nothing is recorded in the lists of Aldine imprints. Like many of his colleagues, no doubt, Aldus spent his time trying to collect what was due from his correspondents in other cities. During 1508 the workmen were kept occupied by two large volumes, the Adagii of Erasmus, with 276 leaves, and the first volume of Rhetores Graeci, with 375. These were followed in November of this year by an octavo Plinius Secundus, the first complete edition of the Epistles, from an ancient manuscript which a Venetian ambassador had brought to him from Paris.
      The name of ANDREAS TORRESANUS DE ASULA appears in the colophon of the 1508 Pliny for the first time as a partner of Aldus. This suggests that some financial rearrangement had become necessary, or else that the health of Aldus was failing, for the two names continue until the latter's death in April, 1515. Torresanus then assumed the direction of the establishment, assisted by his two sons, and retaining the phrase "In aedibus Aldi" in the imprints. They maintained the reputation of the press for excellent printing, if they could not add to its standing among scholars.
      After Torresanus died, in 1529, all book-making ceased until 1533, when PAUL MANUTIUS, the son of Aldus, came of age. He at once entered upon a life-long effort to renew the prestige of the press. He sought out his father's old friends whose gatherings had made the Aldine house the literary centre of / p.67 / Venice, and tried to interest his own scholarly contemporaries in the attempt to stave off the decadence of the city. He bought new fonts of type; where Lyons and Paris had copied his father, he now sent his commissions to the famous French type designer Claude Garamond. It was a losing struggle, and his own real interests were elsewhere. The family tradition made him a scholar even more than a printer. The five years from 1556 to 1561 were devoted to a proposed "Academia della Fama," which was to draw to Venice the most learned men who could be attracted by generous patronage, from all the world; then the merchant who had promised an endowment failed, but not before it had been demonstrated that much more besides money is needed to make such a plan successful. The printer was called to Rome by Pope Pius IV, to undertake an equally ambitious plan for printing everything which it was desirable that the faithful should read, with the revisions made necessary by the decrees of the Council of Trent. Once more it proved easier to promise money than to provide the time which such an undertaking requires.
      The second ALDUS MANUTIUS, born in 1547, was placed in charge of the Venice establishment in 1565, and spent much of the ensuing decade until the death of his father, Paul, in 1574, trying to make some profitable arrangement by which it might be carried on by more experienced manage-/ p.68 / ment without loss of the inherited prestige. Even his marriage to an heiress of the famous printing family of the Giuntas of Florence did not bring successful direction to the Venice business. The younger Aldus was even more famous than his father for great learning. He was an infant prodigy for erudition, and it was said that he edited, or helped his father to edit, the Epistles of Cicero, at the age of twelve. After 1576, having leased the right to use the press and the famous trade-mark, he devoted himself to the more congenial profession of teaching Belles Lettres. He died, the last of the family, in 1597. Hailed as the most learned man of his time, he lived too late; learning had become erudition, and the Renaissance had given way to the modern world.

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WHEN the French troops occupied northern Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth century, JEAN GROLIER accompanied them as the financial representative of the royal treasury. He came of a family of Italian bankers, settled at Lyons, and made his own prosperous career in official positions, rising to the dignity and responsibility of treasurer to the Crown. He was also, for more than half a century, the greatest collector of his time, the sixteenth-century successor to the earlier Medici. He established a reputation in bookish circles as the model for book-collectors. This rests upon two characteristics, a generous patronage of the book-makers who were producing fine work, and the most careful treatment of his possessions. The binding with which he had his books covered are so famous that there is a common misconception that he was himself a book-binder. He maintained a staff of craftsmen in his own palace, employing the most skilful artisans, who developed the characteristic designs which have come to be known as Grolieresque. The typical feature of these is the interlacing of ribbons of various harmonious colors to make a design or border on the sides of the bindings. Similar designs were executed by other binders for other patrons, / p.70 / especially in Italy, and they have been copied with great skill and remarkable ability in giving the appearance of sixteenth-centuy workmanship. Grolier's own books sometimes contain his motto, and the friendly inscription "J. Grolierii et amicorum," and this is more frequently found stamped at the foot of the binding. The phrase was not his alone, for it is also found on the bindings executed for two contemporary collectors, Thomas Maioli*

