PRINTING AND THE
RENAISSANCE
^PRINTING AND THE RENAIS-
SANCE : A PAPER READ BEFORE
THE FORTNIGHTLY CLUB OF
ROCHESTER NEW YORK BY
JOHN ROTHWELL SLATER.
NEW YORK
William Edwin Rudge
1921
PRINTING AND THE RENAISSANCE:
A PAPER READ BEFORE THE
FORTNIGHTLY CLUB OF
ROCHESTER
N.Y.
PRINTING did not make the Renaissance; the
Renaissance made printing. Printing did not be-
gin the publication and dissemination of books.
There were libraries of vast extent in ancient
Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome. There were universities
centuries before Gutenberg where the few instructed the
many in the learning treasured up in books, and where
both scholars and professional scribes multiplied copies
of books both old and new. At the outset of any exam-
ination of the influence of printing on the Renaissance it
is necessary to remind ourselves that the intellectual life
of the ancient and the mediaeval world was built upon
the written word. There is a naive view in which ancient
literature is conceived as existing chiefly in the autograph
manuscripts and original documents of a few great cen-
ters to which all ambitious students must have resort. A
very little inquiry into the multiplication of books before
printing shows us how erroneous is this view.
We must pass over entirely the history of publishing
and book-selling in ancient times, a subject too vast for
adequate summary in a preliminary survey of this sort.
With the fall of Rome and the wholesale destruction
that accompanied the barbarian invasions a new chapter
begins in the history of the dissemination of literature.
This chapter opens with the founding of the scripto-
rium, or monastic copying system, by Cassiodorus and
Saint Benedict early in the sixth century. To these two
men, Cassiodorus, the ex-chancellor of the Gothic king
Theodoric, and Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine
order, is due the gratitude of the modern world. It
was through their foresight in setting the monks at
work copying the scriptures and the secular literature
of antiquity that we owe the preservation of most of the
books that have survived the ruins of the ancient world.
At the monastery of Monte Cassino, founded by Saint
Benedict in the year 529, and at that of Viviers, founded
by Cassiodorus in 531, the Benedictine rule required of
every monk that a fixed portion of each day be spent in
the scriptorium. There the more skilled scribes were en-
trusted with the copying of precious documents rescued
from the chaos of the preceding century, while monks
not yet sufficiently expert for this high duty were in-
structed by their superiors.
The example thus nobly set was imitated throughout
all the centuries that followed, not only in the Benedic-
tine monasteries of Italy, France, Germany, England,
Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, but in religious houses of all
orders. It is to the mediaeval Church, her conservatism
in the true sense of the word, her industry, her patience,
her disinterested guardianship alike of sacred and of
pagan letters, that the world owes most of our knowledge
of antiquity. Conceive how great would be our loss if to
archaeology alone we could turn for the reconstruction
of the civilization, the art, the philosophy, the public
and private life of Greece and Rome. If the Church had
done no more than this for civilization, it would still
have earned some measure of tolerance from its most
anti-clerical opponents. It is of course to the Eastern
rather than to the Roman Church that we owe the pres-
ervation of classical Greek literature, copied during the
dark ages in Greek monasteries and introduced into
Italy after the fall of Constantinople.
A second stage in the multiplication and publication
of manuscript books begins with the founding of the
great mediaeval universities of Bologna, Paris, Padua,
Oxford, and other centers of higher education. Inas-
much as the study of those days was almost entirely
book study, the maintenance of a university library
with one or two copies of each book studied was inade-
quate. There grew up in each university city an organ-
ized system of supplying the students with textbooks.
The authorized book-dealers of a mediaeval university
were called stationarii, or stationers, a term apparently
derived from the fixed post or station assigned in or near
the university buildings to each scribe permitted to
supply books to the students and professors. A stationer
in England has always meant primarily a book-dealer
or publisher, as for example in the term Stationers' Hall,
the guild or corporation which until 1842 still exercised
in London the functions of a copyright bureau. Inci-
dentally a stationer also dealt in writing materials,
whence our ordinary American use of the term. Another
name for the university book-dealers was the classical
Latin word librarii, which usually in mediaeval Latin
meant not what we call a librarian but a vender of
books, like the French libraire. These scribes were not
allowed at first to sell their manuscripts, but rented
them to the students at rates fixed by university statutes.
A folded sheet of eight pages, sixteen columns of sixty-
two lines each, was the unit on which the rental charges
were based. Such a sheet at the beginning of the thir-
teenth century rented for about twenty cents a term;
and since an ordinary textbook of philosophy or theol-
ogy or canon law contained many sheets, these charges
constituted no inconsiderable part of the cost of instruc-
tion. The books must be returned before the student left
the university; sales were at first surreptitious and ille-
gal, but became common early in the fourteenth century.
Reasonable accuracy among the stationers was secured
by a system of fines for errors, half of which went to the
university, the other half being divided between the
supervisor or head proof-reader and the informant who
discovered the error.
The original regulation which forbade the stationers
to sell books was intended to prevent students of a
profiteering turn of mind from buying books for resale
to their fellow-students at a higher price, thus cornering
the market and holding up the work of an entire class.
In course of time, however, the book-dealers were per-
mitted not only to sell textbooks, at prices still controlled
by official action, but also to buy and sell manuscripts
of other books, both those produced by local scribes
and those imported from other cities and countries.
This broadening of the activities of the university
bookstores led naturally to the third and last stage
which the publishing business underwent before the
invention of printing. This stage was the establishment
in Florence, Paris, and other intellectual centers, of
bookshops selling manuscripts to the general public
rather than to university students. These grew rapidly
during the first half of the fifteenth century, receiving a
marked impetus from the new interest in Greek studies.
