Censorship notwithstanding, the final half-century of Spanish rule in the Philippines was a time of efflorescence in colonial print culture. Between the advent of typo-lithography in 1858 and the successive occurrence, in 1896 and 1898, of the Filipino revolution and the Spanish-American War, printing presses operating in Manila and beyond issued thousands of books and periodicals, the first public library, the Muséo-Bibliotéca de Filipinas, opened its doors in 1887, and the importation of books from Europe and America could scarcely keep pace with demand.
