CHAPTER SEVEN, The Great Diffusion

Page 257 -- It is not possible, I think, to make an exact calculation of the number of copies that Aldus distributed through Europe with the help of his academic friends and the less welcome services of entrepreneurs like Jordan von Dinslaken. Most authorities accept 1,000 copies as the normal size of an Aldine press-run, and allowing for the fact that certain editions, such as that of Demosthenes' "Orations", may have been smaller, this figure would still give us a basis for reckoning Aldus' total output between 100,000 and 120,000 copies. But I suspect that the actual number may be considerably higher. Avanzio's introduction to the octavo edition of Catullus can only mean that 3,000 copies were being produced, and what was done with one popular Latin text may well have been repeated with others. One-thousand copy editions were being turned out in the 1460s: but no printer is known to have produced more than 3,000 copies of a single edition until the feverish controversies of the early reformation expanded demand still further. There can be no doubt that Aldus was the most active member of the most active printing industry in Europe, at least between 1499 and 1504, then again after 1512: if he was producing editions of up to 3,000 copies, then he must be regarded, on purely numerical grounds, as the most important focus for the distribution of literature to contemporary Europe.

[COMMENT: After the year 1500, there was no turning back. No matter what the Vatican or Church of England, etc, wanted, the floodgates of knowledge were open. And on top of all that was happening in Europe, many people started to flee to America for safe-haven intellectually, to be rid of all the church crap in Europe; and undoubtedly people were bringing the Aldus books to America. 300 years after Aldus, the USA was born upon the principle of "intellect" over "religion"; but unfortunately these days, it seems to be decaying into fundamentalist religious stupidity, led by George W. Bush and John Ashcroft. It is terrible.]

Page 258 -- It is this process of transmission, combined with the sheer bulk of his work, which raises the most important questions about Aldus' whole position in the cultural history of Western Europe. Historical turning-points are out of fashion these days: so are heroic individuals. But Aldus' career straddles a period of turbulent cultural and political change in a most suggestive way. He was organising his company and preparing his earliest editions as Poliziano and Pico [della Mirandola] lay dying, and as the French armies marched into Florence behind Charles VIII: he was working on Greek and Latin texts provided by Janus Lascaris until the very moment when the power which that ambassador represented smashed the last independent military and political force in Italy on the battlefield of Agnadello; he died just six months before the Franco-Venetian victory at Marignana brought the first stage of the foreign invasions of Italy to a close. He was therefore making the fruits of a century and a half of intellectual activity available in bulk at precisely the time when the courtiers and dilletanti of the Northern kingdoms arrived in force to sample them. Anyone can argue, without fear of being proved wrong, that if Aldus had not taken it upon himself to put the heritage of Greece into print, someone else would have done so, and that in any case the survival of that heritage was already assured. But the company of Barbarigo, Torresani and Manutius represented a fusion of economic and intellectual power which could not easily have been copied, and the fortunes of the Medici library or the Marciana during this period show how vulnerable the most apparently secure centres could be.

[COMMENT: The following is a peculiar statement. I am not sure if this refers to Apollonius of Tyana or Apollonius of Rhodes.]

Page 274 -- "I have every Greek book printed in the whole of Italy," boasted [Willibald] Pirckheimer [mentioned earlier by Lowry] in a letter to Celtis during 1504. The gradual dispersal of his [Pirckheimer's] library in the course of the seventeenth century means that we cannot now test this claim absolutely, but we can use it to illustrate the total dominance that Aldus acquired over this field of publication after 1500. Pirckheimer began collecting very early, and owned copies of Accursius' Aesop and the Florentine first edition of Homer, besides Lorenzo di Alopa's texts of The Greek Anthology, Lucian, and Apollonius, and Callierges' "Etymologicum Magnum". He always kept himself fully informed about the production in different centres. But the thirty Aldine volumes which he possessed wholly outweigh the Greek contribution of any other contemporary press, and if we include two editions published after Aldus' death and a sprinkling of Latin texts, the overall figure can be expanded to forty.

[COMMENT: As I said, which Apollonius? Notice here the mention of the "two editions published after Aldus' death". If you recall earlier, when I was counting up all the editions in the various tables in Chapter IV, I counted only 128 out of 130. So these posthumous 2 volumes obviously make up the difference. And, as is discussed in the next pages of Lowry's book, apparently, as you and I mentioned a few days ago, the Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther occurred also during these first decades of the 1500s, as Martin Luther seems to have been a contemporary of Aldus and Pirckheimer. What a busy century, n'est-ce pas? The following also may be of importance. This "Jean Grolier" probably was the same as "Jean le Rouge" mentioned earlier by Lowry.]

Pages 280-281 -- It must have been in 1511 that he [Aldus] met the man who perhaps comes nearer than any other to Michelet's vision of the French visitor to Renaissance Italy -- Jean Grolier. Like many contemporary French patrons and collectors, including the Briçonnets from whose number he chose his bride, Grolier's family had risen from relative obscurity through the rapidly expanding financial administration of the Crown. His father Estienne was Élu of Lyons in 1494, and Treasurer of Milan from 1499. Jean, who succeeded his father in 1510, lived and died in royal service. He was besieged in the Castello of Milan in 1512, and captured at Pavia in 1525: he was involved in the foundation of the Collège Royale during the 1530s; and he survived a charge of embezzlement in 1561. During this eventful career he became so sensitive an esthete and so committed a collector that even the fragments of his library form some of the most prized holdings of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the British Museum, besides having given his name to a style of ornamental binding and a bibliographical society.

