Part 10 (1/2)

One of the chief charms of the books of the fifteenth century is that they are so unlike those of our own day. In the first year of its successor a great step was taken towards their modernization by the production of the first of the Aldine octavos, and the process went on very rapidly. In the early days of printing all the standard works of the previous three centuries that could by any possibility be considered alive were put on the press. By 1500 men were thinking of new things.

New editions of many of the old religious and didactic treatises, the old poems and romances, continued to be printed, though mostly in a form which suggests that they were now intended for a lower cla.s.s of readers, but the new publishers would have little to do with them. Scholars.h.i.+p, which till now had been almost confined to Italy, spread rapidly to all the chief countries of Europe, and amid the devastation which constant war soon brought upon Italy, was lucky in being able to find new homes.

With the new literary ideals came new forms for books, and new methods of housing them. Before 1500 several publishers had found it worth their while to print editions in five huge volumes of the _Speculum_ of Vincent de Beauvais, each volume measuring eighteen inches by thirteen and weighing perhaps a dozen pounds, though paper in those days was not yet made of clay. These great volumes had been cased in thick wooden boards, covered with stout leather and protected with bosses or centre-pieces and corner-pieces of metal. They were not intended to stand on shelves like modern books, but were laid on their sides, singly, on shelves and desks, and from pictures which have come down to us we can see that the library furniture of the day included a variety of reading-stands with the most wonderful of screws. The men for whom Aldus catered wanted books which they could put in their pockets and their saddlebags, and it was not long before the publishers of Paris and Lyon outdid Aldus in the smallness and neatness of their editions. Of course large books continued to be issued. The _Complutensian Polyglott_ will not easily be got either into a pocket or a saddlebag, but it is a good deal smaller than the _Speculum_ of Vincent de Beauvais, and, speaking generally, small folios took the place of large folios, and octavos the place of quartos, and in a little time the octavos themselves were threatened by the still smaller s.e.xtodecimos. There is, indeed, no stop till in the seventeenth century we come to the tiny Elzevirs, which remained the last word in book-production until the diamond editions of Didot and Pickering.

Aldus Manutius, who led the revolution, has often been wrongly praised.

He can hardly be called a great printer. He burdened Greek scholars.h.i.+p for three centuries with a thoroughly bad style in Greek types, and the cursive subst.i.tute which he provided for the fine roman founts for which Italy had been famous almost drove them from the field. Both the Greek type and the italics were the outcome of confused thinking. They were based upon styles of handwriting which Aldus and his scholarly friends doubtless found more expeditious than the formal book-hands which had previously been in use. Quickness in writing is an excellent thing. But a sloping type takes just as long to set up as an upright one, and absolutely nothing is gained by the subst.i.tution of an imitation of a quicker hand for the imitation of a slower one.

Aldus had begun publis.h.i.+ng at Venice early in 1495[43] with an edition of the Greek grammar of Lascaris, an earlier edition of which, issued at Milan in 1476, had been the first book wholly in Greek to obtain the honour of print. The Idylls of Theocritus and the poem of Hesiod called _Works and Days_ had been printed at the same place in 1479 and a Greek Psalter in 1487. At Florence the famous first edition of Homer was printed (by Bartolommeo Libri) in 1488, and was followed in the years 1494-6 (i.e. about the time that Aldus began work) by five books printed entirely in majuscules on the model of the letters used in inscriptions.

Among these books were the Greek Anthology, four plays of Euripides, and an Apollonius Rhodius. The printing of the Greek cla.s.sics had thus made a start, although a slow one. Aldus now greatly quickened the pace, producing his great Aristotle in four (or, as it is sometimes reckoned, five) volumes, between the years 1495 and 1498, and following it up with nine comedies of Aristophanes in 1498, Thucydides, Sophocles, and Herodotus in 1502, Xenophon's _h.e.l.lenics_, and the plays of Euripides in 1503 and Demosthenes in 1504. The service which he thus rendered to Greek scholars.h.i.+p was incalculable, but it was accompanied by a very serious drawback, the evil effects of which lasted for nearly three centuries. The Greek quotations in many books printed in Italy before this time had been printed in types imitating the writing in fairly old Greek ma.n.u.scripts, handsome in appearance and fairly free from contractions; Aldus is said to have taken as his model the handwriting of his friend Marcus Musurus, with all its crabbed and often fantastic ligatures, and the simplicity of the Greek alphabet was thus intolerably complicated.

