Giambattista Bodoni of Parma

GIAMBAT 'ISTA BODONI

EX.UBKlSUNIVERSITf OF CALIFORNIA^

JOHN HENRY NASH LIBRARY

SAN FRANCISCO '

PRESENTED TO THE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

ROBERT GORDON SPROUL, PRESIDENT

MR.AND Mas.MILTON S . RAY
CECILY, VIRGINIAANDROSALYN RAY

AND THE

RAY OIL BURNER COMPANY

GIAMBATTISTA BODONI
OF PARMA

1ms biographical sketch of the life of the
Italian printer, Giambattista Bodoni, was
delivered by Thomas Maitland Cleland of
New York, at a meeting of The Society
of Printers in Boston, April 22,

Two hundred and fifty copies have been
printed by The University Press, Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts, for The Society of
Printers, of which this is

MONUMENT TO BODOM, ERECTED AT SALLZZO, OCT. 20, 1872

GIAMBATTISTA BODONI
OF PARMA

T. M. CLELAND

BOSTON
THE SOCIETY OF PRINTERS

MCMXVI

Copyright, 1916,
BY T. M. CLELAND

GIAMBATTISTA

BODONI

OF PARMA

Mr. President and Members of The Society
of Printers :

In selecting, as the subject of your meeting
tonight, Bodoni, the printer of Parma, on
this centennial anniversary of his death, you
have done a "very wise and just thing. For
though he may have been over-praised and
honoured in his own day, he has certainly
received rather more than a fair share of
neglect in ours. While I am very sensible
of the honour, I am not so sure of the wis-
dom of your having asked me to talk to you

on this subject, and as you have made this
bed, you may be compelled to fall asleep in
it before the evening is over; but we have,
fortunately, what appears to be a very repre-
sentative collection of specimens of Bodoni's
work here tonight for inspection and study.
These shall be the real speakers of the even-
ing, and from them I hope you will gather
much interest and even inspiration. My part
shall be no more than to introduce them to
you — a sufficiently difficult one within such
a limited time. To do this we must know
something of the history of the printer him-
self; we must analyze, as far as we are able,
the elements of his style, consider the sources
from which it grew, and note wherein it is
distinctive or original.

The principal source of biographical data
which we have relative to Bodoni is the
"Life" written by his friend, Joseph De
Lama, and published at Parma in 1816 —
a work rich in the banalities and bombast
common to the biographies of that epoch,
and which does not, I regret to say, present
quite the vivid impression of its hero which

we should like to have. Another book, com-
piled at an earlier date and entitled "Anec-
dotes to Serve for a Life of G. B. Bodoni,"
is certainly more interesting because of its
more personal note; but since it is not so
much the history as the work of Bodoni as
a printer which is important to us as printers,
1 shall offer you only the briefest and barest
outline of his early life, with a view to arriving
the sooner at a more careful consideration of
his types and the books and other things he
printed from them at the Royal Press of Parma .

Giambattista Bodoni was born at Saluzzo,
in the Province of Piedmont, on the i6th of
February, 1740. His father was a printer
before him, and we are told by his biographer
that he applied himself diligently in his early
youth to the learning of that trade, and that
when he was but twelve years of age he
showed a decided artistic instinct by devising
some nocturnal illuminations on the front
of his father's house, during a local festival,
which excited the wonder and admiration of
the inhabitants of Saluzzo.

It is of more interest to us, however, to

know that when still quite a boy he cut a
number of wood blocks with such success
that the prints from them obtained some sale
in Turin. The approbation which these early
attempts received appears to have aroused in
young Bodoni a lively ambition to go to Rome
and there perfect himself in this art. He had
a great curiosity, we are told, to see the famous
press of the Propaganda Fides, the missionary
institution of the Roman Church which issues
ecclesiastical works in all languages for dis-
tribution all over the world.

He was eighteen years of age when he set
out on this journey, with one of his fellow
townsmen for companion, and when he finally
succeeded in visiting the press of the Propa-
ganda his enthusiasm and interest so impressed
the head of that institution that he immedi-
ately engaged Bodoni as a compositor. During
his stay here he took up the study of Oriental
languages with such success that he was able
to redistribute and put into useful order the
series of exotic characters which had been
cut in Sixtus Fifth's time by the French type-
cutters Garamond and Le Be, and which had

become hopelessly pied, and had been for a
long time useless. He had to clean the rust
from the punches and matrices and put them
in good order for casting, and it is painful
for the less scholarly among us to dwell upon
a task like this, and difficult to conceive of
the interest and enthusiasm which alone could
have supported him in it. And yet this in-
terest in these strange outlandish characters
never seems to have deserted him from that
time on, as we shall see later, by examining
his "Manuale," or specimen book of types.
It is apparently through his labours with these
matrices and punches that" he was inspired
to undertake the cutting of type punches on
his own account.

His first attempts at this were decided
failures, but he kept at it until he succeeded
in getting a fairly good ornament, and finally
a series of capital letters, which were admired
by his associates at Rome.

