Aldus and including the Estiennes and the Didots. And there are the
typecutter-printers who combined letter-founding and printing--Nicolas
Jenson, Giambattista Bodoni, John Baskerville, as well as the
names equally brilliant in printing history of those who devoted
themselves to founding--Claude Garamond, William Caslon and the
Fourniers. A general haze surrounds the subject of the contribution
of less well-known type-cutters to printing. Although the use of a
distinguished type may be one of the chief reasons for the printer's
success, compare the fame of the printer Aldus with that of his type
designer, Francesco da Bologna, of John Bell with that of Richard
Austin, of Thomas Bensley with that of Vincent Figgins, of Bulmer with
William Martin, of Elzevir with Christoffel van Dyck, of François
Ambroise Didot with that of Waflard. On the subject of the share which
these printers had in suggesting the nature of the type to the men
who cut it, typographical writers are almost consistently inexplicit,
although we do know that William Martin brought his types with him
when he started work for Bulmer. Even Updike, who gives credit to
the type designer and cutter wherever he is known, says, "At first
the best printers were often type-founders too, although Garamond
merely (_sic!_) cut and cast type for the use of others." Binders and
papermen, ink-makers and machinery manufacturers have always had an
affectionate and proprietary air about printing. Rather than try to
define "printer" strictly, it may be truer to say that printers are an
adjectival lot, and that printing can honorably be a very inclusive
term, but that we might have a new printing terminology which would
better define the various contributions.
* * * * *
What was happening in the world about the year 1500 when Aldus
Manutius[23] had his great printing shop in Venice working at its peak?
Columbus had made several voyages, and the Portuguese had been around
the tip of Africa although Magellan had not yet sailed around the
world. Leonardo da Vinci had left Milan for political reasons, and was
working in Venice, as was Giovanni Bellini and his pupils Titian and
Giorgione. Northern Italy was the scene of much brawling between rival
princes, with Emperor Maximilian I stepping in now and then to make
things worse. The battles were nuisances to Aldus, for they interfered
with the production and distribution of his books. I do not know how
much he knew about the geographical discoveries of his time, but we can
be sure that a man of his cultivation knew about the great painting and
sculpture being done. Ralph Roeder says of this time that its "triumphs
are preserved in art, its reverses in its spiritual story, and both are
the result of the same cause--its supreme vitality."
It is one more indication of that vitality that Aldus at the age of
forty embarked on a project which was to bring about a tremendous
enlargement of the conception of the purpose of books. Many printers
in history have drifted into printing or its allied trades by chance,
but there seems to be no doubt that Aldus knew exactly what he was
doing all the time. He was a man who knew what he wanted. He had been
a scholar and tutor to Alberto and Lionello Pio, princes of Carpi,
when he first saw printed books and realized what could be done to
make classical manuscripts generally available. With the aid of the
Pio family he went to Venice, which, since the fall of Constantinople,
had been the richest repository of manuscripts and a residence of
Greek scholars. In order to have reference books available for his
proof-readers and editors, he first printed a Greek dictionary and a
Greek grammar and himself prepared a Greek-Latin dictionary. He gave
Venice a university when he started the New Academy of Venice. For his
press he hired the finest scholars of the day--Bembo and Reuchlin,
Musurus and Erasmus. We, in the twentieth century, have a tendency to
think of scholars as removed from the affairs of life. Aldus was a
scholar who was also in the midst of life, because scholarship was an
important affair in the world of Renaissance man. He must have been a
true cosmopolitan as well, commanding, as he did, the friendship of men
as different as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Jean Grolier of France, from
whom he had a commission to print special copies of his books on vellum.
The 1500's were a time of religious bickerings and of religious wars,
of Henry the VIII's break with Rome, of the German wars following the
death of Martin Luther, and the Inquisition in Spain. In the early part
of the century there was working at Lyons, which was then second only
to Paris as a printing center in France, a young scholar and printer
named Etienne Dolet.[24] There is a story that he was the illegitimate
son of Francis I, but at any rate he came of a wealthy family, having
been to Venice as secretary to the French Ambassador and to Toulouse
to study law. By the time he was twenty-seven he had published a
Latin Dictionary which was "one of the most important contributions
to classical scholarship in the century" and was given a license by
Francis I providing that Dolet might print for ten years any books
written or supervised by him. His great range of taste and interests
may be judged by the fact that he printed the New Testament in Latin
and Rabelais in French.