Some years before the fall of Constantinople in 1453
Italian book-sellers were accustomed to send their buyers
to the centers of Byzantine learning in the near East in
quest of manuscripts to be disposed of at fancy prices
to the rich collectors and patrons of literature. There is
evidence of similar methods in France and Germany
during the earlier decades of the Renaissance.
This preliminary sketch of the book-publishing busi-
ness before printing is intended to correct a rather
common misapprehension. Manuscript books were in-
deed relatively costly, but they were not scarce. Any
scholar who had not been through a university not only
had access to public libraries of hundreds of volumes,
but might also possess, at prices not beyond the reach
of a moderate purse, his own five-foot shelf of the clas-
sics. The more elegant manuscripts, written by experts
and adorned with rich illuminations and sumptuous
bindings, were of course not for the humble student;
but working copies, multiplied on a large scale by a
roomful of scribes writing simultaneously from dicta-
tion, might always be had. Chaucer, writing of the poor
clerk of Oxford at the end of the fourteenth century,
tells us that
"Him was levere have at his beddes heed
Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed,
Of Aristotle and his philosophye,
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrye."
We are not sure that he had the whole twenty books;
that was his ambition, his academic dream of wealth;
but we are assured that he spent on books all the money
he could borrow from his friends, and that he showed his
gratitude by busily praying for the souls of his creditors.
When we consider the enormous number of manu-
script books that must have existed in Europe in the
middle ages, we may well wonder why they have become
relatively rare in modern times. Several explanations
account for this. In the first place, the practice of
erasing old manuscripts and using the same vellum
again for other works was extremely common. Secondly,
vast numbers of manuscripts in the monasteries and
other libraries of Europe were wantonly or accidentally
destroyed by fire, especially in times of war and reli-
gious fanaticism. In the third place, the early binders,
down through the sixteenth century and even later,
used sheets of vellum from old manuscripts for the
linings and the covers of printed books. Finally, after
the invention of printing, as soon as a given work had
been adequately and handsomely printed in a standard
edition, all but the finest manuscripts of that book
would naturally be looked upon as of little value, and
would be subject to loss and decay if not to deliberate
destruction. Owing to these and perhaps other causes
it is almost entirely the religious manuscripts that have
survived, except those preserved in royal libraries and
museums from the finer collections of the middle ages.
The invention of printing was not the work of any one
man. Not only were printed pages of text with accom-
panying pictures produced from woodcut blocks in Hol-
land a quarter of a century before Gutenberg began his
work at Mainz, but it is pretty well established that
movable types were employed by Laurence Koster, of
6
Haarlem, as early as 1430. But Koster, who died about
1440, did not carry his invention beyond the experimen-
tal stages, and produced no really fine printing. More-
over, his work had no immediate successor in Holland.
Whether it be true, as sometimes alleged, that Guten-
berg first learned of the new art from one of Koster's
workmen, we have no means of knowing. At any rate,
Gutenberg's contemporaries as well as his successors
gave to him the credit of the invention. That he was
not the first to conceive the idea of multiplying impres-
sions of type-forms by the use of a screw press is evident;
but he was the first to develop the invention to a point
where it became capable of indefinite extension. He
seems to have worked in secret for some years on the
problems involved in type-founding and printing before
the year 1450, when he set up his shop in Mainz.
The capital for the new business was furnished by a
wealthy goldsmith named Johann Fust. Between 1450
and 1455 Gutenberg printed an edition of the Latin
Bible, sometimes known as the Mazarin Bible, which is
ordinarily regarded as the first printed book. It was a
magnificently printed volume, exhibiting at the very
foundation of the art a skill in presswork scarcely sur-
passed by any of Gutenberg's immediate successors.
He was a great printer, but not a financially successful
one. Fust sued his partner in 1455 for repayment of
the loans advanced, and upon Gutenberg's failure to
meet these obligations Fust foreclosed the mortgage
and took over the printing plant. Although Gutenberg
started another publishing house at Mainz, and contin-
ued it until his death in 1468, the main development of
printing after 1455 was in the original plant as carried
7
on by Fust and his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer. They
printed in 1457 an edition of the Psalms in which for the
first time two-color printing was employed, the large
initial letters being printed in red and black. This inno-
vation, designed to imitate the rubricated initials of the
manuscripts, involved great technical difficulties in the
presswork, and was not generally adopted. Most of the
early printed books, even down to the end of the fifteenth
century, left blanks for the large capitals at the begin-
nings of the chapters, to be filled in by hand by profes-
sional illuminators.
From the establishments of Gutenberg and of Fust
and Schoeffer in Mainz knowledge of the new art spread
rapidly into many German cities. In 1462 Mainz was
captured and sacked by Adolph of Nassau in one of the
local wars of the period, and printers from the Mainz
shops made their way to other cities throughout the
empire. Before 1470 there were printing establishments
in almost every German city, and hundreds of works,
mostly theological, had been issued from their presses.
In all these early German books, printed of course in
Latin, the type used was the black-letter. Gutenberg,
in designing his first font, evidently tried to imitate as
closely as possible the angular gothic alphabet employed
by the scribes in the best manuscripts. Not only were
the letters identical in form with the engrossing hand of
the monks, but the innumerable abbreviated forms used
in the Latin manuscripts were retained. Thus a stroke
over a vowel indicated an omitted m or n, a p with a
stroke across it indicated the Latin prefix per, a circle
above the line stood for the termination us, an r with a
cross meant rum, and so forth. These abbreviations,
8
which make printed books of the earliest period rather
hard reading today, were retained not only to save space
but to give the printed page as nearly as possible the
appearance of a fine manuscript. It was not at first the
ambition of the printers and type-founders to make their
books more legible or less taxing on the eyes than manu-
script; their readers were accustomed to manuscript and
felt no need of such improvements. The mechanical
advance in the art of writing brought about by printing
was at first regarded as consisting in the greater rapidity
and lower cost at which printed books could be produced.
