[42] Only a few of the cuts in this were specially designed for it, all the later ones being taken from stock in Vérard’s most haphazard fashion.
CHAPTER X
LATER FOREIGN BOOKS
One of the chief charms of the books of the fifteenth century is that they are so unlike those of our own day. In the first year of its successor a great step was taken towards their modernization by the production of the first of the Aldine octavos, and the process went on very rapidly. In the early days of printing all the standard works of the previous three centuries that could by any possibility be considered alive were put on the press. By 1500 men were thinking of new things. New editions of many of the old religious and didactic treatises, the old poems and romances, continued to be printed, though mostly in a form which suggests that they were now intended for a lower class of readers, but the new publishers would have little to do with them. Scholarship, which till now had been almost confined to Italy, spread rapidly to all the chief countries of Europe, and amid the devastation which constant war soon brought upon Italy, was lucky in being able to find new homes. With the new literary ideals came new forms for books, and new methods of housing them. Before 1500 several publishers had found it worth their while to print editions in five huge volumes of the Speculum of Vincent de Beauvais, each volume measuring eighteen inches by thirteen and weighing perhaps a dozen pounds, though paper in those days was not yet made of clay. These great volumes had been cased in thick wooden boards, covered with stout leather and protected with bosses or centre-pieces and corner-pieces of metal. They were not intended to stand on shelves like modern books, but were laid on their sides, singly, on shelves and desks, and from pictures which have come down to us we can see that the library furniture of the day included a variety of reading-stands with the most wonderful of screws. The men for whom Aldus catered wanted books which they could put in their pockets and their saddlebags, and it was not long before the publishers of Paris and Lyon outdid Aldus in the smallness and neatness of their editions. Of course large books continued to be issued. The Complutensian Polyglott will not easily be got either into a pocket or a saddlebag, but it is a good deal smaller than the Speculum of Vincent de Beauvais, and, speaking generally, small folios took the place of large folios, and octavos the place of quartos, and in a little time the octavos themselves were threatened by the still smaller sextodecimos. There is, indeed, no stop till in the seventeenth century we come to the tiny Elzevirs, which remained the last word in book-production until the diamond editions of Didot and Pickering.
Aldus Manutius, who led the revolution, has often been wrongly praised. He can hardly be called a great printer. He burdened Greek scholarship for three centuries with a thoroughly bad style in Greek types, and the cursive substitute which he provided for the fine roman founts for which Italy had been famous almost drove them from the field. Both the Greek type and the italics were the outcome of confused thinking. They were based upon styles of handwriting which Aldus and his scholarly friends doubtless found more expeditious than the formal book-hands which had previously been in use. Quickness in writing is an excellent thing. But a sloping type takes just as long to set up as an upright one, and absolutely nothing is gained by the substitution of an imitation of a quicker hand for the imitation of a slower one.
Aldus had begun publishing at Venice early in 1495[43] with an edition of the Greek grammar of Lascaris, an earlier edition of which, issued at Milan in 1476, had been the first book wholly in Greek to obtain the honour of print. The Idylls of Theocritus and the poem of Hesiod called Works and Days had been printed at the same place in 1479 and a Greek Psalter in 1487. At Florence the famous first edition of Homer was printed (by Bartolommeo Libri) in 1488, and was followed in the years 1494-6 (i.e. about the time that Aldus began work) by five books printed entirely in majuscules on the model of the letters used in inscriptions. Among these books were the Greek Anthology, four plays of Euripides, and an Apollonius Rhodius. The printing of the Greek classics had thus made a start, although a slow one. Aldus now greatly quickened the pace, producing his great Aristotle in four (or, as it is sometimes reckoned, five) volumes, between the years 1495 and 1498, and following it up with nine comedies of Aristophanes in 1498, Thucydides, Sophocles, and Herodotus in 1502, Xenophon’s Hellenics, and the plays of Euripides in 1503 and Demosthenes in 1504. The service which he thus rendered to Greek scholarship was incalculable, but it was accompanied by a very serious drawback, the evil effects of which lasted for nearly three centuries. The Greek quotations in many books printed in Italy before this time had been printed in types imitating the writing in fairly old Greek manuscripts, handsome in appearance and fairly free from contractions; Aldus is said to have taken as his model the handwriting of his friend Marcus Musurus, with all its crabbed and often fantastic ligatures, and the simplicity of the Greek alphabet was thus intolerably complicated.
As we have seen, the introduction of the Aldine italics, though in themselves a better fount than the Greek type, was almost as mischievous in its effects. On the other hand, the service which Aldus rendered to scholarship by his cheap and handy series of the Latin and Italian classics was very great. The first book which he printed in his new type was a Virgil, and this was quickly followed by works by Petrarch and Dante and a whole series of similar editions. Aldus had powerful supporters in these ventures, among them being Jean Grolier, the famous bibliophile, who for many years was resident in Italy as Treasurer of the Duchy of Milan. Despite this encouragement he did not find printing very profitable, partly, no doubt, on account of the wars in which Venice was at this time engaged.
On the death of Aldus in 1515 his business was for some time carried on by his father-in-law, Andrea de Torresani, an excellent printer, but with little of Aldus’s scholarship. In 1533, at the age of twenty-one, Paulus Manutius, the youngest son of Aldus, took over the management of the firm, and proved himself an even finer scholar than his father. Financially he was no more successful, and when he was made printer to the Pope the anxiety of carrying on business at Rome as well as at Venice only added to his difficulties. On his death in 1574 his son, Aldus Manutius the younger, succeeded him and worked till 1597, but without adding anything to the reputation of the firm, perhaps because he had been pushed on prematurely in his boyhood, as is witnessed by his compilation of a volume of elegant extracts at the age of nine.