A Companion to the History of the Book (40 page)

Printing in English is distinct from the general pattern. Taken together, the three main printers of the period 1476–1500 (William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and Richard Pynson) published much more in English than in other languages, and their English books were unambiguously destined for a lay readership. William Caxton created this market. He combined editions of the English literary canon (Chaucer, Lydgate, Gower) with the publication of a large number of translations from French, most of them by himself. Uniquely, he added prologues and epilogues to these texts, explaining to readers his choices. His oeuvre in prose also includes his substantial extensions of existing chronicles which he brought up to date to recent times. Caxton’s fame as England’s first printer obscures the fact that he is one of the few contemporary authors to appear in print in a vernacular language, and who addressed his readers directly, in a voice that is still capable of speaking to us.

Initially, Caxton’s preference was for literary and historical works, but with the translation of the
Golden Legend,
a massive collection of saints’ lives probably published early in 1484, he began to concentrate on devotional texts. After his death in 1492, his immediate successor, Wynkyn de Worde, continued to concentrate on devotional works, while Richard Pynson’s reprints from Caxton included
The Canterbury Tales.
A few years later, the roles reversed, and de Worde reprinted some of Caxton’s literary publications, including
The Canterbury Tales,
but his approach was more critical than Pynson’s had been, and he initiated rigorous revisions (BMC xi: 49–50).

De Worde’s revision of
The Canterbury Tales,
based on the comparison of several manuscript sources (BMC xi: 214–16; Tokunaga 2006), is a good example of a remarkable phenomenon that began to develop as an effect of the much-expanded availability of textual sources, which is in direct contradiction to what must have appeared initially to be the major advantage of the multiplication of texts in print. A printed version might indeed be accepted as a standard and be copied in subsequent editions without being subjected to further critical assessment. However, multiplying a text in many copies might initiate a critical process. It frequently happened that on publication in print a text was compared with other sources and improved in later editions, sometimes on the grounds of greater completeness, but also by the introduction of variant readings, by conjecture, through collation with manuscripts, or in due course with other printed editions with versions from independent sources. The process can be observed from the very first years of printing, and can be demonstrated particularly well in the successive editions of
The Canterbury Tales.
It accelerated to become in the sixteenth century the basis for the critical assessment of the complete European literary heritage from classical times onward. Its immediate impact on religion and society was never felt more dramatically than in the sixteenth century, but in essence the process continues to the present day.

The Trade in Printed Books

The production of printed books soon created problems of marketing. As we have seen, a manuscript text, once set in type and printed, would spawn hundreds of copies. Along with the printing press, the already existing book trade had to be reinvented. The first printers in Rome, the partnership of Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, were shocked to discover that between 1467 and 1472 they had produced a warehouse full of printed books (they counted over 12,000 volumes) that they found hard to sell. They printed an appeal for help addressed to the pope, possibly also serving as an advertisement for their wares (BMC iv: 15). Selling books, printers discovered, takes as much ingenuity as printing them.

Only gradually, through owner’s inscriptions, and the study of decoration and bindings, are we beginning to grasp the complexity of the early book trade. The illumination of copies of Gutenberg’s great Latin Bible shows that within a short time it was decorated by artists in cities as far apart as Mainz, Leipzig, Vienna, Lübeck, Bruges, and London (Kõnig 1991). The major printers shared risks with distant colleagues, and operated in an international world through wholesale arrangements, resulting in the distribution of books over a wide area. Commonly, books eventually reached stationers in sheets (“in albis”), and could be decorated and bound according to customers’ wishes. But through an entrepôt system (for example in Mainz and Louvain) an agent might receive copies of books in sheets, to have them decorated and bound before they were sold on to markets to which he had access.

In England, London’s St. Paul’s Churchyard was a center for the retail trade from early in the fifteenth century on, as was Cat Street in Oxford, but Caxton’s shop in Westminster was new, conveniently situated near the royal court and parliament (BMC xi: 8–9). Less documented is the role of fairs in England, although some ownership inscriptions mention Stourbridge, but no inscription is known to record the fact that a book was bought from a peddler, although this must have happened quite often.

References and Further Reading

Agüera y Arcas, B. (2003) “Temporary Matrices and Elemental Punches in Gutenberg’s DK Type.” In K. Jensen (ed.),
Incunabula and their Readers,
pp. 1–12. London: British Library

Armstrong, E. (1990)
Before Copyright: The French Book-privilege System 1498–1526.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baker, J. H. (1999) “The Books of the Common Law.” In L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.),
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,
vol. III:
1400–1557,
pp. 411–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barnard, J. and McKenzie, D. F., with Bell, M. (eds.) (2002)
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,
vol. IV:
1557–1695.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bechtel, G. (1992)
Gutenberg et l’invention de l’imprimerie.
Paris: Fayard.