But the new invention was at first looked upon by
some famous scholars and patrons of learning as a detri-
ment rather than a help. The great Trithemius, abbot of
Sponheim, wrote as late as 1494 in the following terms :
"A work written on parchment could be preserved for a thou-
sand years, while it is probable that no volume printed on paper
will last for more than two centuries. Many important works
have not been printed, and the copies of these must be prepared
by scribes. The scribe who ceases his work because of the inven-
tion of the printing-press can be no true lover of books, in that,
regarding only the present, he gives no due thought to the intel-
lectual cultivation of his successors. The printer has no care for
the beauty and the artistic form of books, while with the scribe
this is a labor of love."
Contrasted with this low estimate of the importance
of the new art by some scholars, we note the promptness
with which the great churchmen of Italy and of France
took measures to import German printers and set up
presses of their own. In 1464 the abbot of Subiaco, a
monastery near Rome, brought to Italy two German
printers, Conrad Schweinheim and Arnold Pannartz,
and set them at work printing liturgical books for the
9
use of the monks. Soon afterward, under ecclesiastical
patronage, they began to issue, first at Subiaco and then
at Rome, a series of Latin classics. During five years
this first printing establishment in Italy published the
complete works of Cicero, Apuleius, Caesar, Virgil,
Livy, Strabo, Lucan, Pliny, Suetonius, Quintilian, Ovid,
as well as of such fathers of the Latin Church as Augus-
tine, Jerome and Cyprian, and a complete Latin Bible.
This printing establishment came to an end in 1472 for
lack of adequate capital, but was soon followed by
others both in Rome and especially in Venice.
Early Venetian printing forms one of the most dis-
tinguished chapters in the whole history of the subject.
The most famous of the first generation was Nicolas
Jenson, a Frenchman who had learned the art in Ger-
many. Between 1470 and his death in 1480 he printed
many fine books, and in most of them he employed what
is now called roman type. He was not absolutely the
first to use the roman alphabet, but his roman fonts
were designed and cast with such artistic taste, such a
fine sense of propprtion and symmetry of form, that
the Jenson roman became the model of later printers
for many years after his death. Roman type, unlike the
black-letter, had two distinct origins. The capitals were
derived from the letters used by the ancient Roman
architects for inscriptions on public buildings. The small
letters were adapted from the rounded vertical style of
writing used in many Italian texts, altogether different
in form from the angular gothic alphabet used in eccle-
siastical manuscripts. Jenson's roman letters were clear,
sharp and easy to read, and constituted the greatest
single addition to the art of printing since its beginning.
10
Germany clung obstinately to the black-letter in its
Latin books, as it has adhered down to very recent
times to a similar heavy type for the printing of German
text; but the rest of Europe within a few years came over
to the clearer and more beautiful roman.
There were many early printers at Venice between
Jenson and his greater successor Aldus Manutius, who
began business in 1494, but we shall pass over them all
in order to devote more careful attention to the noble
history of the Aldine press. I propose in the remainder
of this paper to select five great printers of the Renais-
sance, and to examine their work both as a whole and
as illustrated in typical examples. These five are :
ALDUS MANUTIUS, of Venice.
ROBERT ESTIENNE, of Paris, commonly
known by the name of Stephanus.
JOHANN FROBEN, of Basel.
ANTON KOBERGER, of Nuremberg.
WILLIAM CAXTON, of London.
Each stands for a different aspect of the art of printing,
both in the mechanical features of book-making and also
in the selection of works to be published and the editorial
methods employed in making them ready for the press.
Taken together, the books issued from their presses at
the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the six-
teenth century form a sort of composite picture of the
Renaissance.
ii
First of all, in our consideration and in order of greatness,
stands the name of Aldus Manutius. The books of the
Aldine press, all with the well-known sign of the anchor
and dolphin, are familiar to most students of the classics.
Aldus was born in 1450, the very year of Gutenberg's
invention. For the first forty years of his life he was a
scholar, devoting himself to the Latin classics and to the
mastery of the newly revived Greek language and litera-
ture. His intimate association with Pico della Mirandola
12
and other Italian scholars, as well as with many of the
learned Greeks who then frequented Italian courts and
cities, led him to conceive the great plan upon which his
later career was based. This was nothing less than to issue
practically the whole body of classic literature, Greek as
well as Latin, in editions distinguished from all that had
preceded in two important respects. First, they were to
be not reprints of received uncritical texts but new revis-
ions made by competent scholars based upon a compari-
son of all the best available manuscripts. Secondly, they
were to be printed not in ponderous and costly folios but
in small octavos of convenient size, small but clear type,
and low price. This was not primarily a commercial ven-
ture like the cheap texts of the classics issued in the nine-
teenth century by Teubner and other German publish-
ers, but resembled rather in its broad humanistic spirit
such a recent enterprise as the Loeb Classical Library.