As we have seen, the introduction of the Aldine italics, though in themselves a better fount than the Greek type, was almost as mischievous in its effects. On the other hand, the service which Aldus rendered to scholars.h.i.+p by his cheap and handy series of the Latin and Italian cla.s.sics was very great. The first book which he printed in his new type was a Virgil, and this was quickly followed by works by Petrarch and Dante and a whole series of similar editions. Aldus had powerful supporters in these ventures, among them being Jean Grolier, the famous bibliophile, who for many years was resident in Italy as Treasurer of the Duchy of Milan. Despite this encouragement he did not find printing very profitable, partly, no doubt, on account of the wars in which Venice was at this time engaged.

On the death of Aldus in 1515 his business was for some time carried on by his father-in-law, Andrea de Torresani, an excellent printer, but with little of Aldus's scholars.h.i.+p. In 1533, at the age of twenty-one, Paulus Manutius, the youngest son of Aldus, took over the management of the firm, and proved himself an even finer scholar than his father.

Financially he was no more successful, and when he was made printer to the Pope the anxiety of carrying on business at Rome as well as at Venice only added to his difficulties. On his death in 1574 his son, Aldus Manutius the younger, succeeded him and worked till 1597, but without adding anything to the reputation of the firm, perhaps because he had been pushed on prematurely in his boyhood, as is witnessed by his compilation of a volume of elegant extracts at the age of nine.

The family of printers and publishers which came nearest to rivalling the fame of the Aldi in Italy during the sixteenth century was that of the Giunta. Springing originally from Florence, members of it worked for some time simultaneously at Florence and Venice, and Lucantonio Giunta, the earliest member of it to rise into note, was already one of the foremost publishers at Venice in the closing years of the fifteenth century, and subsequently printed for himself instead of always employing other men to print for him. The speciality of this Venetian firm was at first ill.u.s.trated books of all kinds, afterwards the production of large and magnificent missals and other service books of the Roman Church, and these they continued to publish until nearly the end of the sixteenth century.

At Florence, Filippo Giunta competed with Aldus of Venice in printing pretty little editions of the cla.s.sics, his compet.i.tion sometimes taking the form of unscrupulous imitation.

At Rome, Eucharius Silber and his successor Marcellus were the chief printers from 1500 to 1516. A little later the Bladi took their place, and under the auspices of the Council of the Propaganda of the Faith a press was set up for printing in Syriac, Armenian, and other Oriental languages. The output also of the presses in other Italian cities was still considerable. Nevertheless, from the same causes which produced her political decay Italy rapidly ceased to be the head-quarters of European printing, yielding this honour to France about the end of the first quarter of the century, and by some thirty or forty years later becoming quite uninfluential.

To the German printing trade, also, the sixteenth century brought a notable decline of reputation. In its first two decades Johann Schoeffer (son of Peter) produced some fine books at Mainz; at Stra.s.sburg Gruninger poured forth ill.u.s.trated books, and Johann k.n.o.blouch and Matthias Schurer were both prolific. The importance of Cologne diminished, though the sons of Heinrich Quentell had a good business.

