BOOK: Aldus Manutius, "Humanism and the Latin Classics"

Aldus Manutius: Humanism and the Latin Classics. Edited and translated by John N. Grant. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 78. Harvard University Press, 2017. 9780674971639. xxxi + 414 pp.

This is a sequel or companion volume to the previous book of Aldus's prefaces, which I posted about a few months ago. This one includes his prefaces to books in Latin as opposed to Greek; most were works of ancient Roman authors, but there were a few books by Aldus's humanist contemporaries. Overall my impression is similar as with the previous volume: mostly nothing here is terribly exciting by itself (but then, it would be unreasonable to expect a publisher's prefaces to make for exciting reading), but there are enough interesting random tidbits here and there to make the book an enjoyable read, especially in moderate doses.

The translator's introduction is very interesting and gives us more details about Aldus's life and work than I remember from the previous volume. I was surprised to learn that he only owned a 10% share of his publishing business; two other people owned the rest (p. xii). There are also some interesting remarks about how much more expensive and time-consuming it was to print books in Greek than in Latin, partly due to all the ligatures and the like, partly because compositors made more mistakes and proofreading took more time; and besides, the market for them was smaller (p. xiii–iv). One rival even tried to cut costs by printing everything in uppercase! (P. xiii.)

I also liked the discussion of Aldus's marketing efforts (p. xvii); he issued catalogues, wrote prefaces that partly functioned as advertisements, and introduced his famous logo (pp. xix–xx) to promote his brand name. His books are still famous for their design, but the quality of the texts themselves “was a hit-or-miss affair” (p. xxiii). Well, he certainly likes to complain that his rivals' books are full of errors (pp. 161, 207).

One of his most famous innovations was publishing more things in a smaller format, which I think is mentioned more in this volume than it was in the previous one. (p. xiv–v). His word for a book in this format was “enchiridium”, i.e. something that can be held in the hand; I guess it's from the same Greek word that gave us chiromancy for palm-reading. Previously this format was mostly used for some religious books so people could carry them to church etc., but Aldus's innovation was to publish classical authors in this format (n. 27 on p. 325). See also n. 125 on p. 338. He also argued that his font added to the convenience of the format (n. 160, p. 341). He says that he got the idea of the pocket-book format from the manuscript library of Bernardo Bembo, father of the better-known Pietro (p. 163) There's a letter from a Hungarian prelate, Sigismund Thurzó, praising the format: “certain books which were of pocket-book size and which because of their convenience gave me marvelous pleasure. [. . .] had a much better text and were printed in a much more beautiful font” etc.(p. 243).

Another topic that appears several times here but that I don't remember from the previous volume are Aldus's complaints about his employees. “Unrest among Aldus' employees was not uncommon” (note 16, p. 324). He complaints about “the hostility of scoundrels and members of my household, and the plotting of workers who were no better than damnable runaway slaves” (p. 11). “I have also been the victim of four conspiracies of my labores and workmen in my publishing house, led by Avarice, the mother of all evils.” (P. 245) :))

Some of these conspiracies apparently involved publishing pirated imitations of Aldus's books in Lyons, resulting in hilarious complaints about those smelly Frenchmen: “the paper in their books is of an inferior quality and is somewhat malodorous while the font, if one looks carefully at it, smacks of a certain ‘Frenchness,’ so to speak, and the capitals are quite ugly.” :))) (P. 247.)

Some of his books contained both a Greek text and its translation in Latin, but instead of simply printing them on facing pages, he had a strange and complicated system of printing some quires all in Greek and some all in Latin, then included instructions to the reader on how to bind them into something halfway decent (p. 15; but it was still a mess). Apparently the idea was that readers who were good enough at Greek could, if they wanted, just bind the Greek quires and throw the Latin ones away. There's even an appendix by the translator to clarify his instructions; I was relieved to learn that this practice was abandoned after his death (p. 311).

I was impressed by his efforts to obtain new manuscripts of works that he hadn't printed yet; we find him communicating with Poles, Hungarians, and occasionally his efforts extend “as far as Romania” (p. 41), though some of this may be an exaggeration (note 3 on p. 322).