BMC (1908–2007)
Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Museum/British Library,
vols, i–ix: London: British Museum; vols, x, xii: London: British Library; vols, xi, xiii:’t Goy-Houten: HES & De Graaf

Christianson, C. Paul (1999) “The Rise of the London Book-trade.” In L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.),
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,
vol. III:
1400–1557,
pp. 128–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Corsten, S. (1987) “Universities and Early Printing.” In L. Hellinga and J. Goldfinch (eds.),
Bibliography and the Study of 15th-century Civilisation,
pp. 83–123. London: British Library

Davies, M. (1996)
The Gutenberg Bible.
London: British Library

Ford, Margaret L. (1999) “Importation of Printed Books into England and Scotland” and “Private Ownership of Printed Books.” In L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.),
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,
vol. III:
1400–1557,
pp. 179–204 and 205–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gaskell, P. (1972)
A New Introduction to Bibliography.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Goldschmidt, E. P. (1955)
The First Cambridge Press in its European Setting.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hellinga, L. (1997) “Press and Text in the First Decades of Printing.” In
Libri, Tipografi, Biblio-teche,
pp. 1–23. Istituto di Biblioteconomia e Paleografia, Università degli Studi, Parma. Florence: Leo S. Olschki.

— (1999) “Printing.” In L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.),
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,
vol. III:
1400–1557,
pp. 65–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

— (2003) “Nicolas Jenson et les débuts de l’imprimerie à Mayence.”
Revue française d’histoire du livre,
118–21: 25–53.

— and Trapp, J. B. (eds.) (1999)
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,
vol. III:
1400–1557.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kapr, A. (1996)
Johann Gutenberg: The Man and his Invention,
trans. D. Martin. Aldershot: Scolar.

Kõnig, E. (1991) “New Perspectives on the History of Mainz Printing.” In S. L. Hindman (ed.),
Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books circa 1450–1520,
pp. 143–73. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Needham, P. (1999) “The Customs Rolls as Documents for the Printed-book Trade in England.” In L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.),
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,
vol. III:
1400–1557,
pp. 148–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nieto, P. (2003) “Géographie des impressions européennes du XVe siècle.”
Revue française d’histoire du livre,
118–21: 125–73.

Reske, C. (2000)
The Production of Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Roberts, Julian (2002) “The Latin Trade.” In J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, with M. Bell (eds.) (2002)
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,
vol. IV:
1557–1695,
pp. 141–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tokunaga, S. (2006) “The Textual Transmission of
The Canterbury Tales:
The Case of Wynkyn de Worde.” Unpublished PhD thesis, Keio University, Tokyo.

Veyrin-Forrer, J. (1987) “Aux origines de l’imprimerie française: l’atelier de la Sorbonne et ses mécènes (1470–1473).” In
La lettre et le texte,
pp. 161–87. Paris: L’École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles.

16

The Book Trade Comes of Age: The Sixteenth Century

David J. Shaw

Incunables and Post-incunables: Continuity and Innovation

Although it has been traditional among book-collectors and printing historians to distinguish the fifteenth century with its own label of “incunable” (and to call the years 1501–40 the “post-incunable” period), the defining date of December 31, 1500 has no real importance in terms of the technologies used nor in the appearance of the books produced. However, there is no doubt that the typical book of 1530 looked significantly more modern than the typical book of 1490. The changes were, however, gradual and regional and, even by 1600, the books produced in most countries in Europe retained a recognizable national appearance in typography or in the layout of text as well as in the styles of bindings found on individual copies.

The Italian book had a stylistic reputation among purchasers, collectors, and book-trade personnel which encouraged the spread of a more “modern” appearance: increasing use of roman (and italic) type, instead of Gothic; greater use of white space and geometrical patterns in page layout (centered text, triangular and other shapes); and illustrations in a more “classical” style, with a clean black-on-white-ground appearance.

Although the invention of printing is commonly thought of as a “revolution,” it is clear that the change was in the volume of material available for purchase, not in the nature of the texts offered. Italian printers in the 1470s over-supplied the market with new Humanist books and quickly reverted to supplying traditional texts, especially for the professional university-educated market: law, theology, medicine, as well as more basic school and college texts. Rabelais was still complaining in the 1530s of the durability of the old medieval educational texts: “Don Philippe des Marays, Viceroy of Papeligosse . . . answered that it was better for the boy to learn nothing than to study such books under such masters. For their learning was mere stupidity, and their wisdom like an empty glove; it bastardised good and noble minds and corrupted the flower of youth” (Rabelais 1955: 71).

Older texts gained a wider currency thanks to printing (Goldschmidt 1943). Study of the great scholars of the Middle Ages, theologians and lawyers in particular, was greatly facilitated by the availability of printed texts of their works and of commentaries on them. Typically produced in very large folio volumes, this aspect of the industry must have been as welcome to the printers as it was to students who had access to easily consultable copies of basic texts, either in their own possession or in the growing libraries of the universities and religious houses of Europe.