Augsburg, on the other hand, came to the front, the elder and younger Schoensperger, Johann and Silva.n.u.s Otmar, Erhard Oglin, Johann Miller, and the firm of Sigismund Grim and Marcus Wirsung all doing important work. At Nuremberg the chief printing houses were those of Hieronymus Holzel, Johann Weissenburger, and Friedrich Peypus. Leipzig and Hagenau both greatly increased their output, and with the advent of Luther, Wittenberg soon became an important publis.h.i.+ng centre. Luther's activity alone would have sufficed to make the fortunes of any publisher had it not been for the fact that as each pamphlet from his pen was produced at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft, or some other authorized printer, it was promptly pirated in other cities, often with the retention of the original imprint. Many of these Luther tracts had ornamental borders, and, as will be narrated in another chapter, the German book-ill.u.s.trations of this period were often very finely designed, but the paper used, even in important books, was poor compared to that found in German incunabula, and the presswork too often careless. These defects are found intensified in almost all the German books published after this date, and German printing soon lost all its technical excellence, though the output of its presses continued to be large, and the great annual fair at Frankfort during the course of the sixteenth century became the most important event in the book-trade of Northern Europe.

A little before Germany gave herself up to theological strife, the conjunction at Basel of the great printer Johann Froben and the great scholar Erasmus temporarily raised that city to importance as an intellectual centre. Froben had begun printing at Basel in 1491, but until he formed his friends.h.i.+p with Erasmus in 1513 published only a few editions of the Bible, some of the papal Decretals, the works of S.

Ambrose, and a few other books of no special interest. From 1513 onwards his output increased rapidly both in quant.i.ty and importance, so that by the time of his death in 1527 he had printed over three hundred books, including almost all the works of Erasmus and many books in Greek.

During this period, also, border-pieces and initials were designed for him by the two Holbeins (Hans and Ambrosius) and other skilful artists, and he was ent.i.tled to rank as the greatest printer-publisher in Europe in succession to Aldus. After his death in 1527 the supremacy of European printing rested for the next generation indisputably with France.

During the fifteenth century printing in France had developed almost entirely on its own lines. Vernacular books of every description had poured from the presses of Paris and Lyon, and many of them had been charmingly ill.u.s.trated in a style worthy of the great French school of ill.u.s.trators of ma.n.u.scripts. In the first half of the sixteenth century the publication of these popular books--romances, poetry, and works of devotion--still continued, though with some loss of quality, the print and paper being less good and the ill.u.s.trations often consisting of a medley of old blocks, or where new ones were made being executed in a coa.r.s.er and heavier style. But to the vernacular literature there was now added a learned and scholarly literature which soon rose to great importance. As early as 1492 Johann Trechsel, a printer of Lyon, had possessed himself of sufficient Greek type to print quotations in that language, and in the following year he issued the profusely ill.u.s.trated edition of _Terence_, the cuts in which were imitated by Gruninger at Stra.s.sburg. Trechsel's press corrector and general editor was a young scholar named Josse Bade, of Asch, near Ghent, better known by the Latin form of his name as Jodocus Badius Ascensius, or Ascensia.n.u.s. In 1503, after Trechsel's death, Ascensius started business for himself in Paris, and his editions of the cla.s.sics, well known from the device of a printing-press found on many of their t.i.tlepages, obtained a considerable reputation. Almost simultaneously, in 1502, Henri Estienne, the first of a famous family of scholar-printers, had started in business by an expedient of which we hear a great deal in the annals of English printing, that of marrying a printer's widow. Of Henri Estienne's three sons the eldest, Francois, became a bookseller, Robert a scholar-printer, and Charles, in the first instance, a physician. In the technical side of his business Henri had been helped by Simon de Colines, who, on his employer's death, in 1520, became his widow's third husband, and carried on the business until 1526, when he handed it over to Robert Estienne, and started on his own account in another house in the same street. Thus, just as the co-operation of Erasmus with Froben, which began shortly before the death of Aldus, brought the Basel press into prominence, so this duplication, just before the death of Froben, of the business of Henri Estienne with the two firms of Robert Estienne and Simon de Colines materially aided the rivalry of Paris. Greek printing, which by this time had become essential to a printer's reputation for scholars.h.i.+p, had at last begun there with the publication of a Greek Grammar in 1507, and had increased somewhat, though not very rapidly. In 1539 Francois I appointed Robert Estienne royal printer for Latin and Hebrew, and Conrad Neobar, a German from the diocese of Cologne, his printer for Greek. It was soon after this that plans were formed for the printing of Greek texts from ma.n.u.scripts in the royal library, and the preparation for this purpose of a special fount of Greek type. Neobar died from overwork the following year, and the office of royal printer in Greek was added to Robert Estienne's other honours, and with it the supervision of the new Greek type. For this Angelus Vergetius, a celebrated Greek calligrapher, had probably already made the drawings, and the cutting of the punches was entrusted to Claude Garamond. By 1544 a fount of great primer had been completed and a book printed in it, the _Praeparatio Euangelica_ of Eusebius. A smaller type, of the size known as pica, was next put in hand, and a pocket Greek Testament in s.e.xtodecimo printed with it in 1546. Lastly, a third fount, larger than either of the others, was produced and used for the text of a folio Greek Testament in 1550, the other two founts appearing in the prefatory matter and notes. These royal Greek types became very famous and served as a model to all designers of Greek characters for nearly two centuries. Technically, indeed, they are as good as they could be, showing a great advance in clearness and dignity upon those of Aldus, from which nevertheless they inherited the fatal defect of being based on the handwriting of contemporary Greek scholars, instead of on the book-hand of a n.o.bler period of Greek writing.