He made an important friend at this time
— the Father Maria Paciaudi, then Librarian
to Cardinal Spinelli, the head of the Propa-
ganda; and it was this same priest who after-

ward became Librarian to the Duke Ferdinand
I of Parma on his succession to that state in
1766. The Duke of Parma, inspired by the
counsels of his minister, Du Tillot, established
an Academy of Fine Arts, founded the remark-
able library which still exists in that city, and
was ambitious to have a royal press like those
at Paris , Madrid , Turin , and other capitols , and
it was Father Paciaudi who suggested Bodoni
as the director of such an establishment.

Bodoni, in the meantime, had decided on
a trip to England, where he had been told
greater opportunities would be open to him
than at Rome. He had stopped to visit his
parents at Saluzzo, when he was taken with
a fever which kept him there for some time.
It was this fortunate, if not agreeable, cir-
cumstance which put an end to the projected
visit to England and kept him in Italy at the
moment when the Parma Government was
seeking a director for its press. The offer
reached him at Saluzzo, and on the 2 4th of
February, 1 768, we find him arrived at Parma
and preparing to build presses and collect the
various materials which were to form the

equipment of the new establishment . A press
had already existed in the Ducal Palace of
Parma, and a document has been found which
was printed in the seventeenth century, en-
titled "A Note on the Printing Types in the
Press of the Duke of Parma," etc. But this
must have been a poor affair and fallen into
disuse, for I can find no mention of Bodoni's
having made use of anything he found there.

Bodoni was now twenty-eight years of age,
and it is at this point that his career as a
printer begins; and the story of his life is in
reality the story of his work. Thus, before
pursuing any further his biography, it would
be well to consider the nature of this work
and some of the influences and conditions
out of which it developed.

Like most successful men he arrived upon
the scene at a very happy moment, when the
art of printing was in as low a state of decline
as it had ever been. The lamp of the great
Renaissance was spluttering dismally, and the
splendid mastery which we are familiar with
in the works of the great printers of the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries began to fade

in the seventeenth, and by the eighteenth
century had almost ceased to exist. It is quite
true that much of the best work of the eight-
eenth century continued to show some taste
and style in composition ; but this was little
more than a protraction of the good traditions
which died hard in those days. At any rate,
interest in the beauty and workmanship of
typography and presswork for its own sake
was very dead. Books were thought to be
beautiful because of their engraved illus-
trations and ornament, and typography was
regarded as a mere utilitarian adjunct, and in
some cases was abandoned altogether, as in
the editions of Horace, made by John Pine
in London in 1787, in which all the text was
engraved on copper with the plates, and which
was considered the apotheosis of fine book-
making at that time. But if typography
and types became poor and clumsy, press-
work had grown slovenly beyond belief, and
we find some of those books in which the
exquisitely designed and engraved plates of
the most celebrated of the French draughts-
men and engravers were lavished with the

loosest prodigality so badly printed in the text
as to be almost illegible.

To John Baskerville, of Birmingham, credit
is no doubt due for the first attempt to revive
the art of typography itself, and for the first
publications in the eighteenth century which
threw their entire dependence for recognition
upon their typography alone, without any
extraneous adornment. But Baskerville was
not altogether successful, and he certainly did
not get very much encouragement. His types
were fine in certain respects, but they were not
a sufficiently radical improvement over those
which had already existed to make a \erygreat
stir. A number of others followed, like the
brothers Foulis in Glasgow, theDidots in Paris,
and the Spaniard Ibarra. But it remained for
the robust Italian, with his limitless energy and
exalted ideals, to grasp anew the idea of the
organic beauty of printing, and to infuse into it
the definite style and expression of his epoch.

Whatever may be our judgment now of
that style and the taste which produced it, it
is apparent that it contained a more vital germ
than did any of the tentatives of his con tern-

m^m

i5

poraries, since the best of them came to follow
it, and its influence is still discernible in the
common current of our printed matter today.
I say that his style in typography was a per-
fect expression of his own epoch, like any
art of consequence ; but like all artists of any
consequence, he was inspired by the beautiful
traditions of the past, and his art was an
orderly development out of these . He did not
seek consciously to express his own individu-
ality; happily, it was ample to express itself.
But it is certain that he introduced into the
forms of printing types a decidedly new and
characteristic style, which our eyes are so
familiar with at the present time, in all of
those types which we know as ' * modern face , ' '
that it is at first a little difficult to see that it
was so. And now, for the reason that his
style, or whatever you prefer to call it, was
so closely related to the thought and feeling
of his time and sprang out of it, it seems to
me indispensable that we consider, at least
briefly, what was the artistic constitution of
this period at the end of the eighteenth and
the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The art of the middle of the eighteenth
century, which but a few years ago was always
referred to as wholly frivolous (though I can't
think of any more serious task than to do it
as beautifully as most of it was done), had
certainly indulged in excesses of brilliance
which left something in the state of the public
mind akin to the purely private feeling of
having eaten too much cake, with a consequent
revival of interest in humbler and simpler
nourishment. What followed in the history
of art was certainly dry and unpalatable in
some of its chief characteristics.