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   * [Handwritten note in book, Ed:] Thomas MAHIEU, Secretary to Queen Catherine de Medici. See G.D. Hobson, Maioli, Canevari and others, 1926.
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of Asti and Marc Lauwrin of Bruges.
   Grolier, while his headquarters were at Milan, became acquainted with Aldus and established a lifelong friendship with his family. He kept informed about what the press was doing, and had a standing order for several copies of each important book, on vellum or on extra fine paper if possible. He also commissioned work to be done on his own account. Aldus in turn dedicated books to the patron, expressing his appreciation in the prefatory epistles. This was the most famous of these friendships, but Geofroy Tory and others of the Paris printers were equally in his favor.
      The name of an owner occurs on bindings much less frequently than the crest or coat of arms, or a personal device. These go with special bindings, which were customary when books were ordinarily kept in stock in sheets, to be bound when sold, so that this did not imply the destruction of an original cover except in the case of older manuscript works. [ p.71 ] The use of a bookplate as a sign of ownership, also, had already begun. The earliest known may even be older than typography, for it has the name of the owner, Hans Igler, cut on the block with a crude design much like the little woodcut pictures of saints.
      HILDEBRANDE BRANDENBURG established a noteworthy place for himself in bookish annals by inserting an attractive plate, an angel holding a shield with the family arms, in the books that he gave to the Carthusian monastery at Buxheim toward the end of the fifteenth century. The library of this house was dispersed during the French Revolution, and volumes containing this plate are now widely scattered amongst appreciative collectors. The earliest dated plate is a woodcut designed by ALBRECHT DÜRER in 1516 for Hieronymous Ebner. Another Dürer plate is even more famous, executed on copper in 1524, with the portrait of the owner, BILIBALD PIRCKHEIMER. He was a Nuremberg jurist, who became councillor to Maximilian I, and maintained an active correspondence with the leading humanists of his time. He also had another Dürer plate, and a third one by another designer. Some twenty armorial designs are listed as Dürer's which may have been used as bookplates, and there are similar engravings credited to Lucas Cranach, Jost Amman, and Hans Trochsel.

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THE ESTIENNE family at Paris was a rival to that of Aldus for three generations, along closely parallel lines. The first HENRI ESTIENNE, Étienne, or Stephanus, acquired an active business in 1501 when he married Guyonne, the widow of Jean Higman. Higman had established a strong University connection, and this was broadened by his successor. For twenty years Estienne printed solid works on theology and philosophy, and orthodox scientific treatises, edited by the leading professors of the Sorbonne. His son Robert set up for himself in 1525 through an amicable arrangement with his stepfather, Simon de Colines, who has taken Estienne's place as the third husband of Guyonne and the manager of the printing establishment.
      ROBERT ESTIENNE was a good printer, and a scholar of distinction who took an important part in bringing the Renaissance to France. The story is that, when he was asked to reprint the standard Latin Dictionary of Calepin, he found that this was so far behind the movement of linguistic scholarship that he decided it would be easier to make up a new work than to correct the errors in the old one; and as he could not find anyone to do this to his satisfaction, he prepared the new one himself. This / p.73 / "Thesaurus linguae Latinae" occupied him for nearly two years, appearing in 1532, when he was thirty years old. His wife was the daughter of BADIUS ASCENSIUS, the most noted editor of that time, whose works were recognized as authoritative and enjoyed a wide sale throughout Europe. Badius was provided with a press in his own house, so that he might direct the printing of his publications and secure the utmost accuracy with an economy of time and effort. The books from this press, known as the Praelum Ascensianum, are still in demand, less for the learned editing than because of the printer's mark, which is a view of a printing shop giving one of the earliest representations of a press in operation.