While the name of Robert Estienne is thus connected with these royal Greek types he was himself distinctly a Latinist, and his own personal contribution to scholars.h.i.+p was a Latin Dictionary (_Thesaurus Linguae Latinae_) published in 1532, which remained a standard work for two centuries. He published, too, as did also Simon de Colines, many very pretty little editions of Latin cla.s.sics in s.e.xtodecimo, some in italics, others in roman type, thus carrying a step further the triumphant march of the small book, which Aldus had only taken as far as octavos. Simon de Colines, while sharing in work of this kind, did not neglect other cla.s.ses of literature, and, as has already been noted, joined with Geoffroi Tory, another scholar-printer, who was also a scholar-artist, in producing some remarkable editions of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin.

This scholar-artist, Geoffroi Tory, was a native of Bourges, who had been a professor at several of the Paris colleges and was at one time proof-reader to Henri Estienne. His career as a printer began in 1522 and ended with his death in 1533, after which his business was carried on by Olivier Mallard, who married his widow. Tory printed a few scholarly books and wrote and published a curious work, to which he gave the name _Champfleury_, on the right forms and proportions of the letters of the alphabet. It is, however, by his Books of Hours that he is now chiefly remembered.

While all this good work was going on in Paris the printers at Lyon were no less busy. At the beginning of the century Aldus had been justly annoyed at the clever counterfeits of his italic octavos which were put on the market at Lyon. But in Sebastian Gryphius (a German, born in 1491 at Reutlingen) Lyon became possessed of a printer who had no need to imitate even Aldus. After printing one or two works in the four preceding years his press got into full swing in 1528 and, by the time of his death in 1556 he had issued very nearly a thousand different editions, mostly in Latin, and many of them in the dainty format in s.e.xtodecimo which Estienne and de Colines were using in Paris. In 1534 the luckless Etienne Dolet, soon to be burnt as a heretic, arrived at Lyon, and with some friendly help from Gryphius printed between 1538 and 1544 some seventy editions. In 1546 Jean de Tournes, who had been a journeyman in the office of Gryphius, started business for himself, and soon proved a worthy rival to his master. Meanwhile excellent popular work was being done by other printers, such as Francois Juste, Claude Nourry, Mace Bonhomme, and Guillaume Roville. From the old Lyonnese firm of Trechsel proceeded in 1538 two books ill.u.s.trated by Holbein (the _Dance of Death_ and _Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones_, see p.

192), and numerous other Lyonnese books were charmingly ill.u.s.trated and also, it may be added, charmingly bound, a very pretty style of trade bindings being just then in vogue.

