Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

Of the Epistolæ Familiares, the first edition comprised but one hundred copies, but the demand must have been greater than had been calculated for, as four months later the printing of a second edition of six hundred copies was begun, which was completed (in two impressions) within the term of three months.

The printer, Nicolas Jenson, was born in the province of Champagne about 1420, and was brought up in the Paris Mint. He was sent to Mayence in 1458 by Charles VII. to learn the secrets of the new art of printing. He returned to France in 1461, shortly after the accession of Louis XI. It is not clear whether the new king was less interested than had been his predecessor in the development of French printing, or whether Jenson was afforded any opportunity for exercising his art in Paris. In 1465, however, he is heard of in Venice, and he began there, in 1470, a printing and publishing business which soon became the most important in Italy.

There were many reasons to influence Jenson in his choice of Venice as the scene of his operations. In the first place, the tide of printers was flowing steadily towards Italy. Apprentices who had acquired the new art in Germany set out to seek their fortunes by the exercise of their skill. It was natural that they should turn to Italy, where the nobles were rich, where learning had its home, where there were already many manuscripts available for the printers, and where there was a public, both lay and ecclesiastic, ready to pay for the reproductions. The Venetian Republic offered special attractions in the security afforded by its government, and in the protection and liberty she promised to all who settled in her dominions. Venice was, moreover, the best mart for the distribution of goods, and the trade in paper was facilitated by the ease and cheapness of sea-carriage.

The first rag paper was made about the year 1300, and the trade of paper-making soon became an important one in Italy. In 1373, the Venetian Senate forbade the exportation of rags from the dominions of the Republic, an act which recalls the edict of Ptolemy Philadelphus in 290 B.C., forbidding the exportation of papyrus from Alexandria.

The position of Venice secured for it exceptional facilities for becoming a literary and a publishing centre, facilities in some respects similar to those which eighteen hundred years earlier had given to Alexandria the control of the book production of its time. The Venetian Contarini, writing in 1591, speaks of “the wonderful situation of the city, which possesses so many advantages that one might think the site had been selected not by men but by the gods themselves. The city lies in a quiet inlet of the Adriatic Sea. On the side towards the sea, the waters of the lagoons are spread out like a series of lakes, while far in the distance the bow-shaped peninsula of the Lido serves as a protection against the storms from the south. On the side towards the main land, the city is, in like manner, surrounded and protected by the waters of its lagoons. Various canals serve as roadways between the different islands, and in the midst of the lakes and of these watery ways arise in stately groups the palaces and the towers of the city.”

It was by the thoroughness of the protection secured for Venice through its watery defences, no less than by its isolated position outside of, although in immediate connection with, the Italian territory, that the Republic was enabled to keep free from a large proportion of the contests petty and great that troubled or devastated Italian territory during the sixteenth century.

When it was drawn into a conflict, its fighting was done very largely by means of its fleets, operating at a distance, or with the aid of foreign troops hired for the purpose, and but rarely were the actual operations of war brought within touch of Venetian territory. Its control of the approaches by sea prevented also the connections with the outer world from being interfered with. The city could neither be blockaded nor surrounded, and in whatever warlike operations it might be engaged, its commercial undertakings went on practically undisturbed. It was under very similar conditions that Alexandria secured, in literary production and in publishing operations during the fourth and the third centuries B.C., pre-eminence over Pergamus and the other Greek cities of Asia Minor. The fact that manuscripts and printing-presses could be fairly protected against the risks of war, and that the road to the markets of the world for the productions of the presses could not easily be blocked, had an important influence during the century succeeding 1490, in attracting printers to Venice rather than to Bologna, Milan, or Florence. The Venetian government was also prompt to recognise the value of the new industry and the service and the prestige that were being conferred upon the city by the work of the printer-publishers and their scholarly editors. The Republic gave, from the outset, more care to the furthering of this work by privileges and concessions and by honourable recognition of the guild of the printers than was given in any other Italian state. To these advantages should be added the valuable relations possessed by Venice with the scholars of the Greek world, through its old-time connections with Constantinople and Asia Minor. It was through these connections that the printers of Venice secured what might be called the first pick of the manuscripts of a large number of the Greek texts that became known to Europe during the half-century succeeding 1490.

These texts were brought in part from the monasteries, which had been spared by the Turkish conquerors in the Byzantine territory and in Asia Minor, while in other cases, they came to light in various corners of Italy, where the scholars, flying from Constantinople after the great disaster of 1453, had found refuge. As it became known that in Venice there was demand for Greek manuscripts, and that Venetian printers were offering compensation to scholars for editing Greek texts for the press, scholars speedily found their way to the City of the Lagoons. To many of these scholars, who had been driven impoverished from their homes in the East, the opportunity of securing a livelihood through the sale and through the editing of their manuscripts must have opened up new and important possibilities.

In 1479, Jenson sold to Andrea Torresano of Asola, later the father-in-law of Aldus Manutius, a set of the matrices punched by his punches. These matrices were probably the beginning of the plant of the later business of Aldus. In 1479, Pope Sixtus IV. conferred upon Jenson the honourary title of Count Palatine. He was the first nobleman in the guild of publishers, and he has had but few successors. He died in 1480.

John of Windelin, John of Speyer, and Nicolas Jenson, the three earliest Venetian printers, employed three kinds of characters in their type—Roman, Gothic, and Greek. The Gothic character secured, as compared with the others, a considerable economy of space, and its use became, therefore, more general in connection with the increased demand from the reading public for less expensive editions. Before the Greek fonts had been made, it was customary to leave blanks in the text where the Greek passages occurred and to fill these in by hand.