The discovery of the buried cities of Her-
culaneum and Pompeii had helped to fire
throughout Europe an immense enthusiasm
for classical antiquity and art. But with all
the inspiration that was liberated by the open-
ing of these sepulchres there was mingled
something like a wave of cold, dead air, which
had the effect of nearly asphyxiating artistic
progress altogether . There was Winckelmann ,
who wrote volumes on classical sculpture and
tried to establish a system upon which the
Greeks had arrived at perfection of form ; and

there was Raphael Mengs, the painter and
writer on art, who had worked out a theory
to combine the form of Greek sculpture, the
expression of Raphael, the colour of Titian,
and the light and shade of Correggio. Mengs
was a pretty poor painter himself, despite the
fact that Bodoni, in a letter, calls him the
* 'Apelles of Our Time," and says that Tiepolo
(one of the hest painters that ever lived)
wasn't fit to serve him at table.

All this produced a return to classical forms ,
if not to classical feeling. Everyone affected
to talk in high-flown terms of purity of form ,
divine harmony, etc., and quoted on all oc-
casions from the Greek and Latin authors.

Bodoni never writes to a friend in Rome
and calls it Rome. He always says, "I hope
soon to join you on the banks of the Tiber,"
and he always calls Madrid ' * the banks of the
Tagus . ' ' Many of his books bear the imprint
"Grisopoli" instead of Parma, which is some-
what confusing until one learns that this was
the legendary name given to Parma during
the brief domination of the Greeks in the
sixth century. This was the taste of the time

which produced the sculptures of Ganova, and
the paintings of the school of David, which
have been aptly styled "tinted bas-reliefs,"
and also the types of Bodoni. It was a period
of rather pompous affectations, which amuse
us a little today and give scope to that facile
faculty of negative criticism which is one of
the best developed and least effective accom-
plishments of which our time can boast.

If this pseudo-classical school of art has a
faded and artificial air in our sophisticated
eyes, it is not safe to assume, on the other
hand, that any of those men who attained
eminence in it were not sincere, and least of
all that our friend Bodoni was not. One can-
not read the record of his activities and see
listed the great volume of his productions in
the " Life" written by De Lama, one cannot
contemplate the almost superhuman labour
of cutting all those types in the "Manuale,"
or read what he has to say in the preface of
that book, or in his letters, on the subject
of his work, and fail to realize that he was
a man profoundly and passionately devoted
to his art.

We have considered, in a very rough
fashion, what was the intellectual basis of
his peculiar type designs and style of compo-
sition; but we must remember that he did
not start out with this characteristic style
full blown; and though it was, as I have
said, the expression of his epoch and grew
out of it, Bodoni, of course, was no more
conscious of the special flavour of that epoch
than we are of ours. We must look to the
practical basis of his work as it appeared to
him in order to arrive at any understanding
of it.

When he established himself in the Parma
Press he had to have an outfit of types ; for
up to that time his own efforts at type cutting
were hardly successful enough for so impor-
tant an undertaking. After due consideration
of the types of the principal founders of the
time, he judged those of the French founder,
Fournier, to be the best, and accordingly he
ordered six different sizes of Fournier 's types
from Paris. With these he printed the first
six items issued from the Ducal Press under
his direction. But he was not content to

30

rest upon the sufficiently honourable title of
printer to the Duke of Parma, and his genius
asserts itself here in his desire for perfection.
He must improve on Fournier's types, much
as he evidently admired them ; and very soon
after his settlement at Parma he established
a foundry of his own and took his brother
Joseph in to manage it. He set to work cut-
ting his punches, and in 1771 he brought
out his first specimen book of borders and
capitals, which was distributed gratis, as a
sort of advertisement for the press. There
are only a few types in this, but an extrava-
gant profusion of ornaments. It is interesting
to see in this first specimen how completely
he was under the French influence ; for in
this book he copies outright the elaborately
framed title-pages of Fournier's "Manuel,"
constructed entirely from moveable type or-
naments and borders. It is difficult to dis-
cover the very minute differences which exist
between these first types of Bodoni and those
by which they were inspired. For a con-
siderable time after this he continues to show
a fondness for the baroque character of the

21

French work, and uses ornaments in great
number and with great ingenuity, if not
always with the best taste.

There is little in this early work which is
above the average of the time, and certainly
nothing to foretell the severity and elegance
of his full-fledged style. He went on refining
and improving on Fournier's designs, which
were good sound models in their way, working
step by step in his own peculiar direction
toward what amounted finally to a complete
innovation in the forms of Roman characters,
and brought about a radical change in the
style and arrangement of printed matter
generally.

