THE FIRST PAGE OF DISPLAYED TYPE COMPOSITION
Arranged by Jenson at Venice in 1471
It is an interesting fact that the books of Jenson do not contain the letters J, U and W, these characters not having been added to the alphabet until some years later. To satisfy a demand he also cut and used a round Gothic face. The product of Jenson’s presses represents the highest attainment in the art of printing. His types were perfect, the print clear and sharp, paper carefully selected, and margins nicely proportioned.
Jenson died in 1481, honored and wealthy. His printing office passed first to an association and then to one whose fame as a printer perhaps surpasses that of Jenson.
Aldus Manutius was a learned Roman, attracted to printing about 1489 by the pleasures it afforded in the publishing of books. He introduced the slanting style of type known as italic, so named in honor of Italy and fashioned after the careful handwriting of Petrarch, an Italian poet. Italic at first consisted only of lower-case letters, small upright Roman capitals being used with them. The reproduction below shows this combination and also the peculiar style of inserting a space after the capital letter beginning each line.
A page (actual size) from the famous Bamberg Missal
Printed by Sensenschmidt in 1481
Aldus also introduced the innovation of considerably reducing the size of books from the large folio to the convenient octavo. The size of a folio page is about twice that of this one, which is known as a quarto, and an octavo page is half the size of a quarto.
Aldus was the first to suggest the printing of a polyglot Bible. The word polyglot means “many tongues” and here refers to a book giving versions of the same text or subject matter in several languages. The polyglot Bible of Aldus was to have been in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, but got no further than a few specimen pages.
The first polyglot work ever printed was a Psalter of eight columns, each a different translation, from the press of Peter Paul Porrus, at Genoa, Italy, in 1516. This Psalter was the literary work of Augustin Justinian, a Corsican bishop, who later also arranged an entire Bible on similar plans.
