Aldus applied to the Emperor Maximilian for a diploma giving imperial sanction to the organisation of his Academy, but the Emperor, although, as is shown in other correspondence, friendly in his disposition to the printer, was from some cause unwilling to give an official recognition to the Academy. The constitution of the Academy was printed in Greek, and certain days were fixed on which the members gave their personal consideration to the examination of Greek texts, the publication of which was judged likely to be of service to scholarship.
With the editorial aid of certain members of the Academy, Aldus arranged to print each month, in an edition of one thousand copies, some work selected by the Council. This Council, therefore, took upon itself in the matter of the selection of Greek classics for presentation, a function similar to that exercised 300 B.C. by the scholars appointed for the purpose in the Academy of Ptolemy Philadelphus, while some of its functions might be paralleled by those exercised to-day by the Delegates of the Clarendon Press of Oxford. It was the hope of Aldus that this Venetian Academy would take upon itself larger responsibilities in connection not only with Greek literature but with arts and sciences generally. When, however, with the death of its president, the Academy lost the service of his energetic initiative, its work soon came to a close.
For the sale of his publications, Aldus was in the main dependent upon direct correspondence with scholars. In Italy prior to 1550, bookselling hardly existed as an organised trade, and while in Germany there was a larger number of dealers in books, and the book-trade had by 1510 already organised its Fair at Frankfort, the communications between Italy and Germany were still too difficult to enable a publisher in Venice to keep in regular relations with the dealers north of the Alps. Paris was probably easier to reach than Frankfort, but the sales in Paris were not a little interfered with by the Lyons piracy editions before referred to, and even by piracies of the Paris publishers themselves. Aldus succeeded, however, before his death in securing agents who were prepared to take orders for the Aldine classics, not only in Paris, but in Vienna, Basel, Augsburg, and Nuremberg. With Frankfort he appears to have had no direct dealings, as his name does not appear in the list of contributors to the recently instituted Book-Fair.
As an example of a business letter of the time, the following lines from a bookseller in Treviso, who wanted to buy books on credit, are worth quoting:
Alde, libros quos venales bene credere possis
Hic pollet multa bibliopola fide.
Fortunis pollet quantum illa negotia possunt;
Hoc me, Manuti, credere teste potes!
Ignoras qui sim, nec adhuc sine pignore credis;
Te meus erga ingens sit tibi pignus amor.
(You have books for sale, Aldus, which you are able to entrust to me, if as a dealer, you have sufficient faith. This confidence would secure for you as much business advantage as is possible in such transactions. You can accept in this matter my personal word. You do not know who I am, and do not make a practice of giving credit. My great regard for you should, however, serve as a sufficient pledge.)[448]
The business of the time was done very largely by personal correspondence, and as the knowledge of his editions of the Greek classics came to be spread abroad, Aldus found himself overburdened with enquiries calling for personal replies. In order to save time in replying to such enquiries, Aldus printed on a folio sheet the descriptive titles of his publications with the prices at which they were offered. This sheet, printed in 1498, was the first priced catalogue ever issued by a publisher.
The orders that came to Aldus for his books differed in one important respect from those received by a publisher or bookseller to-day. The buyers did not write as a matter of ordinary business routine, or as if they were conferring any favour upon the publisher in taking his goods, but with a very cordial sense of the personal obligation that the publisher was, through his undertakings, conferring upon them and upon all scholarly persons. As an example of many such letters, I will quote from one written in 1505, from a Cistercian monastery in the Thuringian Forest, by a scholarly monk named Urbanus:
“May the blessing of the Lord rest upon thee, thou illustrious man. The high reward in which you are held by our Brotherhood will be realised by you when you learn that we have ordered (through the house of Függer in Augsburg) a group of your valuable publications, and that it is our chief desire to be able to purchase all the others. We pray to God each day that He will in His mercy, long preserve you for the cause of good learning. Our neighbour, Mutianus Rufus, the learned Canonicus of Gotha, calls you ‘the light of our age,’ and is never weary of relating your great services to scholarship. He sends you a cordial greeting, as does also Magister Spalatinus, a man of great learning. We are sending you with this four gold ducats, and will ask you to send us (through Függer) an Etymologicum Magnum and a Julius Pollux, and also (if there be money sufficient) the writings of Bessarion, of Xenophon, and of Hierocles, and the Letters of Merula.”[449]
Troublesome as Aldus found his correspondence, letters of this kind must have been peculiarly gratifying as evidence that his labours were not in vain.