Now by way of explanation of just what
that innovation was and what were the pecul-
iarities of his design, we cannot do better
than quote from the preface of his ' ' Manuale
where he states some of his theories on the
subject. He says : " It is proper here to offer
the four different heads under which it seems
to me are derived the beauties of type, and
the first of these is regularity — conformity
without ambiguity, variety without disso-

nance, and equality and symmetry without
confusion. A second and not minor value is
to be gained from sharpness of definition,
neatness, and finish. From the perfection of
the punches in the beginning comes the polish
of the well-cast letter which should shine like
a mirror on its face." His next point is that
of taste, and here he speaks of ' ' The beautiful
contrast as between light and shade which
comes naturally from any writing done with
a well-cut pen held properly in the hand."
It must be admitted that most of this state-
ment is fuller of redundancy than of meaning;
but this latter sentence about * * light and
shade " and the natural effect of writing with
a pen is illuminating in the highest degree
and explains more clearly than anything else
he has to say the aim and tendency of his
type design. In order to achieve this "light
and shade" he made his thin strokes thinner
and the thick ones thicker than they had ever
been made in Roman types before, and he
cut them with a sharpness and regularity
which had never up to that time been equalled.
He speaks of the natural effect of their being

mt—^-m

23

written with a well-cut pen, and I presume
you are all more or less familiar with the
kind of pen he refers to here — the quill or
reed, cut something in the form of a little
chisel, its mechanical action rendering a broad
line when it is drawn down or up in the direc-
tion of the broad face of the nib, and a thin
line when it is drawn crossways on the thin
edge. The design of all good types was, of
course, based on this action of the pen in
writing, and the very forms of the letters
themselves, as well as the living quality of
their design, have their origin in it. It seems
hardly necessary to state this principle since,
with the exception of our typefounders, almost
everyone is familiar with it. But what Bodoni
did was to consider his designs as being made
with a broader and sharper-edged pen than
anyone had thought of before , or than , I doubt ,
anyone would be able to make. If we have
any fault to find with him, it is here, for in
striving for neatness and sharpness and greater
contrast he overstepped the mark a little and
gave to his letters something more of the char-
acter of copperplate engraving than of penman-

ship. Another change which he introduced
into the forms of his Roman letters was in
the serifs. In the old-style types, and in the
classical Roman forms generally, the serifs did
not form a sharp angle with the upright strokes
of the letters, but flowed into them on more
or less of a curve. The serifs of the lowercase
letters you will remember, in the earlier types,
do not form a right angle with the upright
strokes, but rather an acute one. Bodoni re-
duced the serifs of his capitals to single sharp
lines of the same weight as the thin strokes of
the letters, and the serifs of his lowercase are
raised to a nearly, if not quite, horizontal posi-
tion at right angles with the upright strokes.
This plays an important part in that sharpness
and brilliance which he tells us he sought,
and tends to produce an effect of rigidity in
keeping with the coldly classical ideal by which
he was governed. While his own types were
never really mechanical and lifeless , they often
had sufficient appearance of being so to lend
encouragement to a tendency which ended in
the complete destruction of this vital principle
of the pen and produced the worst and most

•toa^^H

25

artificial types which have ever been known.
It is the well-merited repugnance for these
which has brought, unjustly, I think, disfavour
upon Bodoni. He should hardly be held re-
sponsible for the exaggerations and miscon-
ceptions of his aims. The Didots in France
carried the idea a step further, but they printed
with such perfect taste and style that one is
inclined to excuse them on these grounds. He
offers, farther on in his preface, his system
of measurement for the proportions of his
lowercase letters . * ' Divide the body of the
type into seven parts," he says, "and let two
at the top and two at the bottom be for the
ascenders and descenders and the three in the
middle for the other letters." Any such at-
tempt to regulate design by mathematical rule
is bad, of course, and Bodoni himself admits
that ' ' these proportions should receive no law
but from what pleases the vision." I am not
sure, however, that such a rule would not do
much for type design ; it might at least put
an end to the practice of typefounders who
try to crowd their faces on bodies too small
for them, ruthlessly chopping off the de-

scenders of the letters wherever they interfere
with this procedure.

Bodoni's Italic letters, while they have in
some instances a good deal of distinction, are
generally less successful than the Romans, and
nearly always have the weakening effect of too
much slant.

The equipment of type faces which are
shown in the "Manuale" as representing the
sum of his achievements is bewildering in the
range of sizes and in the variety of foreign
and exotic characters. Arthur Young, the cel-
ebrated English economist, gives an account
in one of the journals of his "Travels" of a
visit to Bodoni in 1789 in which he says that
he had 3o,ooo matrices at that time. In her
introduction to the ' ' Manuale," the widow of
Bodoni tells us that he believed a thoroughly
equipped establishment should be furnished
with such a gradation of characters that the
eye in passing from one to the other might
hardly be able to perceive the difference. The
sizes of the Romans run from what he calls
"Parmigianina," which would correspond
about to our 3J^ or 4 point, up to ' * Papale,"

which would certainly require a body of at
least eighty points of our measurement, and
it is very hard to distinguish any size from
that immediately preceding or following it.
Not only were there all these sizes, but there
were two kinds of faces of every size; one
fully rounded and of strongly contrasted lines
and one a little condensed and of less bold
character, the former being generally intended
for prose and the latter for poetry where it
was desired to avoid breaking the lines.