Parish clergy and ordinary lay people were also catered for by the growth of printing. In these cases, the texts tended to be smaller and cheaper. Works by (or attributed to) famous names such as St. Bonaventura or anonymous texts such as the
Dialogus linguae et ventris
(Dialogue of the Tongue and the Stomach) received an extra burst of life into the mid-sixteenth century. One of the staples of religious printing in many centers was the production of Books of Hours for lay people to use in their devotions. Each diocese had its own variety until the Council of Trent (1545–63) attempted to impose a standard set of liturgical texts such as the Tridentine Missal (1570), an attempt that was not entirely successful. Printers in Paris, for example, were producing several dozen editions a year of Books of Hours with woodcut illustrations in the 1520s, as well as other liturgical texts for churches and religious houses, such as breviaries and missals. Several centers specialized in the production of Bibles.

Vernacular literature also received a new lease of life through the printing press. The Arthurian legends, which had been immensely popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were modernized by translation into modern prose versions. These romances of chivalry were often very large books, designed at first for wealthy nobles or middle-class purchasers, but there were also “pot-boiler” versions of medieval tales which were produced in editions of eight or twelve leaves for a more popular market by specialist firms such as the Trepperel and Lotrian families in Paris. In the mid-century, a new vogue for this sort of literature arose with the creation of a range of new works such as the
Orlando furioso
and
Amadis de Gaule,
which unhinged poor Don Quixote.

Paradoxically, the avant-garde cultural craze of sixteenth-century Europe was the revival or “renaissance” of the literature of ancient Greece and, especially, ancient Rome. Colleges and “grammar” schools set up to educate boys for the professions and the universities saw their syllabuses captured by “Humanists” who taught the ancient languages and their culture. The publishing industry benefited immensely, first of all in Italy where the movement began, and then across the whole of Europe. New grammar books and other teaching aids were needed and suitable editions of the basic texts were produced in ever-increasing quantities. Popular Latin school authors, such as the poets Virgil, Terence, and Ovid or the prose writers Cicero and Caesar, made the fortunes of printers like Sebastian Gryphius in Lyon or the Wechel family in Paris and then in Frankfurt later in the century. Scholars such as Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) or William Lily (c.1466–1522) wrote grammar books, readers, and reference works. Erasmus’s
Adagia
was a collection of classical proverbs each accompanied by an explanatory essay; his
Colloquia
provided specimen dialogues to help pupils learn to speak a good classical Latin. These and similar texts were printed in countless editions across Europe through the century and beyond, with print-runs as high as a thousand copies even at the start of the century.

The emphasis of this “Humanist” education was philological: a strong bias toward the study of the languages and literatures of the classical world. A related category of texts (one in which Erasmus also specialized) was the revival of the study of the early Church Fathers, especially those of the Greek Church, and also the study of the original languages of the Bible: Hebrew and Greek. These topics were looked on with suspicion at first by the ecclesiastical authorities, but gradually became part of the mainstream of intellectual activity in the Catholic as well as the Protestant traditions. Again, the publishers sought to meet a need with the provision of newly researched editions of the relevant texts, not always a profitable venture, as these were typically very large folio texts with extensive commentaries. Print-runs for these more learned works would inevitably be smaller.

So far as we know, the technology of printing was essentially unchanged from that of the incunable period but its practitioners were tending to specialize more: punch-cutting and type-founding in particular, and also bookbinding in the larger centers; papermaking and distribution had always tended to be in the hands of separate tradesmen. The physical appearance of texts on the page did undergo changes which gradually gave the printed book a more modern and less medieval appearance. One of the main developments was the emergence of the title page, partly for practical reasons to protect the opening page of the text from wear and tear, partly for advertising reasons: the title of the book and the name and location of its producer could be displayed prominently on this otherwise blank first page (Smith 2000). Another development of the modern page layout was the introduction of page numbers, which did not really become common until the early sixteenth century. This went hand in hand with the development of indexes in scholarly works. without a page number, an index reference or a list of errata is very difficult to use.

One consequence of the ever-increasing growth of the consumer market for printed materials was pressure for a reduction in prices. The costs of producing an edition of a printed book depend on three factors: fixed overheads (accommodation, investment in equipment), the cost of labor, and the cost of paper. Of these, the greatest area of flexibility was in reducing the page size and type size of the book so that the same amount of text could be fitted onto fewer sheets of paper. This had the effect of making the large formats (folio and quarto) less popular and the small formats (octavo and smaller) much more common. The producers of classical texts, for example, turned away from large format books with text accompanied by multiple commentaries to small-format editions with either plain text or texts with simple marginal notes intended for the wider school and college markets. In 1565, the Antwerp printer Christophe Plantin produced 1,250 copies of the satires of Juvenal and Persius in octavo format (8°) which needed ten sheets; the following year he produced 1,600 copies in the smaller “sixteenmo” format (16°) occupying six sheets; twenty years later, his Leiden office issued an even smaller 24° edition which took up only two and a half sheets.