In my post about the previous volume I mentioned his term “buriers of books” (bibliotaphs) for those who held onto their manuscripts and refused to make them available for printing. He uses the word again here (p. 47), but a note by the translator (n. 106, p. 337) says that the term had actually been coined by Michael Apostolis.

In some instances, Aldus's printed editions preserved works that would otherwise be lost, i.e. the manuscripts he worked with are no longer extant (e.g. the work of Julius Obsequens, n. 200, p. 346).

In one of his prefaces, Aldus quotes from Ovid's Fasti: “The earth is like a ball, propped up by no support,/ its great weight hanging in the suspended air” (p. 61). It's nice to see that the idea of a spherical earth was already well-known in ancient times.

In another preface, he quotes from Martial: “If you are poor, Aemilianus, you will always be poor. Nowadays only the rich receive money.” (P. 177.) I guess that some things never change...

A curious quote on p. 197: “A long time has taught lions to obey humans, along time has eaten away rocks with gentle water.” The translator's note says it's from Tibullus. What was he smoking? Lions obeying humans? Maybe when you order them to eat people in the arena...

One of his books contains a colour map; “[t]he coloring was done by hand” (n. 248, p. 351). His preface included a legend, and he couldn't resist entering into a discussion of the Greek names of colours and what exactly they meant (pp. 109–10). :)

On one occasion Aldus himself has some misgivings about the long-term effects of the technology of printing: “First of all, we see the kind of artisans into whose hands the sacred monuments of literature have fallen; secondly, we know how certain men with little education dare to explain, comment on and emend every book.” (P. 189.) He is on to something — but oh, if he thinks printing is bad, he can count himself lucky that he did not live to see what we did with blogs and social media :]

Aldus also wrote a textbook on Latin grammar (and published it — so I guess that technically it was self-published :P). It was reasonably succesful, though not as much as some others (p. 365, n. 51). In the preface he criticizes the practice of learning grammar rules by heart, and suggests learning Cicero's writings by heart instead (p. 199). Well, I guess that technically counts as an improvement...

One of the prefaces is dedicated “to the divine Lucrezia Borgia” (p. 217), whom he praises as “having lived the most praiseworthy of lives” and possessing “outstanding virtues” (p. 219). “What can I say of your devotion to God and all the saints, of your generosity toward the poor, of your kindness to your fellow citizens, of your just treatment of anyone?” (P. 221.) I was very surprised by all this, because my impression of Lucrezia Borgia so far has mostly been that her virtues consisted of being pimped out by her father, the pope, to various cardinals and noblemen for political purposes. But then, perhaps I shouldn't be learning my history from gloriously lurid quasi-biographical novels and Assassin's Creed games... :))

There's an interesting letter from one Giovanni Giocondo, describing the work of editing ancient texts from manuscripts and pointing out how much work is involved in this, especially when dealing with numerous and/or corrupt manuscripts (pp. 255–7). This reminded me of a remark I recently read somewhere else: “the worst texts, e.g. that of Propertius, are often so corrupt that in a given place each particular MS has only gibberish. In such a case modern editors can construct a tentative text only because each MS seems to retain different scraps of the truth.”

This book has unusually many misprints: missing hyphens (“nobl|man”, p. xii; “man|script”, p. xxx); “what can me more delightful” on p. 25; a missing full-stop after “lifetime” on p. 73. And a very curious quirk: on p. xix, the ó in the name “Thurzó” looks very unusual — I suspect it's actually a Greek omicron: Thurzό. In Móré on the same page they use a normal-looking ó. I wonder how this happened.

I learned an interesting new word on p. 277: “supposititious”. At first I thought it was a misprint, but it seems to be a real word, and apparently means the same thing as the more normal-looking suppositious.

ToRead:

• Note 12 on p. xxviii mentions a book titled Aldus Manutius and the Development of Greek Script and Type (1992) — sounds interesting.
• N. G. Wilson: From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (1992). Mentioned here on p. 321.