"I have devised up to the present," he
says, "one hundred and forty-two Roman
characters, each with Italics and capitals, and
seventeen scripts of which thirteen have their
respective Finanziere" which was the name
given to a more elaborate and florid form of
the same letter, "and seven English com-
prising two round characters, and further
several Russian, Greek, German, Hebrew,
and other exotics; also a quantity of capitals
for titles in Latin, Greek, and Russian. All
of these I have had cast in matrices struck
from punches entirely perfected with great
love by my own hand." He goes on to tell

us that a single font, complete with Roman
and Italics, required some three hundred and
eighty punches.

The question of his having cut all the
punches with his own hand gave rise to some
bitter disputes in the years when he was at
the height of his fame, and certainly the
number of them seems a little incredible.
Fournier's "Treatise on Printing," published
in 1768, says that it took at that time three
or four hours to cut a punch, and that not
more than three or four could be cut in a day.
We know, however, that he had assistants
to whom he taught punch-cutting and type-
founding, the brothers Amoretti (who after-
ward established a foundry of their own),
and two other men; and it was claimed by
certain persons who wished to detract from
his fame that he owed the beauty of his types
to these workmen. We know, nevertheless,
that the style and manner is his own invention,
and the probabilities are that the assistants
merely helped him in the manual labour of
finishing the punches and matrices. I have
examined a specimen book of types and bor-

— ^—
29

ders issued in 1 8 1 1 from the foundry of these
brothers Amoretti at San Pancrazio, a small
town near Parma, and while they are me-
chanically very well cut, there can be little
question that they lack the grace of design of
the Bodoni characters.

Besides all these types, Bodoni cut an as-
tonishing number of borders and ornaments
which, in the best work of his later years, he
seldom used. "It is not," he says, "a wise
way in which to lend pomp or dignity to a
book except, perhaps, to those books less
valued by men of letters, and which are printed
for the pleasure of persons of an elegance less
disdainful/' Yet in some of the inscriptions
and smaller work where he made use of the
ornaments the effect is altogether charming.
It is interesting to note how these ornaments
developed from the rococo French manner
into a dryer and more classical form, much
as did the types themselves.

The striking characteristic of his compo-
sition is the luxurious and sometimes prodigal
use which he made of space. His titles were
generally narrow in measure and were ar-
_> —

3o

rangements of short, centered lines in various
sizes, and nearly always of capitals. His text
pages present a striking contrast to those of
the masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies. In place of the compactness in the
solid matter without leading, and the large
pages of small type which prevailed in the
earlier books, Bodoni endeavoured to set off
his brilliant characters on great fields of white
paper, and not only to have space in the
margins, but also between the lines, showing
a decided predilection for setting large types
in narrow measures. This love of space pro-
duced a striking elegance of effect — not the
elegance of the earlier printers certainly, but
in its own way very splendid. When space
got in between the lowercase letters them-
selves it did more harm than good, and some
of the small sizes of the Roman types are so
widely fitted on their bodies that the pages
printed with them have a distressing appear-
ance of having been sprayed with type. In
the arrangement of the capitals in titles and
headings, and in the innumerable inscriptions
which were issued from the press, he showed

a remarkable nicety of taste and fine sense of
balance. And the exercise of this faculty was
no mere matter of blind instinct or special
gift, but required on Bodoni's part the same
study that it requires of us today in the
lamentably few instances where we find it
employed. There is an amusing anecdote
which bears out this fact in one of Sten-
dahl's journals of his Italian travels which I
think is worth giving entire: "To do my
duty as a traveler," he says, "I presented
myself at Monsieur Bodoni's, the celebrated
printer. I was agreeably surprised. This
Piedmontais is not at all ostentatious, but in
love with his art. After having shown me
all his French authors he demanded of me
which I preferred, the "Telemaque" of Fene-
lon, the Racine, or the Boileau. I vowed they
all seemed equally beautiful . * Ah , Monsieur ! '
cried Bodoni, 'you don't see the title of the
Boileau?' I looked at it for a long time and
was forced to admit that I could not see any-
thing more perfect in that title than in the
others. 'Ah, Monsieur! ' cried Bodoni again,
'Boileau Despreux in one single line of capitals!

I spent six months before I could decide upon
exactly that type.' '

But if we have any ground for complaint
against the mannerisms of his types or can
find his composition questionable at any point,
there is little to be said but praise for his
press work at its best. Good presswork, it
must be remembered, was not easy in those
days as the presses were comparatively crude
affairs and the inking had to be done with
the old hand balls of leather stuffed with wool
(rollers not coming into use until about 1820),
but the sharpness and brilliance of Bodoni's
best work have never been surpassed.

Its success in a great measure was due to
his selection of papers for the different sizes
of type. He preferred vellum to anything
else, and of his more important editions a
few copies were always made on it, generally
for presentation to distinguished patrons.
When it came to paper, he preferred what
was then called vellum paper, and which
was made on a woven wire screen invented
in England. The paper thus obtained re-
sembled vellum a good deal more than did
— ^—

33

the papers made on the laid screens which
were commonly in use at that time. He had
a way, too, of rolling his sheets after they
were printed to smooth out the excess of im-
pression left by the forms, though he himself
expressly warns against the abuse of this
process, which may easily be made to destroy
entirely the impression which is the life and
soul of all really fine typographic printing.
Another trick was to paint in with the brush
the spots on the large letters which did not
come off from the impression entirely black.
He must have given considerable attention to
the making of good black ink, because pre-
vious to his time it had grown very bad, and
he set a new standard for his contemporaries
to follow in this.

