The weight of responsibility felt by Aldus in becoming a printer may be better appreciated when one realizes that this profession then included the duties of editor and publisher. The publisher of today accepts or declines manuscripts submitted by their authors, and the editing of such manuscripts, if considered at all, is placed in the hands of his editorial department. Then the “copy” is turned over to the printer for manufacture. In the olden days the printer was obliged to search out his manuscripts, to supervise their editing—not from previously printed editions, but from copies transcribed by hand, frequently by careless scribes. Thus his reputation depended not only on his skill as a printer, but also upon his sagacity as a publisher, and his scholarship as shown in his text. In addition to all this, the printer had to create the demand for his product and arrange for its distribution because there were no established bookstores.
The great scheme that Aldus conceived was the publication of the Greek classics. Until then only four of the Greek authors, Æsop, Theocritus, Homer, and Isocrates, had been published in the original. Aldus gave to the world, for the first time in printed form, Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, Demosthenes, Lysias, Æschines, Plutarch, and Pindar. Except for what Aldus did at this time, most of these texts would have been irrevocably lost to posterity.
When you next see Italic type you will be interested to know that it was first cut by Aldus, said to be inspired by the thin, inclined, cursive handwriting of Petrarch; when you admire the beauty added to the page by the use of small capitals, you should give Aldus credit for having been the first to use this attractive form of typography. Even in that early day Aldus objected to the inartistic, square ending of a chapter occupying but a portion of the page, and devised all kinds of type arrangements, half-diamond, goblet, and bowl, to satisfy the eye.
To me, the most interesting book that Aldus produced was the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,—“Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream.” It stands as one of the most celebrated in the annals of Venetian printing, being the only illustrated volume issued by the Aldine Press. This work was undertaken at the very close of the fifteenth century at the expense of one Leonardo Crasso of Verona, who dedicated the book to Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino. It was written by a Dominican friar, Francesco Colonna, who adopted an ingenious method of arranging his chapters so that the successive initial letters compose a complete sentence which, when translated, read, “Brother Francesco Colonna greatly loved Polia.” Polia has been identified as one Lucrezia Lelio, daughter of a jurisconsult of Treviso, who later entered a convent.
Text Page from Aldus’ Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Venice, 1499 (11 × 7 inches).
It is on this model that the type used in this volume is based
Illustrated Page of Aldus’ Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Venice, 1499 (11 × 7 inches)