The purpose in each case was to revive and encourage
the reading of the classics not alone by schoolboys but
by men of all ages and all professions. But there is this
important difference, that Mr. Loeb is a retired million-
aire who employs scholars to do all the work and merely
foots the bill, while Aldus was a poor man dependent
upon such capital as he could borrow from his patrons,
and had at the same time to perform for himself a large
part of the editorial labors on his books. Mr. Loeb
commands the latest and most complete resources of
the modern art of printing ; Aldus helped to make that
art. Mr. Loeb's editors may employ when they choose
the style of type known as italic; Aldus invented it.
Mr. Loeb's publishers have at their command all the
advertising and selling machinery of a great modern busi-
13
ness concern, and yet they do not, and probably can not,
make the classics pay for themselves, but must meet the
deficits out of an endowment. Aldus had to organize his
own selling system, his advertising had to be largely by
private correspondence with scholars and book-sellers
throughout Europe laboriously composed with his own
hand; yet it was imperative that the business become as
soon as possible self-supporting, or at least that losses in
one quarter should be recouped by profits in another.
It was in his edition of Virgil, 1 501 , that Aldus first em-
ployed the new cursive or sloping letter which later came
to be known in English printing as italic type. According
to tradition he copied it closely from the handwriting of
the Italian poet Petrarch. The type was very compact,
covering many more words on a page than the roman of
that day, and was used as a body type, not as in our day
for isolated words and phrases set apart for emphasis or
other distinction from the rest of the text. Aldus also,
though not the first to cast Greek type, gave his Greek
fonts an elegance which was soon imitated, like the italic,
by other printers. By the introduction of small types
which were at the same time legible, and by adopting for
his classical texts a small format suitable for pocket-size
books, Aldus invented the modern small book. No longer
was it necessary for a scholar to rest a heavy folio on a
table in order to read; he might carry with him on a jour-
ney half a dozen of these beautiful little books in no more
space than a single volume of the older printers. Further-
more, his prices were low. The pocket editions or small
octavos sold for about two lire, or forty cents in the money
of that day, the purchasing power of which in modern
money is estimated at not above two dollars.
u
This popularizing of literature and of classical learn-
ing did not meet with universal favor amongst his
countrymen. We read of one Italian who warned Aldus
that if he kept on spreading Italian scholarship beyond
the Alps at nominal prices the outer barbarians would
no longer come to Italy to study Greek, but would stay
at home and read their Aldine editions without adding
a penny to the income of Italian cities. Such a fear
was not unfounded, for the poorer scholars of Germany
and the Netherlands did actually find that they could
stay at home and get for a few francs the ripest results
' of Italian and Greek scholarship. This gave Aldus no
concern; if he could render international services to
learning, if he could help to set up among the humbler
scholars of other lands such a fine rivalry of competitive
cooperation as already existed among such leaders as
Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, he should be well con-
tent to live laborious days and to die poor. Both these
he did; but he gathered around him such a company of
friends and collaborators as few men have enjoyed; he
must have breathed with a rare exhilaration, born of
honest and richly productive toil, the very air of Athens
in her glory; and he must have realized sometimes amid
the dust and heat of the printing shop that it was given
to him at much cost of life and grinding toil to stand
upon the threshold of the golden age alike of typography
and of the revival of learning. In 1514, the year before
his death, Aldus wrote to a friend a letter of which I bor-
row a translation from George Haven Putnam's Books
and Their Makers during the Middle Ages. This is the
picture Aldus drew of his daily routine:
"I am hampered in my work by a thousand interruptions.
Nearly every hour comes a letter from some scholar, and if I
undertook to reply to them all, I should be obliged to devote day
and night to scribbling. Then through the day come calls from
all kinds of visitors. Some desire merely to give a word of greet-
ing, others want to know what there is new, while the greater
number come to my office because they happen to have nothing
else to do. 'Let us look in upon Aldus/ they say to each other.
Then they loaf in and sit and chatter to no purpose. Even these
people with no business are not so bad as those who have a poem
to offer or something in prose (usually very prosy indeed) which
they wish to see printed with the name of Aldus. These interrup-
tions are now becoming too serious for me, and I must take steps
to lessen them. Many letters I simply leave unanswered, while
to others I send very brief replies; and as I do this not from pride
or from discourtesy, but simply in order to be able to go on with
my task of printing good books, it must not be taken hardly. As
a warning to the heedless visitors who use up my office hours to
no purpose, I have now put up a big notice on the door of my
office to the following effect: Whoever thou art, thou art earn-
estly requested by Aldus to state thy business briefly and to take
thy departure promptly. In this way thou mayest be of service
even as was Hercules to the weary Atlas. For this is a place of
work for all who enter."
What a picture that letter gives us of the half humor-
ous, half pathetic spirit in which the great publisher en-
dured the daily grind. Twenty years of it wore him out,
but his dolphin-and-anchor trade-mark still after four
centuries preaches patience and hope to all who under-
take great burdens for the enlightenment of mankind.
The Aldine press did not confine its efforts to the
ancient classics, but printed editions of Dante and
Petrarch and other Italian poets, and produced the first
editions of some of the most important works of Eras-
mus. But all of its publications belonged in general to
the movement known as humanism, the field of ancient
1 16
and contemporary poetry, drama, philosophy, history,
and art. Aldus left to others, especially to the great
ecclesiastical printers of Venice and of Rome, the print-
ing of the scriptures, the works of the church fathers,
and the innumerable volumes of theological controversy
with which the age abounded. In France, on the other
hand, the great publishing house of the Estiennes, or
Stephani, to whom we next direct our attention, divided
its efforts between the secular and sacred literature.
Inasmuch as the history of the Stephanus establishment
is typical of the influence of printing upon the Renais-
sance, and of the Renaissance upon printing, which is
the subject of this paper, we may well examine some
aspects of its career.