In the form and size of his books he showed
a decided liking for grandeur and pomp. In
his preface he discourses somewhat ingenu-
ously on this subject, and advances the curious
theory that large books are better for the eyes
of far-sighted people and little ones for the
near-sighted . He must have thought Napoleon
very far-sighted indeed, for he printed a three-

.> —
34

volume edition of Homer's Iliad, especially
dedicated to him, in a folio so large that only
half a page could be printed at one time on
his largest press. He presented the Emperor
with a copy on selected Bavarian vellum which
must certainly have been very fine.

De Lama's catalogue, which forms the sec-
ond volume of ' * The Life, " cites and describes
about three hundred and forty-five books
printed by him at Parma, not counting second
editions of his works, and one hundred and
fifty-five inscriptions, pamphlets, and other
matter of less than eight pages. But in the
other catalogues of some of the collections
of his works appear numerous items which
are not cited by De Lama. The matter is
further complicated by the existence of other
volumes bearing plainly enough the imprint
of the Royal Press at Parma, but not cited
in any of the catalogues I have seen. They
are so badly printed and in such a different
manner from Bodoni's that it is difficult to
believe they are genuine. In 1 7 7 5 he brought
out the first of his editions on a grand scale,
and one of the most sumptuous of any of the
•A.

35

books he ever printed — an Epithalamium in
several exotic languages. But its splendour
rests largely upon the number of beautiful
copperplate ornaments which it contains . In
1780 appeared the works of Raphael Mengs
who had died the year before, and who was,
as we have seen, one of the leading spirits in
the artistic thought of the time and a great
hero of Bodoni's. In 1782 Bodoni published
another series of specimens — this time of
Russian characters, on forty-four pages. It
contained inscriptions in Latin and Russian
of congratulations to be presented to the
Russian prince and princess on their passage
through Parma. De Lama says : ' ' He offered
them respectfully and was delighted to see
the pleasure shown in their faces on seeing
the characters of their native language so fa-
mously cut and printed in a strange country."
In 1783 a Roman Breviary was published
which is printed throughout in red and black
in four little 12 mo volumes. This is chiefly
interesting because of the number of copies
which were made and sold — two thousand
of them, undoubtedly a considerable tax on

the pressroom of an establishment accustomed
to printing from five to five hundred copies.
In 178^ came another book which is remark-
able for its engraved decorations, ' ' The Prose
and Verse in Honour of Li via Doria Caraffa,"
in which the typography and presswork are
up to the mark of his finest productions. A
still more sumptuous reprint of this was made
in 1798. In 1785 he published his letter to
the Marquis de Cubieres in French and Italian,
written in defence of his types that had been
criticised in France. He attacks his critics
with ill-disguised annoyance, particularly over
the criticism of his Greek types, which he here
says were exact copies of those of Etienne,
the famous French scholar printer of the six-
teenth century. When he comes to the doubts
which had been expressed in some quarters
of his having made all the foreign types him-
self, he quite loses his temper and offers to
deposit all the punches and matrices of the
types in question in any safe place, supposing
that the doubting Thomases had no occasion
to come to Parma and verify the fact on the
spot. It was this publication which brought

him the following letter from America, which,
I think, is worth reading:

SIR : I have had the very great pleasure of receiving your
excellent "Essai des Characteres de L'Imprimerie." It is one of
the most beautiful that art has hitherto produced. I should be
glad to see a specimen of your other fonts besides this Italic and
Roman of the letter to the Marquis de Cubieres, and to be in-
formed of the price of each kind. I do not presume to criticise
your Italic capitals — they are generally perfect. I would only
beg leave to say that to me the form of the " t" in the word lettre
of the title-page seems preferable to that of the "t" in the word
typographic in the next page. As the downward stroke of T, P,
R, F, B, D, H, K, L, I, and some others, which in writing we
begin at the top, naturally swells as the pen descends, and it is
only in the "A" and the "M" and "N" that those strokes are
fine because the pen begins them at the bottom. With great
esteem, I have the honour to be, etc.

B. FRANKLIN.

De Lama naively says that Bodoni was filled
with joy at receiving this honourable letter
from the " President of the United States
of America"!

In 1788 appeared the first "Manuale," so
called, in 3 60 pages, which contained a range
of one hundred Roman characters, each size
printed on one side of the paper and forming
a description of a city. The names of the
cities, which are appended to each face of type
in the final "Manuale" of 1818, are intended
to identify it with this earlier work.