Against the pretty bindings and vignettes and the popular books to which they were applied little or no opposition was raised, and they continued to be issued till the taste for them died out about 1580. But against all the scholarly work of the French presses the leaders of the Church took up an att.i.tude of unrelenting hostility. Foremost in this opposition, regretful that their predecessors had introduced printing into France, were the theologians of the Sorbonne, who forbade the study of Hebrew as dangerous and likely to lead to heresy, and looked with eyes almost as unfriendly on that of Greek. In 1546 (just after the iniquitous campaign against the Vaudois) Etienne Dolet was hanged on a charge of atheism, and his body cut down and burnt amid a pile of his books. In 1550, despite his position as a royal printer, Robert Estienne, who had just completed his fine folio edition of the Greek Testament, was obliged to seek safety by flying to Geneva, and a generation later Jean de Tournes the younger, of Lyon, was obliged to follow his example. The kings of France and their advisers at this period were determined to be rid of both Huguenots and Freethinkers at all costs, and French scholars.h.i.+p and French printing were both the recipients of blows from which it took them some generations to recover.

When Robert Estienne fled to Geneva, his brother, the physician, Charles, was allowed to succeed to his office at Paris, and he in turn was followed by a younger Robert, who died in 1571. Meanwhile Robert I had taken with him a set of matrices of the royal Greek types, and with these and other founts printed at Geneva until his death in 1559. His son, Henri Estienne II, then took over the business, but was of too restless and roving a disposition to conduct it with success. As a scholar he was even greater than his father, excelling in Greek as Robert had in Latin, and producing in 1572 a Greek dictionary (_Thesaurus Graecae Linguae_) which became as famous as the Latin one which Robert had published forty years earlier. Henri Estienne the younger died in 1598, but the Estienne tradition was kept up by his son Paul (1566-1627) and grandson Antoine (1592-1674), the latter bringing back into the family the office of royal printer at Paris, and printing an edition of the Septuagint.

Under the discouraging conditions of the middle of the sixteenth century French printers gradually ceased to be scholars and enthusiasts, but Christopher Plantin, a Frenchman, born in the neighbourhood of Tours in 1514, built up by his energy and industry a great business at Antwerp, the memory of which is preserved in the famous Plantin Museum. He had started at Antwerp in 1549 as a binder, but about six years later turned his attention to printing, in consequence (it is said) of an accident which disabled him for binding-work. The most famous of his books is the great Antwerp Polyglott edition of the Bible in eight volumes, published between the years 1569 and 1573. Over this he came so near to ruining himself that the Spanish Government granted him special privileges for the production of service-books by way of compensation. The sack of Antwerp by the Spaniards in 1576 was another heavy financial blow, and for a time Plantin removed to Leyden, and also for a time kept a branch business at Paris. But he ultimately returned to Antwerp, and his premises remained in the possession of the descendants of one of his sons-in-law, Joannes Moretus, until they were purchased in 1877 for 48,000 as the Musee Plantin.

After Plantin's death the branch business which he had left at Leyden was carried on by another of his sons-in-law, Franciscus Raphelengius, who printed some pretty little editions of the cla.s.sics and other good books. Plantin's own work as a printer was costly and pretentious rather than beautiful, and the bad style of his ornaments and initials exercised a powerful influence for evil on the printers of the ensuing century.

The mention of Plantin's Antwerp Polyglott may remind us that the first Polyglott edition of the Bible had been printed between 1514 and 1518 at Alcala, in Spain, under the auspices of Cardinal Ximenes. The Latin name of Alcala being Complutum, this edition is generally quoted as the Complutensian Polyglott. Among the notable features in it is the use of a singularly fine Greek type in the New Testament. Absolutely different from the Aldine and all the other Greek types imitating the rapid handwriting of the Greek scholars of the sixteenth century, this was based on the book-hand used in some early ma.n.u.script, possibly the one which the Pope had lent from the Vatican to aid Cardinal Ximenes in forming his text. It was on this Greek type that Mr. Robert Proctor, shortly before his death, based his own fount of Greek, supplying the majuscules which (with a single exception) are wanting in the original and making other improvements, but keeping closely to his model and thus producing by far the finest Greek type ever cast. This has been used to print notable editions of the _Oresteia_ and _Odyssey_, the former at the Chiswick, the latter at the Clarendon Press.