Printing had been introduced into France in 1469 by
the ecclesiastics of the Sorbonne. Like that abbot of
Subiaco who set up the first press in Italy five years
before, these professors of scholastic philosophy and
theology at Paris did not realize that the new art had
in it the possibilities of anti-clerical and heretical use.
For the first generation the French printers enjoyed a
considerable freedom from censorship and burdensome
restrictions. They published, like the Venetians, both the
Greek and Latin classics and the works of contemporary
writers. Both Louis XII. and Francis I. gave their pat-
ronage and encouragement to various eminent scholar-
printers who flourished between the establishment of
the first publishing-houses in Paris and the beginning
of the sixteenth century. I pass over all these to select
as the typical French printers of the Renaissance the
family founded by Henri Estienne the elder. His first
book, a Latin translation of Aristotle's Ethica, appeared
in 1504. From that date for nearly a hundred years the
house of Stephanus and his descendants led the pub-
lishing business in France. Both in the artistic advance-
ment of the art of printing and in the intellectual ad-
vancement of French thought by their selection of the
works to be issued they earned a right to the enduring
gratitude of mankind.
Henri Estienne, the founder of the house, who died
in 1520, had published during these sixteen years at
least one hundred separate works. Although they were
mostly Latin, many of them revealed Estienne's know-
ledge of and devotion to the new Greek studies, and this
tendency on his part was at once suspected as heretical
by the orthodox doctors of the Sorbonne. The favor of
King Francis was not at all times sufficient to protect
him from persecution, and an increasing severity of cen-
sorship arose, the full force of which began to be evident
in the time of his son Robert.
After Henri's death his business was for a time carried
on by his widow's second husband, Simon Colines, a
scholar and humanist of brilliant attainments. Both
while at the head of the house of Stephanus and later
when he had withdrawn from that in favor of Robert
Estienne his stepson and set up a separate publishing
business, Colines added much to the prestige of French
printing. He caused Greek fonts to be cast, not inferior
to those of the Venetian printers, and began to publish
the Greek classics in beautiful editions. It was Colines,
rather than either the elder or the younger Estienne, who
elevated the artistic side of French printing by engaging
the services of such famous typographical experts as
Geofroy Tory, and adding to his books illustrations of
18
the highest excellence, as well as decorative initials and
borders. Indeed it may be said that after the death of
Aldus supremacy in the fine art of book-making gradu-
ally passed from Venice to Paris.
The greatest of the Estiennes was Robert, son of Henri
Estienne and stepson of Colines, who was in control of
the house from 1524 to his death in 1559. The very first
book he published was an edition of the Latin Testa-
ment. Although following in the main the Vulgate or
19
official Bible of the Roman Church, he introduced cer-
tain corrections based on his knowledge of the Greek
text. This marked the beginning of a long controversy
between Estienne and the orthodox divines of the Sor-
bonne, which lasted almost throughout his life. In fol-
lowing years he published many editions of the Latin
scriptures, each time with additional corrections, and
eventually with his own notes and comments, in some
cases attacking the received doctrines of the Church. A
Hebrew Old Testament, in 1546, was followed in 1550
by the Greek New Testament. The next year he published
a new edition of the Testament in which for the first
time it was divided into verses, a precedent followed in
Bible printing ever since. It was not merely the fact of
his printing the scriptures at all that angered the heresy-
hunters, but much more Estienne's notes and comments,
in which, like Luther in Germany and Tyndale in Eng-
land, he sided with the views of the Reformers.
What distinguishes Robert Estienne from the ordi-
nary Protestant scholars and publishers of his time is the
fact that he was not only a Reformer but a humanist of
broad and tolerant culture. In all the illustrious group
of that age there is scarcely another like him in this union
of religious zeal and of scholarly culture. Luther and
Calvin and Tyndale had the one; Erasmus is the most
eminent example of the other, with such great publishers
as Aldus and Froben his worthy supporters. But Robert
Estienne, alongside of his controversial works and Bib-
lical texts, labored at such great enterprises as his monu-
mental edition of Terence, in which he corrected by the
soundest methods of textual criticism no less than six
thousand errors in the received text, and especially his
20
magnificent lexicons of the Latin and Greek languages,
which set the standard for all other lexicographers for
generations to come.
The middle of the sixteenth century in France is thus
marked by a curious blend of those two distinct move-
ments in human history which we call the Renaissance
and the Reformation, and the blend is nowhere more
picturesque than in the life of Robert Estienne. At one
moment we find him attacking the abuses of the church,
at another we find him consulting with Claude Gara-
mond upon the design of a new Greek type, or reading
the final proofs of an edition of Horace or Catullus or
Juvenal, or discussing with some wealthy and noble
book-collector like the famous Grolier the latest styles
in elegant bindings and gold-stamped decoration. For
beauty and for truth he had an equal passion. All that
romance of the imagination which touches with a golden
glamour the recovered treasures of pagan antiquity he
loved as intensely as if it were not alien and hostile, as
the many thought, to that glow of spiritual piety, that
zeal of martyrdom, that white, consuming splendor which
for the mystical imagination surrounds the holy cross.
Humanism at its best is ordinarily thought to be embod-
ied in the many-sided figure of Erasmus, with his sanity,
his balance, his power to see both sides, that of Luther
and of the Church, his delicate satire, his saving humor,
his avoidance of the zealot's extremes. Perhaps a not
less striking figure is that of this much less known French
printer, striving in the midst of petty cares and un-
lovely sectarian strife to maintain the stoical serenity of
a Marcus Aurelius side by side with the spiritual exal-
tation of a Saint Paul. There are two types of great men
21
equally worthy of admiration : those of unmixed and life-
long devotion to a single aim springing from a single
source, such as Aldus Manutius, and those in whom that
balance of diverse and almost contradictory elements of
character which commonly leads to weakness makes in-
stead for strength and for richness, for duty and delight.