_>_
38

Up to this time the books issued were prac-
tically all undertaken either at the instigation
of the Duke or on Bodoni's own initiative;
that is to say, the press did not execute
outside orders. But his friend and patron,
Gavaliere d'Azare, who was then Spanish
minister to Rome, had obtained permission
to establish a press at the Embassy, and he
wanted Bodoni to come and take charge of
it and print some splendid editions of the
classics. Duke Ferdinand would not listen
for a moment to parting with his printer, but
suggested that the proposed classics could be
done just as well at Parma. Bodoni began
at once on this basis, and every week sent
his proofs to Borne to be gone over by eminent
scholars. In order to facilitate the execution
of these orders from Borne he set up presses
of his own in the Ducal Palace, and in 1791
brought out the first fruits of this arrange-
ment in a large folio edition of Horace. This
year begins a new period in the affairs of the
Parma Press and marks the transition from
his tentative and experimental stage to the
fully developed and severer taste on which

his fame rests . He continued to receive orders
from patrons in all parts of Europe, and even
from England, where Edwards, the London
bookseller, commissioned him to print an
edition of Horace Walpole's "Castle of
Otranto."

In this year also, at the age of fifty-one,
he married a Parmesan lady to whom he had
long been devoted and who proved to be a
very happy choice. She showed not only
great devotion throughout the remainder of
his life, but a good deal of ability as well;
for it was she who finished the printing and
publication of his "Manuale" and carried
out the editions of the French classics which
he had planned and started before his death.

Bodoni had for some time held the title
of Printer to the King of Spain, though I do
not find that he ever printed anything for him ;
but notwithstanding, in 1798 his Catholic
Majesty granted him a pension of 6,000 reals
a year with no obligations whatsoever. With
this impetus the year 1798 became a very
productive one , and among the editions which
we can find time to note here was the Gray's

_-!

4o

"Elegy" translated into Italian, and later
Gray's "Complete Poems" in English, and
the edition of Virgil in two volumes. This
latter work brought down the stinging criti-
cism of the French printer and publisher,
Firman Didot, on the score of its inaccuracy,
and it must have been no pleasant sensation
for poor old Bodoni to read Didot' s letter to
a friend in which he picks out the errors in
this and some of his Greek classics and says:
* * It is time, citizen, that men of letters united
against negligent printers who think to have
done all when they have employed fine char-
acters and fine paper, and who regard the
correction of text as a mere bagatelle." But
he continues: "As a scholar I condemn him,
as a printer I admire him." Bodoni tried to
explain these errors by saying that some im-
perfect copies had been stolen from his press
and sold and thus got into France. We are
forced to admit, however, that there must
have been some foundation for this charge of
inaccuracy since it was frequently repeated.
Horace Walpole wrote in the postscript of one
of his letters dated from Strawberry Hill,

December 20, 1790: ''Very late at night.
I am glad you did not get a Parmesan
Otranto — a copy is come so full of faults that
it is not fit to be sold here." But this was
written in 1790 and the Otranto was riot
published until 1791, so it might be fair to
assume that what the elegant and gouty Lord
Orford saw was an advance copy which may
have been corrected afterward.

Time will not permit us to consider any
more of his editions, except, perhaps, to men-
tion a Lord's Prayer in no fewer than one
hundred and fifty-five languages done in 1 806 ,
the title-page of which is in many respects
the finest flower of the Bodoni style and
seems to have been admired by himself since
he copied its general characteristics for the
title of his own "Manuale." The celebrated
"Homer" already mentioned came out in
1808, and in his last year the "Racine" in
three volumes — the first of a series of French
classics which he had long had under way.

In his later years Bodoni was very deaf and
suffered a good deal from other physical in-
firmities, as well as from the assaults of critics

and persons jealous of his fame. But to offset
these he was more overwhelmed with praise
and honours than any printer, I believe, ever
was before or since. There was hardly a per-
son of distinction in Europe at that time who
had not visited his press. In 1802 the city of
Parma had a medal struck in his honour, and
there is a book issued from his press describing
this occasion. He was invited to send proofs
of his work to the Paris Exposition of 1 806 ,
the jury of which awarded him the gold medal
over his French competitors . In 1 8 1 o , Parma
then being a part of the French Empire, Na-
poleon offered him a pension of 3,ooo francs,
and in 1 8 1 o also he was given the decoration
of the Order of the Two Sicilies by the King
of Naples in acknowledgment of a complete
collection of his works which he had sent to
that monarch. There were other like honours
showered upon him in the bombastic manner
of the period — so many that it would be tire-
some to name them all. I will mention only
one more which was less formal, but which
must have meant much to the old man, who,
when he was confined to his bed a year before

M—*—.

43

his death, was visited by the Gomte St.Vallier.
With characteristic grace and simplicity the
Frenchman approached his bedside and said:
" M. Bodoni, I come to render homage to the
genius of typography . You are very well known
in France. The Emperor esteems and likes
you, and it is he who has ordered me to make
this visit . Another day I will make my own . ' '
Bodoni showed such appreciation of this and
expressed himself in such a lively manner that
the Count further remarked: "M. Bodoni, if
you have so much fire being sick, what will
you be when you are well again?"