He had met Rabelais when he first went to Lyons to work under
Sebastian Gryphius as proof-reader, and there gained his practical
knowledge of printing under the foreman, Jean de Tournes. E. D.
Christie, Dolet's biographer, says that Dolet, arriving in Lyons
with a fever, may have been taken directly to Rabelais, who was at
that time practising medicine, with the position of Physician to the
Great Hospital. Christie also thinks it possible that Dolet may have
seen Rabelais perform a dissection on a man's body ten years before
Vesalius. Everything Dolet did shows him to have been a man with
lively fearless intellect and no talent for playing safe and keeping
out of trouble. He spent several terms in jail for lack of orthodoxy
on religious questions, was pardoned by Francis I for killing a man,
and was denounced by Rabelais for printing an unexpurgated edition of
_Pantagruel_ after Rabelais had fixed it up to suit the Sorbonne.
At Lyons in the months of April and May, 1539, there occurred the first
large organized printers' strike. It was no wonder, for Updike says
that it was not unusual for the printers' day to begin at two in the
morning and last until eight or nine at night. The workmen said that the
masters did not supply sufficient food, that wages had been reduced,
that there were too many compulsory holidays. The Seneschal of Lyons
was empowered to meet a committee of journeymen and one of masters; at
this conference rules were drawn up. But the trouble spread to Paris,
and as a result of arbitration there, the working day was set from five
in the morning till eight at night. Then there was a flare-up at Lyons
again because the master printers threatened to move away; this was
some years in settlement.
Of all the master printers of Lyons, the only one who sided with
the strikers was Dolet. This was held against him later when he was
imprisoned on a charge of atheism, tortured, hanged and finally
burned on his thirty-seventh birthday. (See _Chronology of Books and
Printing_.) On his way to his death he made a Latin pun on his name. If
we speak of him as a man of the world, the accent is on man.
It is said that it was this event--the burning of Dolet--which
decided Christopher Plantin[25] to leave France in 1548 for Antwerp,
though Plantin never exhibited the uncompromising attitude of Dolet;
rather he showed a business toughness and adaptability which enabled
him to survive and stay in this world, which was no small feat for
a printer in the sixteenth century. It was a time when empires and
ideologies were in tremendous conflict; the period of the German
religious wars following the death of Martin Luther; of Spain and
England in unrelenting struggle for control of the sea, culminating
in the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Antwerp itself was
a focal point of disorder after Philip II sent the Duke of Alba to
subdue the Netherlanders. Plantin had built up a good printing and
publishing business when, in 1562, it was liquidated because of his
alleged unorthodoxy. Within a few years he had recovered to the extent
that he was made Printer to the King of Spain, from whom he received
assurances of help on his Polyglot Bible. Again, in the sack of Antwerp
by Spanish soldiers in 1576 his business was all but ruined; he went
to Leyden for a few years, but returned to finish his days at Antwerp.
To a man living in those times, the issues must have seemed even more
confused and difficult than ours do now. Recent investigations indicate
that Plantin belonged to a sect of heretics for which he printed books
secretly, while also doing books for the church.
Another sixteenth-century printer who could hardly be oblivious to
the events of his time--he was so knocked about by them--was Robert
Estienne.[26] Even though he was at one time Royal Printer, liked and
respected by Francis I, he sometimes had to seek the sanctuary of the
King's court to escape the King's censors. Robert must have been a man
of stature, for he published his _New Testament_ in defiance of the
Sorbonne, and only after Francis I died did he leave Paris for Geneva.
He was a believer in one of the springs of Renaissance thought--that
through scholarship it is possible to come to the truth, and through
printing all men may recognize and know the truth.