Such was Robert Estienne.
22
The third printer whom I have selected as typical of the
Renaissance is Johann Froben, of Basel. His chief dis-
tinction is that he was the closest friend and associate
of Erasmus, the principal publisher of Erasmus's works,
and the representative in the book trade of the Eras-
mian attitude toward the Reformation. Although he did
print the Greek Testament, years before Estienne pub-
lished his edition in Paris, he accompanied it with no dis-
tinctively Protestant comments. Although at one time
23
he issued some of the earlier works of Luther, he desisted
when it became evident that Erasmus opposed any open
schism in the Church. It was Froben who gave to the
world those three famous works of Erasmus, the Enco-
mium Moriae or Praise of Folly, the Adagia or Proverbs,
and the Colloquia or Conversations, which did quite as
much as the writings of Luther to arouse independent
thinking within the Church, and to bring to an end the
last vestiges of the middle ages in church and state.
And in this relation of Froben to Erasmus there was not
the mere commercial attitude of a shrewd publisher to-
ward a successful author whose works became highly
lucrative, but the support by one enlightened scholar
who happened to be in a profitable business of another
who happened to be out of it. The earlier life of Erasmus
exhibits a rather depressing illustration of the humilia-
tions to which professional scholars were exposed in try-
ing to get a living from the pensions and benefactions of
the idle rich. Literary patronage, as it existed from the
days of Horace and Maecenas down to the death-blow
which Dr. Johnson gave it in his famous letter to Lord
Chesterfield, has never helped the independence or the
self-respect of scholars and poets. It was Froben 's pecu-
liar good fortune to be able to employ, on a business basis
with a regular salary, the greatest scholar of the age as
one of his editors and literary advisers, and at the
same time enable him to preserve his independence of
thought and of action. Aldus and the French publishers
had gathered about them professional scholars and ex-
perts for the execution of specific tasks at the market
price, supplemented often by generous private hospital-
ity. That was good; but far better was Froben's relation
24
with his friend, his intellectual master, and his profitable
client Erasmus. In an age when no copyright laws exist-
ed for the author's benefit the works of Erasmus were
shamelessly pirated in editions, published in Germany
and France, from which the author received not a penny.
Yet Froben went right on paying to Erasmus not only
the fixed annual salary as a member of his consulting
staff but also a generous share of the profits upon his
books. In a greedy, unscrupulous, and rapacious age this
wise and just, not to say generous, policy stands out as
prophetic of a better time.
As a printer Froben was distinguished by the singular
beauty of his roman type, the perfection of his press-
work, and the artistic decoration of his books. In this
last respect he was much indebted to the genius of Hans
Holbein, whom he discovered as a young wood-engraver
seeking work as Basel. With that keen eye for unrec-
ognized genius which marked his career he employed
Holbein to design borders and initials for his books.
Later, with an equally sagacious and generous spirit, per-
ceiving that the young artist was too great a man to
spend his days in a printing office, he procured for him
through Sir Thomas More an introduction to the court
of Henry VIII, where he won fame and fortune as a por-
trait painter. I narrate the incident because it illustrates
a very attractive and amiable aspect of some of these
men of the Renaissance, an uncalculating and generous
desire to help gifted men to find their true place in the
world where they might do their largest work. This, in an
age when competition and jealous rivalry in public and in
private life was as common as it is now, may give pause
to the cynic and joy to the lover of human kindness.
ANTON KOBERGER
(No printer s mark known)
We are in a different world when we turn to the fourth
of our five representative printers, Anton Koberger, of
Nuremberg. During the forty years of his career as a
publisher, between 1473 and 1513, he issued 236 sepa-
rate works, most of them in several volumes, and of the
whole lot none show any taint of reforming zeal. Kober-
ger was a loyal Catholic, and his published books were
largely theological and all strictly orthodox in nature.
He is distinguished in two respects from the other Ger-
man printers of his time, the time between the death of
Gutenberg and the rise of Martin Luther. In the first
place his work showed great typographical excellence,
with many fonts of handsome Gothic type and a lavish
use of woodcut illustrations. In the secpnd place, his
publishing business was far better organized, far more
extensive in its - selling and distributing machinery,
than that of any other printer in Europe. We learn that
he had agents not only in every German city, but in the
very headquarters of his greatest competitors at Paris,
Venice, and Rome, and in such more distant places as
Vienna, Buda-Pesth, and Warsaw. The twenty-four
presses in his own Nuremberg establishment were not
sufficient for his enormous business, and he let out print-
ing jobs on contract or commission to printers at Stras-
burg, Basel, and elsewhere. The true German spirit of
26
discipline appears in a contemporary account of his print-
ing plant at Nuremberg. He had more than a hundred
workmen there, including not only compositors, press-
men, and proof-readers, but binders, engravers, and
illuminators. All these were fed by their employer in a
common dining-hall apart from the works, and we are
told that they marched between the two buildings three
times a day with military precision.