His ancient coins and cameos have long disappeared: so have nearly nine-tenths of his books. But of roughly 350 surviving volumes, almost a half are Aldines, forty-two of them from the lifetime of Aldus the Elder. Grolier's zeal makes even Pirckheimer and Boniface Amerbach look mean. He had four copies of of the 1501 edition of Juvenal and Persius, four of "Polifilo", and no less than six of the first octavo edition of Martial. He bought many copies on vellum, and frequently bore the added expense of illuminations: and since the work often bears a strong resemblance to that executed for members of the Venetian nobility, there is a real possibility that special orders were prepared for him in the Aldine workshop itself. His relationship with the press was definitely close, personal, and lasting: in 1515 Musurus dedicated the posthumous edition of Aldus' Greek Grammar -- the printer's "last daugher", as he put it -- to Grolier, and asked for the Frenchman's help in persuading Torresani to maintain the standards set by his late partner. This, apparently, was given, for in 1521 Grolier received the dedication of Terence which had been promised to him by Aldus, and in the following year he sponsored a new edition of Budé's celebrated treatise "On the Ass", which he wished to have modelled on the Poliziano of 1499. In the meantime he also kept in touch with past-members of the Aldine circle such as Battista Egnazio. It is indeed strange and surprising that Grolier's activity has remained the province of bibliographers, while attracting so little attention from historians, for no career gives a better notion of the lengths to which a French dilettante would go in his quest for the material signs of Italian culture, and no library offers a surer measure of the part played by Aldus in satisfying such demands.

Pages 284-285 -- To see the full measure of Aldus' impact on French scholarship and book-production as well as French taste, we must wait almost a generation after his death.

The long and successful series of plagiarised octavos produced by the Lyons presses are ample proof of the popularity of the smaller format and the italic type at the lower end of the French market. The lapse of the copyright after Aldus' death legalised the imitation of the type, and the appearance of two treatises on writing styles by the scribes Arrighi and Tagliente during the 1520s naturally encouraged this opportunity: but Simon de Colines produced a text of Catullus in italic in 1529, and he was gradually followed by others, notably Gryphius of Lyons with his "Great Italic" in 1537 and Robert Estienne who interspersed his texts with italic passages until, with the "De Re Rustica" of 1543, he initiated a complete series of classical texts in italic.

Over the same period the Aldine Roman types were being studied and imitated by many of the same men. The intermediary in this case appears to have been an antiquarian fanatic named Geofroy Tory, who returned to Paris some time in the early 1520s after a long stay in Italy and much earnest reading of the "Hypnerotomachia Polifili". His views on the proper formation of antique letters were embodieid in a work named "Le Champ Fleury", which he published in April 1529, and which drew heavily on earlier Italian examination of classical inscriptions. The tradition that he "taught" the typefounder Garamond has never been substantiated: but by the early 1530s Colines and Estienne, both of whom dealt regularly with Garamond, were using Roman founts modelled on the type in which Aldus had printed "De Aetna", and it was from Garamond's workshop that this style spread rapidly across Europe during the second quarter of the century. When Garamond took to printing on his own account in 1545, his first aim was to "copy the italic script of Aldus Manutius". The ghost of Aldus had now secured a dominant position in French typography as well.

[COMMENT: I have some Garamond computer fonts on a CD. They used to be in my font folder, but I never used them so I removed them. Somebody obviously named the modern computer font after Garamond.]

Still more striking is the acceptance of the Aldine printed text by critics of the most exactly scholarly and esthetic tastes. We have seen the beginnings of this process with Jean Grolier: but it can be followed at a higher level, and on a different scholarly plane, in the formation of the French Royal Library. Anxious to establish his place among the most discerning and munificent patrons of the time, Francis I appointed Budé his librarian in 1522, and it was probably through Budé's influence that instructions were sent to Jean du Pins and Guillaume Pellicier, successive French ambassadors to Venice, to buy or secure copies of all the Greek texts they could find for the new library at Fontainbleau. Pellicier's list of purchases still survives. It starts with a catalogue of around 150 manuscripts, then continues with fifty-five printed texts. Of these, thirty-one are Aldines, sixteen of them from the lifetime of the elder Aldus. No more than two of them are recorded from any other printing-house. The volumes were incorporated into the library over a period of twenty years or so, and most of them can be clearly identified by the ornate royal binding and the intertwined initials of Henry II and his mistress Diane de Poitiers. In absolute terms their numbers are not, perhaps, very large. But they illustrate yet again the dominance of the Aldine press over this field of scholarship and they draw an emphatic line through Vespasiano's hope that printed texts would feel ashamed in the company of manuscripts. If the Most Christian King could collect such books and have his personal coat of arms stamped on them, no lesser bibliophile need fear a pang of conscience.

Page 290 -- Nowhere complete, the picture is consistent almost everywhere. Though we cannot say precisely how many Aldine texts reached any one country in Europe, the demand for them was so obvious and so universal that Erasmus' tributes to the library that would fill the world now appear as a simple recognition of the facts. At the same time, Aldus was almost as anxious to get manuscripts from his northern friends as they were to get printed books from him: in the event, only France contributed a significant quantity to his programme, but the appearance of Pliny's "Letters" in Paris encouraged dreams that other treasures would emerge from the Scottish or Danubian mists, and Aldus saw himself as leader of a general literary revival, not a campaign for Italian supremacy. He received far less than he had hoped for, and been promised, from abroad. Meanwhile, the fashionable cult for Greek, the prestige of Padua and his own tactful search for the right sort of friends, combined to raise Aldus' personal reputation even higher. By the time of his death, Europe was filled not only with his books but with eager, committed groups of his admirers, who strove to reproduce in London, Vienna, or Poznán the glittering world of high scholarship and good company which they had once known in Italy.

END OF CHAPTER VII