It would be possible for a man of the world to be so without ever
stirring from the town of his birth, yet oftener than not the man
with breadth of interest is a cosmopolitan and a traveller. Such
cosmopolitans were fourteen members of the Elzevir[27] family, who,
over a period of one hundred and thirty years, engaged in printing and
selling small books chiefly intended for poor scholars. This Dutch
family of practical internationalists established their bookshops and
printing offices in nearly every large city on the continent, from
Denmark to Italy, printing their books in Latin and Greek, French and
Arabic, on subjects ranging from medicine to political science. All
this in spite of the Thirty Years' War, which was to bring about the
decline of the artificial internationalism of the Hapsburgs and the
Holy Roman Empire, and in spite of similar disturbances before and
after.
* * * * *
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the geographical
boundaries of printing were extended vastly outside of Europe. The
colonization of North and South America was going forward. The first
press in America had been established at Mexico City in 1539 by agents
of Kromberger of Seville. European printing was carried to India in
1561, to China in 1589, and to Japan in 1591. The first printing was
done in Russia in 1563.
Credit for doing the first printing in the American colonies,
_The Freeman's Oath_, was once given to Stephen Daye, is sometimes
latterly given to his young son, Matthew Daye. Were they more than
mechanic, compositor and pressman? Who chose the copy, proofread it,
set policies, pushed the work along? Possibly some of the founders of
the new Harvard College, or possibly Mrs. Glover, the widow of the
man who originated the idea of the press. She was probably a woman of
education, since she settled in Cambridge to be near the new college
and later married the President, Henry Dunster. She undoubtedly shared
her first husband's independent views--he had been suspended from
his parsonage in Surrey because of his nonconformity; she might have
picked _The Freeman's Oath_ for the first copy. She may have been
more of a printer and more of a woman of the world than the fragments
of knowledge which we have about her disclose.... Whoever guided the
destiny of the first press, it was a person not completely confined by
dogma, for the books included almanacs, law books and college thesis
lists, as is pointed out by Carl Purington Rollins, himself perhaps our
best example of a modern fine printer conscious of what is going on
around him.
* * * * *
During the late 1700's the Industrial Revolution began, but its
implications were not guessed by artisan or statesman, and the
best printers were still in the age of elegance. Baskerville was
businessman, eccentric, free-thinker, but his printing, as much as that
of Bodoni who was employed by the Duke of Parma, was regal.
Probably Horace Walpole,[28] more than any other printer, felt that
the world was his house, in which he could move about freely from
room to room, always at ease. He had the wit and manners to be an
ornament to French salons, the originality to introduce a new brand of
literature in his _Castle of Otranto_--the forerunner of our mystery
novel of today, the personal force to influence the trend of English
architecture with his "little Gothic castle" at Strawberry Hill in
Twickenham. In one of his letters to the artist Richard Bentley he
says that he can't resist going to fires, and there is something of
this spirit in his activities. The collector W. S. Lewis says, "He was
not only, in his own word, a 'gazetteer' but the historian of English
painting and gardening, an essayist, poet, novelist, pamphleteer,
dramatist, printer, antiquarian, and _arbiter elegantiarum_ and in the
modern sense and phrase a 'debunker' of historical figures.... It was
his main purpose in life to be the official historian of his time."
Although he had a seat in Parliament, he paid little attention to the
nation's business. He represented those parts of life in the eighteenth
century which had natured and were drawing to a close, as Fielding
and Goldsmith, the American Revolution and the French Revolution
represented things to come. Printing being one of his minor activities,
he is of more interest as a human being than as a craftsman.
