A piece in the New York Times last week alerted me to a tribute to the Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius on display at New York City’s posh Grolier Club. As the head (and only member) of CreativeLive’s New
A piece in the New York Times last week alerted me to a tribute to the Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius on display at New York City’s posh Grolier Club. As the head (and only member) of CreativeLive’s New York City office, I took it upon myself to see the exhibit.
Manutius, a Venetian, blind to other pursuits, was a pivotal figure in the early printing era, responsible for the very first printed editions of many of the great works of Greek literature that survive to this day, from Plato to Herodotus.
He also invented italics.
If you look at this woodcut of St. Catherine of Siena, from an edition of the Epistole Devotissime printed in 1500, you’ll notice that she has a book open in her right hand. On the pages of that book are 5 words that represent the debut of italic type, inspired by handwritten cursive writing and designed by Manutius’s typographer, Francesco Griffo. Manutius used italics to squeeze more words on a line, allowing him to create pocket-sized editions that people could carry with them, a sort of Sony Walkman of reading.
Eventually Aldus created an entire Portable Library of classics. Thus, artistic innovation was driven by commercial need. (Are you taking notes?)
Manutius wanted to create a product that filled a hole in the marketplace: affordable editions of great, then-dwindling Greek and Latin works that you could carry everywhere.
Soon, people were reading Sophocles and Horace while waiting in line for Shakespeare in the Park tickets (the difference being Shakespeare was literally in that park) and the op-eds were complaining about how everyone had their noses buried in these newfangled gadgets and that nobody really talked anymore.
Five words were just the beginning; in 1501, Manutius published a collection of the works of Virgil entirely in italics. (Did I mention that he also introduced the semicolon’s use to print?)
What most impresses me