I am Joan Vicent Franco, bookseller.

I was born in Valencia in 1583. I am now thirty-five years old. My father was a wealthy miller of the city. He provided good wheat flour for the preparation of the paste with which books are bound until he himself, fond of reading, decided to enter the business. More and more people are beginning to like to read and listen to poems, romances, comedies and novels in loose folds and small format books. What we sell is the Tirant lo Blanch, but Don Quixote or Timoneda songbooks will lag behind. A few years ago my wife Anna Llagostera and I, newly married, bought at auction the house of Anastasia Ros, widow of Jaume Perles, in Mare Vella Street. It was shortly before the expulsion of the Moors in 1609, I remember that first Easter commune in the parish of St. Nicholas. In the fall of that year, in the Grau, I attended the boarding of thousands of Christian families new to Algiers and Tunis, and, there, a mother begged us compassionately that we stay with her child; she had heard that many died during the voyage. The expulsion was a serious blow to the income of the nobles; many who had guaranteed tax revenue from renting land to the Moors. Canvis de Taula de Valencia still suffers.