If Walpole was a man of the world and man of letters, John Bell[29]
was man of the world and man of business. During a lifetime of
eighty-six years he was, as Stanley Morison pictures him, book-seller,
printer, publisher, type-founder and journalist. Like a lesser
Franklin--he had not Franklin's scientific interest, integrity, or
vision--he was endowed with the ability to grasp the salient facts of a
trade or profession, and a wealth of exuberant interest in life around
him. At the beginning of his career as a book-seller, he published a
sort of early version of Wilson's _Cumulative Book Index_, a list of
current books for the use of the trade. As type-founder (and introducer
of the short "s") he employed the talent of the punch cutter Richard
Austin to produce the first English "modern" type. In addition to a
successful fashion magazine, he published at different times four
newspapers. At one time he even made himself a war correspondent, when
he visited the British Army then fighting the French Revolutionaries in
Flanders. He reported the action at Ypres, made a march with the troops
from Courtrai to Tournai and pursued his object of finding "active and
well-informed persons in different parts of the continent" who would
act as regular correspondents for his paper, _The Oracle_. The books
he published included law books, Shakespeare, a series of the poets of
Great Britain; he engaged members of the Royal Academy to illustrate
the plays of a series called _The British Theatre_ and hired the best
engravers of the day to copy the paintings. He knew the literary men of
the day--Sheridan wrote for his _World_--and even had a balloonist for
a friend--Lunardi, who made the first ascent in London. Compared to his
contemporary Bulmer, who could be called a printer's printer, Bell was
a promoter whose medium was printing.
Of all the Didots, and they seem to have been able men, Firmin
Didot[30] is of most interest to us. He taught many of the printers
of Greece out of sympathy for the cause of Greek independence, the
same for which Byron died. He wrote plays, translated classics, and
after he retired from business he entered the Chamber of Deputies;
he learned Spanish at the age of sixty-three. Desmond Flower says,
in writing of him, "Printing is a curious and perhaps unsatisfactory
hybrid between a profession and an art; the men who have caught the
sense of it most successfully have been intelligent people who could
see it whole--scholar-printer-publishers--for whom some other rivers
flowed beyond the simple floods of printing ink." Perhaps when Mr.
Flower wrote this he had forgotten how "tacky" printing ink is, but his
meaning is a large part of what I am trying to say.
* * * * *
The question of what world one chooses to recognize--that of courts
and salons or of slums--arises in connection with the great printer of
the nineteenth century, William Morris.[31] He saw what was happening
as a result of machinery and large industry, and he did not like it.
He must have seen it very plainly in order to revolt against it so
strongly. His printing period was the last in his life, following
the chintzes, stained glass windows, tapestries, rugs and furniture.
He felt that people would be better people if they made and owned
beautiful things, and he also saw, like his contemporary, Karl Marx,
that the economic structure would have to be changed before the best
qualities in people could operate, though he was not willing to follow
Marx in his methods. When we think of the William Morris who printed
the Kelmscott _Chaucer_, we do not always remember the William Morris
who stood in Hyde Park near the Marble Arch talking to the street
crowds about socialism, wondering if the police were coming; who for
years travelled about speaking in a thousand stuffy halls in England,
Ireland and Scotland. When he was old, tears would come to his eyes
when the misery of the poor was mentioned. It is easy to say that his
socialism was vague and his desire to return to the methods of the
thirteenth century unrealistic, but considering the sincerity of his
motives and the breadth of his interests, I think that we must say that
he was not so much a man of this world as a man of a better world.
* * * * *
Perhaps we must return to America to find the printer who has made
the greatest contribution to political history. We can hardly detail
here the cosmopolitan accomplishments of Benjamin Franklin. We might
rather examine what right we have to call him a printer, in view of the
magnitude of his other accomplishments. He liked to think of himself as
a printer, and started his will with the words, "I, Benjamin Franklin,
printer." Once when he visited the establishment of the Didots in
France he stopped at a hand press and pulled a few proofs. When the
workman exclaimed at his dexterity he said, "Do not be surprised.
Printing is my real trade." Wherever he went in England or France he
corresponded with printers and visited their establishments. We know
about his private press at Passy and about his wholesome influence on
American printing. Carl Van Doren, in his biography of Franklin, says
that when he died the printers of Philadelphia walked in his funeral
procession and that the printers of Paris gathered to honor him,
listened to a eulogy by one of them while others set it in type as fast
as it was delivered and distributed printed copies as souvenirs. If
then we can claim him as a printer, we can feel sure that the man who
helped draft the Declaration of Independence, who was sent to negotiate
the peace and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention was, more
than any other printer, a man of the world.
