipriano o los tesoros del hechicero, published by Akal in Madrid in 1993, third edition, with 269 pages and illustrations by Martín Avilez. The record comes from the University of El Salvador. SIIDCA, edition of Akal.

We cannot deduce from these differences, without comparing the interiors, a complete textual relationship with the copy of Maucci. But there is something concrete: another editorial object, another extension, another date and a library presence on the other side of the Atlantic. The circulation leaves modest and verifiable traces that do not require imagining a secret chain of initiates.

The library changes access too. A supposedly exceptional repository enters a shared descriptive system: attributed author, publisher, subject, dimensions and copy. The entry does not cancel its legendary history; it places that history beside information enabling location and comparison.

What keeps the name

'The Book of Saint Cyprian' can sound like one object fixed from its origin. Editions remind us that it is also a name gathering differences. Recognising that name is not the same as knowing which particular volume we face.

Returning to Barcelona, Maucci and the printed address preserves this distance without losing the subject's appeal. The legendary book did not circulate only in whispers: it also had numbered pages, a publisher and readers with varied intentions. Its cultural history opens when the commercial object is allowed to accompany the saint.

Sources and references

• National Library of Spain, Book of Saint Cyprian, Maucci, estimated date 1920.
• Digitised copy of the Maucci edition, reproduction with BNE origin.
• Félix Castro Vicente, Libros do demo, grimorios e ciprianillos, in A figura do demo na literatura de tradición oral, AELG.
• University of El Salvador / SIIDCA, Gran libro de San Cipriano, Akal, 1993.