Koberger employed for a time the services of Albrecht
Diirer, the famous engraver, not only for the illustration
of books but also for expert oversight of the typograph-
ical form. Typography in its golden age was rightly re-
garded not as a mere mechanical trade but as an art of
design, a design in black upon white, in which the just
proportion of columns and margins and tides and initials
was quite as important as the illustrations. Perhaps
Koberger found Diirer too independent or too expensive
for his taste, for we find him in his later illustrated works
employing engravers more prolific than expert. Such
were Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff,
who drew and engraved the two thousand illustrations in
the famous Nuremberg Chronicle published by Koberger
in 1493. This remarkable work was compiled by Doctor
Hartman Schedel, of Nuremberg. It is a history of the
world from the creation down to 1493, with a supple-
ment containing a full illustrated account of the end of
the world, the Millennium, and the last judgment. This
is by no means all. There is combined with this out-
line of history, not less ambitious though perhaps not
more eccentric than H. G. Wells's latest book, a gazet-
teer of the world in general and of Europe in particular,
a portrait gallery of all distinguished men from Adam
27
and Methuselah down to the reigning emperor, kings,
and pope of 1493, with many intimate studies of the
devil, and a large variety of rather substantial and Teu-
tonic angels. Every city in Europe is shown in a front
elevation in which the perspective reminds one of Japan-
ese art, and the castle-towers and bridges and river-
boats all bear a strong family resemblance. The book
is full of curious material, quite apart from the quaint
illustrations. In the midst of grave affairs of state we
run across a plague of locusts, an eclipse of the sun, or a
pair of lovers who died for love. Scandalous anecdotes
of kings and priests jostle the fiercest denunciations of
heretics and reformers. A page is devoted to the here-
sies of Wyclif and Huss. Anti-Semitism runs rampant
through its pages. Various detailed accounts are given
of the torture and murder of Christian boys by Jews,
followed by the capture and burning alive of the con-
spirators. Superstition and intolerance stand side by
side with a naive mystical piety and engaging stories of
the saints and martyrs. Of all the vast transformation in
human thought that was then taking form in Italy, of
all the forward-looking signs of the times, there is little
trace. From 1493 to the last dim ages of the expiring
world, the downfall of Antichrist and the setting up of
the final kingdom of heaven upon earth, seemed but a
little way to Hartman Schedel, when he wrote with
much complacence the colophon to this strange volume.
He left three blank leaves between 1493 and the Day
of Judgment whereon the reader might record what
remained of human history. It is indeed rather the
last voice of the middle ages than the first voice of the
Renaissance that speaks to us out of these clear, black,
28
handsome pages that were pulled damp from the press
four hundred and twenty-eight years ago on the fourth
of last June. At first reading one is moved to mirth, then
to wonder, then perhaps to disgust, but last of all to
the haunting melancholy of Omar the tent-maker when
he sings
"When you and I behind the veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the world shall last."
As to worthy Hartman Schedel, God rest his soul, one
wonders whether he has yet learned that Columbus dis-
covered America. He had not yet heard of it when he
finished his book, though Columbus had returned to
Spain three months before. O most lame and impotent
conclusion! But the fifteenth century, though it had an
infinite childlike curiosity, had no nose for news. Nurem-
berg nodded peacefully on while a new world loomed up
beyond the seas, and studied Michael Wolgemut's pic-
ture of Noah building the ark while Columbus was fit-
ting out the Santa Maria for a second voyage. Such is
mankind, blind and deaf to the greatest things. We know
not the great hour when it strikes. We are indeed most
enthralled by the echoing chimes of the romantic past
when the future sounds its faint far-off reveille upon our
unheeding ears. The multitude understands noon and
night; only the wise man understands the morning.
And now finally, what of William Caxton ? The father of
English printing had been for many years an English
merchant residing in Bruges when his increasing atten-
tion to literature led him to acquire the new art of print-
ing. He had already translated from the French the
Histories of Troy, and was preparing to undertake other
30
editorial labors when he became associated with Colard
Mansion, a Bruges printer. From Mansion he learned
the art and presumably purchased his first press and
type. Six books bearing Caxton 's imprint were published
at Bruges between 1474 and 1476, though it is possible
that the actual printing was done by Mansion rather
than by Caxton himself. In 1476 Caxton set up the
first printing shop in England, in a house within the pre-
cincts of Westminster Abbey. Between that date and
his death in 1491 he printed ninety-three separate works,
some of these in several editions. His industry and schol-
arly zeal as a publisher somewhat exceeded his technical
skill as a printer. Caxton's books, which are now much
rarer than those of many continental printers of the
same period, are not so finely and beautifully done as
the best of theirs. But the peculiar interest of his work
lies in the striking variety of the works he chose for pub-
lication, the conscientious zeal with which he conceived
and performed his task, and the quiet humor of his pref-
aces and notes. Let me illustrate briefly these three
points. First, his variety. We have observed that Aldus
and Froben published chiefly the Latin and Greek clas-
sics, Koberger the Latin scriptures and theological works,
and Stephanus a combination of classics and theology.
Caxton published few of the classics and very little the-
ology. His books consist largely of the works of the early
English poets, Chaucer, Gower, and others, of mediae-
val romances derived from English, French, and Italian
sources, and of chronicles and histories. The two most
famous works that came from his press were the first
printed editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and
Malory's Morte d'Arthur. His own English translation
of the Golden Legend, a mediaeval Latin collection of
lives of the saints, is scarcely less in importance. Among
many other titles the following may serve to show how
unusual and unconventional were his selections:
The History of Reynard the Fox.
The History of Godfrey of Boloyne, or the Conquest
of Jerusalem.
The Fables of Aesop.
The Book of Good Maners.
The Fay tes of Armes and of Chyvalrye.
The Governayle of Helthe.
The Arte and Crafte to Know Well to Dye.