      Robert Estienne began his career by revising the text of the New Testament exactly as the scholars of his day were dealing with other ancient texts. He based his work on the original versions which had been made available in the famous COMPLUTENSIAN POLYGLOTT edition, issued under the auspices of Cardinal Ximenes at Alcalâ in 1514-1517. Except for the Psalter published by Giustiniani at Genoa in 1516, — with the text in Hebrew, a literal Latin rendering, the Latin Vulgate, the Greek Septuagint, Arabic, and Chaldee, — the monumental Spanish work was the first edition of the Scriptures which recognized that the accepted versions were merely translations from older and more authorita- / p.74 / tive texts in other less familiar languages. This implied a recognition of the fact that the accepted versions were subject to corrections which might alter the meaning or the significance of passages which the movement of the Reformation had already made subjects of controversy.
      Violent protests were at once voiced at the Sorbonne against the audacity of Robert Estienne, a mere lad, in issuing his highly controversial revision of Holy Writ, and in printing it in octavo, the undiginified format of books intended for sale to the many. Estienne met this challenge by completing his textual examination of the rest of the Bible. He published the first of several complete editions in 1528. The officials of the Sorbonne threatened extreme measures to suppress his activities, but the French Crown protected the printer, in part perhaps because he was doing the Court circle a real service by distracting the attention of the theologians from others in high station whose opinions were tending away from traditional orthodoxy. When the controversy became more annoying, in 1534, Francis I issued a peremptory order forbidding all printing. This produced another unexpected trouble, for the Parliament refused to register the decree. A revised order, forbidding the printing of new books, met the same refusal, and when the King accepted the situation, the first move had been won in the struggle for the FREEDOM OF THE / p.75 / PRESS. It was a very limited freedom according to modern ideas, but of fundamental importance as recognizing a principle. Francis I died in 1547, and soon afterward Robert Estienne left Paris under the protection of the friendly Bishop of Meaux.
      Geneva welcomed the printer who had championed the fundamentals of the reform movement; but Estienne soon found that it was easier to combat the unified hostility of his Parisian enemies than to make a living trying to please the highly individualistic groups of religious innovators who congregated at the centre of Calvinism. His last decade of unimportant work ended with his death in 1559.
      A second HENRI ESTIENNE, son of Robert, born in 1528, began collating ancient manuscripts before he was twenty. Primarily a hellenist, he began his career as a printer in 1557 at Geneva, by bringing out editions of five Greek authors who were virtually inedited, which is evidence that they were authors for whose writings there was no demand. For the next decade he was subsidized by a cadet of the family of Fugger, the great Augsburg merchant house. In 1569 he issued a printed circular letter to his correspondents, explaining that his failure to answer letters was due to the fact that since 1562 he had been preoccupied by the task of keeping two presses busy printing a Greek Thesaurus compiled on a new method. This appeared in 1572. Before [ p.76 ] there was time for any general sale, a compact abridgement containing all the essential novelties of the compendious work was put on the market by Estienne's assistant and proof-reader, Jean Scapula. Scapula claimed that he had urged Estienne to issue this himself, but the latter foresaw its inevitable effect upon the larger work, and refused to do it. Scapula had it printed elsewhere; and the sale of the Thesaurus scarcely met the bills for paper. Estienne spent most of his remaining years travelling from fair to fair all over Europe, seeking buyers. In 1598 he died, alone, in the city hospital at Lyons. His daughter married Isaac Casaubon, through whom the scholarly inheritance of the Estiennes passed to England.

