Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

The part taken in these new undertakings by Aldus Manutius was of distinctive importance, not only for Venice and Italy, but for the civilised world. He was a skilled printer, and an enterprising, public-spirited publisher, and he was, further, a judicious and painstaking critic and editor, and a scholar of exceptional attainments. To him more than to any other one man is due the introduction into Europe of the literature of Greece, which was in a measure rediscovered at the time, when, by the use of the printing-press, it could be placed within the reach of wide circles of impecunious students to whom the purchase of costly manuscripts would have been impossible.

In his interest in Greek literature, as well as in his scholarship and public-spirited liberality, Aldus was a worthy successor to the Roman publisher of the first century who had earned the appellation of Atticus on account of the attention given by him to the reproduction for the reading public of Italy of the great classics of Greece. Atticus was, however, a man of large means, gained chiefly through his business as a banker and a farmer of taxes, and it appears to have been to him a matter of indifference whether or not his publishing undertakings returned any profits on the moneys invested in them. Aldus began business without capital and died a poor man. Not many of his books secured for the publisher profits as well as prestige. He lived modestly and laboured continuously, but he expended in fresh scholarly publishing undertakings all the receipts that came to him from such of his ventures as proved remunerative.

As before pointed out, the payments made by Aldus for the work of editing his series of classical publications, payments which were probably the first ever made in Italy for literary work in connection with printing, were not only of material service to many of the impecunious Greek scholars, but must have served as precedents for fixing, for Italy at least, a market value for literary service. The payments to the Greek refugees included in a number of cases compensation for the use of the manuscripts they had brought with them, manuscripts which not infrequently constituted practically everything in the shape of property that they had been able to save from the grasp of the Turks. For a number of the more scholarly of these refugees, places were made in the universities, or as we should now say, Chairs were endowed, for instruction in the language and literature of Greece. Aldus himself took the initiative in inducing the Venetian Senate to institute such a professorship in Padua for his friend Musurus.

For a number of years, a larger proportion of the scholars and the manuscripts was absorbed by Venice than by any other of the Italian cities. The production of books progressed more rapidly in Venice than elsewhere, and the art of bookmaking reached a higher perfection there during the first decade of the sixteenth century than in any city in Europe. As before noted, however, Subiaco had preceded Venice in the printing of books, while the use of Greek type, in which Venice so rapidly attained pre-eminence, occurred first in Milan. The introduction of illustrations into book-printing probably originated in Rome.

Aldus Manutius.

—It seems to me in order, for the purpose of my narrative, to present in some detail the record of the life and work of Aldus. The history of any representative printer-publisher whose career belonged to the earlier stages of the business of making and selling books, would have value in throwing light on the extent of the difficulties and obstacles to be overcome and on the nature of the methods adopted; the career of Aldus possesses, however, not merely such typical value but a distinctive and individual interest, as well because of the personality of the man as on the ground of the exceptional importance, for his own community and for future generations, of the service rendered by him.

Aldus Manutius was born at Bassiano in the Romagna, in 1450, the year in which Gutenberg completed his printing-press. He studied in Rome and in Ferrara, and after having mastered Latin, he devoted himself, under the tutorship of Guarini of Verona, to the study of Greek. Later, he delivered lectures on the Latin and Greek classics. One of his fellow students in Ferrara was the precocious young scholar Pico della Mirandola, whose friendship was afterwards of material service. In 1482, when Ferrara was being besieged by the Venetians and scholarly pursuits were interrupted, Aldus was the guest of Pico at Mirandola, where he met Emanuel Adramyttenos, one of the many Greek scholars who, when driven out of Constantinople, had found refuge in the Courts of Italian princes. Aldus spent two years at Mirandola, and under the influence and guidance of Adramyttenos, he largely increased his knowledge of the language and literature of Greece. His friend had brought from the East a number of manuscripts, many of which found their way into the library of Pico.

In 1482, Aldus took charge of the education of the sons of the Princess of Carpi, a sister of Pico, and the zeal and scholarly capacity which he devoted to his task won for him the life-long friendship of both mother and sons. It was in Carpi that Aldus developed the scheme of utilising his scholarly knowledge and connections for the printing of Latin and Greek classics. The plan was a bold one for a young scholar without capital. Printing and publishing constituted a practically untried field of business, not merely for Aldus but for Italy. Everything had to be created or developed; knowledge of the art of printing and of all the technicalities of book-manufacturing; fonts of type, Roman and Greek; a force of type-setters and pressmen and a staff of skilled revisers and proof-readers; a collection of trustworthy texts to serve as “copy” for the compositors; and last, but by no means least, a book-buying public and a book-selling machinery by which such public could be reached.

It was the aim of Aldus, as he himself expressed it, to rescue from oblivion the words of the classic writers, the monuments of human intellect. He writes in 1490: “I have resolved to devote my life to the cause of scholarship. I have chosen in place of a life of ease and freedom, an anxious and toilsome career. A man has higher responsibilities than the seeking of his own enjoyment; he should devote himself to honourable labour. Living that is a mere existence can be left to men who are content to be animals. Cato compared human existence to iron. When nothing is done with it, it rusts; it is only through constant activity that polish or brilliancy is secured.” The world has probably never produced a publisher who united with these high ideals and exceptional scholarly attainments, so much practical business ability and persistent pluck.

The funds required for the undertaking were furnished by the Princess of Carpi and her sons, probably with some co-operation from Pico, and in 1494, Aldus organised his printing-office in Venice. His first publication, issued in 1495, was the Greek and Latin Grammar of Laskaris, a suitable forerunner for his great classical series. The second issue from his Press was an edition of the Works of Aristotle, the first volume of which was also completed in 1495. This was followed in 1496 by the Greek Grammar of Gaza, and in 1497 by a Greek-Latin Dictionary compiled by Aldus himself.