Aldus Manuitus – pioneer of printing

The type in which this sentence is written is called “italic”. Aldus Manutius the man who invented it died almost 500 years ago and his type is still in use. Today publishing a manuscript is almost instantaneous, a new best seller can be placed on Amazon and I can buy a copy minutes later. To look at the books which came off the Venitian presses of Aldus Manutius is a strange experience.

Despite advanced technological improvements, the product has not advanced that much that the centuries have added so little to the basic craft.

New World Of Scholarship

Yet to look at the cream coloured pages with the beautiful printing and delicate ornaments, and to examine the fine bindings that hold them together is to see only half the story. Manutius first opened up his printing press in 1490. The great works of Greek and Roman scholars, which had been known in the monasteries and princely libraries of Europe, were scattered and often inaccurate.

His task was to make accessible the wisdom of the ancient world through the emerging middle class of teachers, scholar-merchants, the gentleman of modest fortune, poorer clergy, as well as through courts and cloisters. The amazing aspect is he did this himself.

The Texts

First, he had to find the manuscript texts, copied faithfully over the centuries by scholars, and produce the most readable text possible.

Then he had to find craftsmen to cut the type for Greek and Roman books and the scholars to edit them, the workmen to set the type and make the paper and all the details that modern technology makes redundant. Despite all his care mistakes would appear in the texts and the inks marks and corrections are still visible in many of the texts.

Some later collectors would have the pages of his manuscripts washed and pressed to make them look cleaner, however, modern scholars have found that the ink corrections had a purpose: Manutius with pen and ink methodically went through his books copy by copy to make sure that they were letter perfect.

The world was appreciative, for it was a world that was hungry for books in a way that we cannot understand. When a new book came off the Aldine Press in Venice, scholars in Germany or France might get their copies within weeks, each one more valuable to the reader than a hundred books nowadays.

Manutius may have also been the ‘Father’ of the pocket edition. Wealthy men earlier had scribes to produce small copies of the classics, however, Manutius made them accessible to a much wider audience.

Aldine Pocket Editions

Dante, Ovid and many other writers of literature, as opposed to the works of philosophy, science and theology printed at first, were to be had in Aldine “pocket books” and it is a tribute to their inventor and to the commercial talents of the renaissance printers that soon after they first appeared, the books were flagrantly pirated by French printers at Lyons.

The marvel, for the careful eye, lies in the deceptively simple pages of print which dispaly the creative integrity of one man who helped to form the modern world.

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