Printing, Literacy & Bookselling in Early Renaissance Venice; Zoomed talk by Patricia Erskine-Hill, 25 September 2020

 

While for Shelley it may have been a case of

"Underneath Day’s azure eyes

 Ocean’s nursling, Venice, lies"       

Patricia Erskine-Hill, delivering the latest instalment  of Winchelsea’s Zoom Chronicles, had a different Venice in mind; a fully-weaned maritime power reaping the commercial harvest of a location straddling the main East-West and North-South trade routes and the metropole of an Empire incorporating Corfu, Cyprus, Crete and the Dalmatian coast. By the mid-15^th century, Venice was the industrial powerhouse of its day with the Arsenale naval yard producing 300 ships a year by virtue of an advanced assembly line using a novel modular construction method.

In 1462, an obscure German conflict, the Baden-Palatinate War, saw Mainz sacked and Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing presses destroyed casting his crew of trained printers adrift to seek another European haven  to  foster their craft. The Papal and Neapolitan courts were the initial magnets but some individuals drifted back north to wealthy, cosmopolitan Venice and set up shop there. At this time, print was challenging an established manuscript culture. Laboriously crafted, usually by monks, on expensive vellum (calfskin) these were a niche product for the weighty purses of the European elite and although they were widely distributed even the rich would only possess a few scripts. The scribes were artists whose skill delivered beautiful texts enlivened by a constellation of illustrations. Ownership conferred a social cachet and the manuscript market lasted for several decades after the coming of print. 

The tradition of literature presented as a thing of beauty was duly absorbed by the artisans of print and the audience was treated to a series of delightful slides demonstrating the work of the Venetian publishers, each of whom developed a characteristic “house style”. The format of the text varied with subject matter e.g. theology scripts came in a red and black Gothic font and in the early  days the surrounding illustrations were done by hand. Aldo Manuzio gave us italic script which allowed a more efficient use of page space and was used for more personal material. These printer/publishers were highly educated with Manuzio’s family famously conversing in classical Greek at home. His equally cerebral rival, Marcolini, was a confidant of Titian and publisher of Dante. His work was characterised by spare, plain text set in a clean, uncluttered layout. Their output was mainly Latin and Greek classics and  religious and devotional works which even featured exotic hybrids like a Book of Hours in Arabic. Other staples were fortune telling, cartomancy, chivalric romances drenched in lust and gore and subversive works like Boccaccio’s Decameron  - awash with obscenity and anti-clerical sentiment. Such specialised creativity was a target for plagiarists and although Manuzio had copyright  or “privilege” laws passed, the writ of the Venetian Republic did not run in Lyon or Breslau. Manuzio introduced the Octavo (i.e. Folio folded x3) format and targeted Army officers as a potential market for these” pocket books”.      

Although much more productive than its predecessor, print was still the province of the craftsman. The initial capital investment was substantial -a printing press and  movable type made by highly skilled cutters for whom Greek, Arabic and Hebrew script  proved particularly challenging. The fonts were made from an alloy of lead, tin and the highly toxic antimony.  and each press needed two compositors, two pressmen and an apprentice The last graduated to journeyman which often entailed becoming a travelling salesman for the firm. .Paper was made from rags and relatively expensive and the paper mills in Treviso and Parma had to increase their output  to meet the rising demand. An average print run at this stage consisted ,of around 400 copies although Manuzio had gone to 3000 copies for popular works. The minimum viable run was 100 copies. The workforce was drawn from the cittadini originali, the Venetian citizenry, and had to be literate, numerate and have a working knowledge of Latin. 

The readership was drawn from the nobility, the clergy, the merchant class and the upper echelon of artisans. 33% of adult males and 13% of females (nuns and wives and daughters of the elite) could read with half the literate males knowing Latin.  In Venice, the Rialto bridge and the streets of  Le Mercerie were favoured pitches for book sales. Publishing was an international trade and family networks helped distribution across Europe and the Levant. Northern Europe was the main market and large bookfairs were held in Strasbourg and Nuremburg. Lasting legacies of  this period were the refinement of punctuation with the introduction of the colon and semicolon, the use of annotations and the glossary, in a  move towards the standardisation of language.   

Decline of the Venetian book trade set in around 1560 as competition increased in the secular book market. The city’s open, liberal,  commercial  ethos drew it to the attention of Protestant Reformers who saw a potential door into Italy. As all Monty Python fans would have expected ,  this occurred to the Counter-Reformation Inquisition too and they firmly closed the door. Their introduction of pre-publication censorship reduced the industry’s responsiveness and  popular appeal.

For the sensualists among the Lit. Soc. membership  Patricia Erskine -Hill’s talk would have been illuminating and inspiring, encouraging them to continue to savour the appearance and the feel of a book while naturally retaining their ability to eschew judging it by its cover. 

 William Doherty

 

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