* * * * *
It could hardly be maintained that being connected with printing makes
one a man of the world. It might even be argued and proved by examples
past and present that preoccupation with the problems of the craft is
a narrowing influence. Since most of the circumstances of our lives
are arranged for us when we are born, it is possible to travel through
life as on a conveyor belt, having things done to us along the way, and
this can be as true of a fine printer as of a bank president. Each can
go through life utterly ignorant of the economic and mental processes
that bring food to his table and send his son to the wars. It was
always a question, now more than ever critical, what part of a man's
life must be given to being a citizen against the claims of livelihood,
philosophy, family and amusement. The events of the past few years have
dramatized the dilemma. Printing has helped bring us to this place in
history. And so, although we cannot condemn a good craftsman because he
is interested in nothing except shop talk, we might say that printers
who are also men of the world realize that they are working in a bigger
shop.
[Illustration: WOOD ENGRAVING BY REYNOLDS STONE, 1937.]
COMPOSED IN GRANJON TYPES
FOOTNOTES:
[22] Johann Gutenberg (c. 1397-1468). Gutenberg is considered the
effective inventor of printing, but his biography is written darkly
only in the records of the law courts to which he was constantly
summoned on money matters. His was a complex of inventions: he not
only cast type in single pieces, but devised a chase to hold it,
mixed suitable ink and perfected a technique for register and good
impression, with the result that the first printing remains among the
best.
[23] Aldus Manutius (1450-1515). Aldus' contributions to
printing--small capitals, the first Italic, the popularization of the
small type page--centered about his wish to help scholars. He wrote
to a friend: "We send these Satires to you, my dear Scipio, that they
may through their brevity become once more your intimate friends, as
they were formerly during your stay at Rome as a young man, when you
possessed them as thoroughly in your memory as your own fingers and
fingernails."
[24] Etienne Dolet (1509-1546). Dolet belongs with the great
scholar-printers Aldus Manutius and Robert Estienne, although he did
not live long enough to compare with them in volume of work. His career
of collision with the authority of the church, the state and other
printers terminated when he was tortured, hanged and burned on his
thirty-seventh birthday.
[25] Christopher Plantin (1514-1589). Plantin, a Frenchman who migrated
to Belgium, printed in many languages, using fonts by the best
contemporary type-cutters; he undertook work for the King of Spain and
the City of Antwerp, which honored him in death by burying him in its
cathedral, with the inscription "... king of typography."
[26] Robert Estienne (c. 1503-1559). In Robert Estienne, as in Aldus
and Dolet, the scholar and printer combined to produce tools for
humanism: dictionaries, lexicons, grammars, editions of the classics.
On his death his son Henri Estienne, grandson of the first Henri,
augmented the family tradition of scholarly publishing, though he never
surpassed the books of his father and grandfather in typographical
brilliance.
[27] Louis Elzevir (1540-1617). About one hundred and thirty years
after the invention of printing, Louis Elzevir became the first
publisher in the modern sense; not primarily a scholar or craftsman,
but a businessman who undertook the risk of production and distribution
of quantities of books for a variety of readers throughout Europe.
[28] Horace Walpole (1717-1797). Walpole is the great example of
the gentleman-amateur in printing. His fame as a printer has been
bolstered by his renown in other fields, especially in literature and
architecture.
[29] John Bell (1749-1831). Bell was a journalist and impresario in
printing whose enterprises ranged from publishing fashion magazines
to sets of Shakespeare. If he did not entirely realize the ambition
announced when he started his foundry--"... I am not without hopes of
raising my fame in this pursuit beyond the reach of competition in any
country whatever"--the type which bears his name remains today his best
memorial.
[30] Firmin Didot (1764-1836). The Didot family illustrates again that
printing ink seems to linger in the blood longer in France than in
other countries; of the Didots, Firmin stands out as a man who loved
his profession and constantly looked beyond it.
[31] William Morris (1834-1896). William Morris was a man who looked
backward in the crafts and forward in human relations, yet had a full
life in the world of his own time. As a printer he had great influence,
not all good.
[Illustration]ANNE LYON HAIGHT[Illustration]
_Are Women the Natural Enemies of Books?_
From _Bookmaking on the Distaff Side_ by Anne Lyon Haight. Copyright
1937 by the author and reprinted by her permission.