This is indeed humanism, but humanism in a different
sense from that of Aldus and Erasmus. Human life from
the cradle to the grave, human life in war and peace,
human life in its gayer and its graver lights and shadows,
human life as embodied equally in famous writers and
in anonymous popular legends, was Caxton's field. He
accounted nothing human alien to his mind or to his
great enterprise.
Again, Caxton was conscientious. He set great store
by accuracy, not only typographical accuracy in mat-
ters of detail, but also the general accuracy of the texts
or sources from which his own translations and his edi-
tions of other works were made. For example, in the
second edition of the Canterbury Tales he explains how
the first edition was printed from the best manuscript
that he could find in 1478, but how after the appear-
ance of that there came to him a scholar who com-
plained of many errors, and spoke of another and more
32
authentic manuscript in his father's possession. Caxton
at once agreed to get out a new edition "whereas before
by ignorance I erred in hurting and defaming his book
in divers places, in setting in some things that he never
said nor made and leaving out many things that are
made which are requisite to be set in." A great many
other examples of such disinterested carefulness are to
be found in the history of those busy fifteen years at
Westminster. In view of the fact that he was not only
editor, printer, and publisher, but also translated twenty-
three books totaling more than forty-five hundred printed
pages, this scholarly desire for accuracy deserves the high-
est praise. Unlike Aldus and Froben, who were like-
wise editors as well as publishers, he was not surrounded
by a capable corps of expert scholars, but worked almost
alone. His faithful foreman, Wynkyn de Worde, doubt-
less took over gradually a large share of the purely
mechanical side of the business, but Caxton remained
till the end of his life the active head as well as the
brains of the concern.
As for his humor, it comes out even in his very selec-
tions of books to be printed, but chiefly in little touches
all through his prefaces. For example, in his preface to
the Morte d'Arthur he answers with a certain whimsical
gravity the allegations of those who maintain that there
was no such person as King Arthur, and that "all such
books as been made of him be but feigned and fables."
He recounts with assumed sincerity the evidence of the
chronicles, the existence of Arthur's seal in red wax at
Westminster Abbey, of Sir Gawain's skull at Dover
Castle, of the Round Table itself at Winchester, and so
on. But he goes on to say, in his own quaint way, which
33
there is not space to quote at large, that in his own
opinion the stories are worth while for the intrinsic inter-
est and the moral values in them, whether they are liter-
ally true or not. He closes thus:
"Herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity,
friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate
virtue and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall
bring you to good fame and renommee. And for to pass the time
this book shall be pleasant to read in, but for to give faith and
belief that all is true that is contained herein, ye be at your
liberty."
This wise, sane, gentle apostle of literature in England
wrought well in his day, and is justly honored alike by
scholars and by printers, who regard him, in England and
America, as the father of their craft. Indeed to this day
in the printing trade a shop organization is sometimes
called a chapel, because according to ancient tradition
Caxton's workmen held their meetings in one of the
chapels adjoining the abbey of Westminster.
This survey of printing in its relations to the Renais-
sance is now not finished but concluded. I have shown
that the invention and improvement of printing was not
the cause but rather the effect of the revival of learning,
while on the other hand the wide dissemination of liter-
ature made possible by typography of course accelerated
enormously the process of popular enlightenment. I have
selected five typical printers of that age:
34
Aldus, with his Homer.
Stephanus, with his Greek Testament.
Froben, with his Plato.
Koberger, with his Nuremberg Chronicle.
Caxton, with his Morte d' Arthur.
Here we find represented in the Aldus Homer the re-
vival of Greek learning, in the Stephanus Testament the
application of this to the free criticism of the scriptures,
in the Froben Plato the substitution of Platonic ideal-
ism for the scholastic philosophy based on Aristotle, in
the Nuremberg book the epitome of mediaeval super-
stition, credulity, and curiosity on the verge of the new
era, and in Morte d'Arthur the fond return of the modern
mind, facing an unknown future, upon the naive and
beautiful legends of Arthurian romance. An age full of
contradictions and strange delusions, but an age of
great vitality, great eagerness, great industry, patience,
foresight, imagination. And in such an age it was the
good fortune of these wise craftsmen who handled so
deftly their paper and type to be the instruments of
more evangels than angels ever sang, more revolutions
than gunpowder ever achieved, more victories than ever
won the applause of men or the approval of heaven. In
the beginning the creative word was Fiat lux let there
be light. In the new creation of the human mind it was
Imprimatur let it be printed. If printing had never
been invented, it is easy to conceive that the enormous
learning and intellectual power of a few men in each
generation might have gone on increasing so that the
world might to-day possess most of the knowledge that
we now enjoy; but it is certain that the masses could
35
never have been enlightened, and that therefore the gulf
between the wise few and the ignorant many would have
exceeded anything known to the ancient world, and
inconceivably dangerous in its appalling social menace.
Whoever first printed a page of type is responsible for
many crimes committed in the name of literature during
the past four centuries; but one great book in a genera-
tion or a century, like a grain of radium in a ton of pitch-
blende, is worth all it has cost; for like the radium it is
infinitely powerful to the wise man, deadly to the fool,
and its strange, invisible virtue so far as we know may
last forever.
DESIGNED BY BRUCE ROGERS AND PRINTED
FROM MONOTYPE CASLON TYPE BY WILLIAM
EDWIN RUDGE AT MOUNT VERNON NEW YORK
IN DECEMBER 1921.
OF THIS EDITION ONE HUNDRED COPIES ARE
ON FRENCH HAND-MADE PAPER AND FIVE
HUNDRED ON ANTIQ.UEWOVE PAPER.
W31 2
6
''<??.