Bodoni never really got well again, but
struggled to his feet only long enough to
do some work on the "Manuale," without
hope, however, of being able to publish it
himself. He died toward the end of Novem-
ber, i8i3.

Of Bodoni' s personality, as I said at the
outset, one does not gather an entirely satis-
factory image from the biography by De Lama.
Nevertheless, it is possible to dislodge from
that monumental pile of human and super-
human virtues enough minor circumstances

_>~
44

with which, aided by the accounts of some of
his distinguished visitors and critics and the
few excellent portraits which exist, to construct
a figure of attractive proportions. The over-
flowing vigour, of which his labours them-
selves are sufficient evidence, was tempered
by North-Italian firmness of character. Of a
lively temper and a sprightly good humour
as well, he nevertheless had the perseverance
and the steadfastness of purpose that generally
are associated with characters of more sober
mien. He appears to have been generous,
and vain in the highest degree, but with the
simple , unconscious , and whole-hearted vanity
of the Latin temperament. He bathed freely
and joyously in the honours which were show-
ered upon him, and no doubt toadied not a
little to the favour of the great persons from
whom these distinctions flowed, but one should
bear in mind that it would have been next to
impossible, at that time, to have developed
and maintained such an enterprise on any
other terms.

In 1818 his widow published the final
edition of the "Manuale" which contains

specimens of all of his types and ornaments,
but as you will have an opportunity to see
this and examine it for yourselves I shall not
tax you with a further description of it.

In 1872 a statue of Bodoni was erected at
Saluzzo, and on this occasion an exhibition
was held by the United Typographical Societies
of Italy to which American printers were in-
vited to contribute. This year the anniversary
of his death is to be celebrated by the different
printing organizations of Italy.

We have seen with what esteem he was
held in his own day, how much he was ad-
mired, and how greatly his works were prized,
and the influence he had upon the other
printers of the period, some of whom, the
Didots, Firman, and Pierre, I am inclined
to think, surpassed him in many respects in
his own manner.

It only remains to consider the position he
occupies in the History of the Art of Typog-
raphy from the viewpoint of our own day.
In a paper read at the Sorbonne in 1900,
Piero Barbera said of him that though he had
a great idea of the perfection of printing from

the artistic point of view, and had high esteem
for the dignity of the art, he lacked perhaps
that of the influence it must have upon society
— he had not the clear vision of its ultimate
evolution. He was a kind of court officer,
like a "first gentleman of the bedchamber,"
or any other. His was, in short, a wholly
aristocratic art. Mr. Alfred Pollard, in his
work entitled "Fine Books," which is one
of the more important recent publications
upon the history of printing, dismisses Bodoni
with scant courtesy as a mere follower of
Baskerville and a printer of books very good
in their way, but in quite a wrong way. But
Mr. Pollard's work, scholarly and replete as
it is with an intimate knowledge of his subject,
is written in what might be called the British
perspective method of criticism. That is to
say, the critic stands in the middle of England
and views his subjects in diminishing per-
spective in all directions, his estimation de-
creasing as the geographical location of the
object viewed recedes from the British Isles.
Baskerville is in the immediate foreground, —
he is on the Island, — life size, and Bodoni over

in Parma, off on the horizon, is scarcely visible
to the naked English eye.

And then by the critic so disposed, it may
very well be argued that Bodoni represents
an epoch of affectations and a school founded
upon false conceptions. But if we grant all
this, may we not be tempted as well to inquire
with the same rigour into the quality and value
of the inspiration by which recent English, and
to a great extent American, "revivals" of the
art of printing have been set on foot ? To the
powerful personality and uncompromising
craftsmanship of William Morris we certainly
owe much of the interest of our own particular
day in printing as a fine art, and his teachings,
more than any others, have dominated most
of the attempts at fine bookmaking in England
for some years past. His masterful revivals
of fifteenth-century printing are certainly
beautiful objects of art in themselves, and if
they possess any fault, it is only that they are
nearly, if not quite, impossible to read. They
were printed in characters modeled after those
of an age in which he did not live — they
attempted, through an inspiration largely

founded upon sentiment, to bring back a
manner irrevocably gone by. Was this an
affectation better or \vorse, or only as bad as
that under which Bodoni laboured?

The interest which Morris aroused has cer-
tainly done much good, but one cannot help
feeling that the style he created has rather
hindered than helped the presenk-day printer
in the advancement of his art. It has given
rise to a curious notion that any art in printing
has inevitably something to do with the style
of the fifteenth century and is hence not
appropriate for the demands of every-day
work, but should be exercised only on ex-
pensive and rare occasions. In consequence,
we find printing generally conceived as of
two distinct kinds — "commercial" and
' * artistic." In reality the two kinds of print-
ing which exist and always have existed are
good printing and bad printing, and any piece
of work, no matter what its purpose, if it be
well and appropriately done, is artistic, if it
be paid for, is commercial.

Bodoni, whose name is anathema to the
more ardent followers of the Morris school,

__*-_
49

made improvements and infused new life
into what was current in his day. What
mannerisms he had were of his own time
and did not interfere with the utility of his
work — he made printing more readable and
not less so.

TV