Illustrations were found in the earliest days of printing. The sixteenth century saw the development of woodcut and copper-engraved illustrations in a wide range of books, scientific, religious, and popular. There was also a spread in popularity of the use of sets of ornamental initials to decorate the starts of chapters, woodcut at first and later produced in type metal. These were accompanied by other ornamental elements: headbands and tail pieces and the development of fleurons, small squares of type with a pattern which could be assembled to make decorative title-page borders and similar ornamental features.

Scholar Printers

During the course of the sixteenth century, hundreds of printers exercised their trade in towns and cities across Europe, their names largely unknown except to specialists in historical bibliography. In fact, the printers increasingly declined in importance in the book trade compared with the bookseller–publishers. In London, for example, it was the booksellers who became dominant in the Stationers’ Company. Some printers, however, achieved a celebrity in their day which they have never lost, partly because of their technical and commercial abilities but also because of their own scholarly attainments or those of the circle of collaborators they attracted. Some created family dynasties, such as Manuzio, Estienne, and Plantin.

Aldo Manuzio (in Latin, Aldus Manutius, c.1449–1515) was already known in the 1490s as an innovator in the design of his Roman and Greek types and the quality of scholarship in his editions of classical texts. In the sixteenth century, he launched a series of small-format editions of classical texts printed in the very first italic type, designed by Francesco Griffo. These innovations in format and type were quickly copied and became fashionable throughout Europe. The celebrated French book-collector Jean Grolier (1479–1565) owned several copies of many of Aldus’s pocket classics, often with elaborate ornamental bindings.

Aldus’s trend-setting work extended beyond the vogue for classical texts. He also produced similar editions of Italian literary texts which had themselves achieved classical status by this time: an edition of Petrarch’s
Canzoniere
(love sonnets) had been prepared for publication in 1501 by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), humanist scholar and later a cardinal, who went on to produce an edition of Dante’s
Divina commedia
in 1502. Aldus’s business was carried on after his death by his father-in-law Andrea Torresano (1451–1529) and his sons and eventually by Aldus’s own son, Paolo Manuzio (1512–74), and a grandson, also called Aldus Manutius (1547–97).

Five generations of the Estienne family were engaged in printing and bookselling in Paris and Geneva in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Counting alliances by marriage, at least thirteen members of the family were engaged in the book trade, many of them using the emblem of the olive tree as their device. The founder, Henri Estienne (known as “Stephanus” in Latin), worked in Paris from 1502 until his death in 1520, producing scholarly editions of classical and philosophical texts for the university market, edited by the leading intellectuals of the day, especially Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples. His son Robert (1503–59) was more famous still, as a scholar, dictionary-maker, and editor of classical texts, as well as a printer. His interests in the texts of the Hebrew and Greek Bible led him into disfavor with the Catholic religious authorities in Paris. In 1551, he transferred to Calvinist Geneva to be able to carry on this work. Several other members of the family were also important scholars and authors as well as printers or publishers, including Robert’s son, Henri Estienne the younger (1531–98), who took over the running of the Geneva office where he published his monumental Greek dictionary, the
Thesaurus Graecae linguae
(1572).

Although Christophe Plantin (1520?–89) was French, it was in Antwerp that he established what was to become one of the largest printing shops of the whole of sixteenth-century Europe, employing 150 men and sixteen presses at the height of his career. No scholar himself, he was nevertheless the friend and business partner of many of the greatest names of the second half of the century, classicists such as Justus Lipsius, artists (his grandson commissioned family portraits from Rubens), churchmen like Benito Arias Montano, and statesmen including King Philip II of Spain. The printing house which he established “at the sign of the golden compasses” and which he left to his son-in-law and business partner Jan Moerentorf (Moretus) still stands today in the Friday-Market in Antwerp. It passed through generations of the Moretus family until it was bequeathed to the city of Antwerp as a museum of printing in 1876. Plantin was a highly successful international businessman with offices or agents in all the major European capitals. His enthusiasm for typography has left a double legacy in the quality of the volumes that he produced and in the scope and importance of the historical collections of typographical materials preserved in the Plantin—Moretus Museum.

Many other successful dynasties of printers or publishers could be cited from this period but the emphasis on famous names whose works are sought after by book-collectors to this day distorts the true picture of the growth of the book trade in the sixteenth century. The expansion in the demand for printed books was met, not by the output of the presses of these famous names, but by a much greater army of invisible artisans: small firms, with their journeymen and apprentices, helped by family members, turning out the less well-produced, less well-considered mass of printed material that survives from the period.