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IN 1521 the first Henri Estienne died and SIMON DE COLINES became the widow's most distinguished husband. He maintained the former prestige of the printing house as a resort for learned men, rivalling in this the Aldine "Academy" at Venice. He added to the fame of the press for its correct and authoritative texts an even greater reputation for elegant typography and beautiful press-work. Its long list of publications already included several groups of books on closely related subjects. Colines developed these into definite series. He issued them with new woodcut designs for the title-pages, carefully using the same style for all the books in a series, so that they could be easily recognized by purchasers.
      Simon de Colines's greatest contribution to the fame of the establishment came when he recognized the genius of GEOFROY TORY and employed him to design decorations for its books. Tory had been a professor of philosophy and the classics and a student of geography before he gave himself up to an overpowering desire to express himself artistically. In later years he became a printer on his own account, a reformer of the French language, and an innovator in its alphabetic symbols. He brought about the abandonment of the traditional black- / p.78 / letter type in favor of the modern roman letter; he introduced the ç, and gave a tremendous impetus to self-consciousness among the French printers, leading them to consider their responsibility for the contents as well as the appearance of the books on which they put their names.
      Geofroy Tory's claim to genius, as the greatest of all decorators of typography, rests upon the ornaments that he designed while he was in the service

Enlargement

THE Era of the Master Printers ended with CHRISTOPHE PLANTIN. Since his time there have been many great masters of printing establishments who were practical craftsmen, some of whom, like the two Charles Whittinghams, have profoundly influenced the development of book-making. Before Plantin, from the days of Koberger and of the early Venetians, there had been owners of printing plants whose business ability made them sellers rather than makers of books. But it was the Master, exercising a direct oversight of the activities of compositors, pressmen, and binders, who gave to the industry its characteristic features down to the later decades of the sixteenth century. After 1600 the publisher dominated the craftsman.
      ANTWERP, the capital of the Spanish Netherlands, was supplanting Venice as the world's shipping metropolis before 1550. The printers already controlled one quarter of the town, and had begun to rival the Italians as purveyors of books, without taking anything away from the older city. The social and economic changes of half a century had doomed the books — treatises on the Canon Law, the Church Fathers, mediaeval medical works, editions of the ancient Classics made authoritative by the names of famous scholars — which were still the / p.82 / backbone of the Venetian book trade. Instead of these books, which appealed to those who longed for culture and learning, hundreds of Antwerp workmen were prosperously employed in making books which were intended to entertain the readers. They were printed in every European language, in quantities as much larger than the editions of those other more respectable works as they are now more difficult to find. Rarely does the hunter through the old bookshops come upon an Antwerp sixteenth-century imprint; and when he does, he may not recognize it, for the title-page is apt to say that it was printed at Paris or Philopolis or some equally improbable locality.
      Christophe Plantin was a young French bookbinder seeking his fortune when he went to Antwerp in 1549. He made his way to recognition by the court officials, until an injury forced him to abandon his trade and take up the lighter physical labor of printing. By 1559 he had won a position which gave him the commission for printing the monumental volume containing the official record of the ceremonies attending the funeral of Charles the Fifth. This led to other similar tasks executed for the government, which gave him contemporary fame, and eventual bankruptcy. He built up a sound business, and prospered whenever he was free to attend to this. But like many another, the fascination of doing a grand book was more than he / p.83 / could resist, and then as always it was impossible to do the monumental volume, to his own critical satisfaction, without exceeding the amount which seems proper to a layman unfamiliar with the time and attention imperatively demanded by a piece of fine printing.
      Plantin's grandest idea became a reality through the assistance of Spanish ecclesiastical and court officials. Fifty years before, another Spaniard, Cardinal Ximenes, had fostered the first Polyglott bible. This had long been unprocurable by scholars, and Plantin proposed to issue a more adequate work which should include the texts of the Holy Scriptures in all the languages from which they are derived. Philip II became interested in the idea and promised to subsidize it. The royal promises were ample to justify the venture; but the royal treasurer had many other claims upon the funds in hand, and with the best of intentions, Philip was unable to do all that he meant to. Plantin began by training a special staff of workmen. A Hebrew Grammar was printed to familiarize them with this language, and when he found a satisfactory proof-reader, he married him to a daughter, that there might be less danger of losing him. New fonts of type were ordered from Robert Granjon of Lyons and Claude Garamond of Paris. The initial order for paper called for 3000 reams, and 400 dozen skins were ordered for the vellum copies.

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      Sample pages of the Polyglott, with the text in four languages, were shown at the Franckfurt book fair in 1566. There was talk of a rival work under Lutheran auspices, with the Elector of Saxony as patron, but it was obvious that the effort to print the two would be suicidal for both. It was this danger — that the undertaking might be contaminated by Protestant influence — which helped to convince Philip II that it must be done under Spanish control. By midsummer of 1568 the specimen sheets had received final approval, and a few months later the work started. Forty workmen, with two, and later four, presses, were kept steadily employed for three years. The edition was 1200 copies, on paper of four different sizes, and thirteen copies on vellum for the King. The number of volumes in which it was bound varies from six on the ordinary paper to eleven for those on vellum. It was completed in 1572.
      Plantin's Polyglott Bible is still unrivalled as a printer's achievement. But the printer had to pay his workmen in order that the work might not stop, and when the remittances from the Spanish treasury did not arrive, he had to turn to a public-spirited Jewish money-lender, Louis Perez, who must have known how precarious was the security. The King endeavored to help the situation, and made it worse by ordering a series of large service books which he thought of presenting to each [ p.85 ] church in the kingdom. This did not please the printers of Spain, who made their influence felt, and the plan was given up after Plantin had committed himself to further heavy expenditures. A more than tangible reward was a royal grant giving him a monopoly for printing the authorized service books for the Spanish domains.
      Plantin died in 1589, and the business passed to a son-in-law, JEAN MORETUS, who had advanced money to keep it going. Abandoning all other lines, Moretus and his successors devoted their attention to the monopoly of service books. The mark of the compass was no longer found on handsome books, but the profits of the establishment steadily accumulated. The business remained in the family and was carried on in the original Plantin house until 1876, when the city of Antwerp and the Belgium government united to purchase it as a public museum. Plantin was a sound business man in principle if not always in practice, keeping all of his account books carefully and preserving his correspondence. These documentary records supplement the actual presses, fonts of type, and cases filled with woodblocks and metal cuts, with the desks of the proof-readers and the incidental paraphernalia of a sixteenth-century printing office, all together making this museum the most significant and instructive of printing meccas.

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PRINTER'S MARK OF CHRISTOPHE PLANTIN
Enlargement

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