Printing and Publishing

The development of printing was one of the most important events of the Renaissance, with a major impact on many aspects of society. Printing promoted literacy by making the written word available to a larger public. It was also a key element in the spread of religious, social, and artistic ideas throughout northern Europe.

ORIGINS OF PRINTING

Before the invention of printing, books were produced and copied by hand, which made them both rare and expensive. In addition, the earliest books in Europe had pages of parchment—an expensive material made from animal skins. As a result, book ownership was largely limited to very wealthy individuals and institutions such as monasteries.

In the early 1100s, the Islamic world introduced paper to Europe. Although paper was less durable than parchment, it was much cheaper. Paper quickly became popular because it helped meet a large demand for books in universities. By the late 1300s, a growing interest in books among powerful secular* individuals created a demand for books out-side universities.

Early Printing. Three different individuals claimed credit for the invention of printing around the same time. A 1499 text names Laurens Coster, from the Dutch city of Harlem, as the inventor of printing. Another document states that Procopius Waldvogel of Prague owned molds for printing in 1444. However, no printed books have ever been traced to either of these figures. Most historians give the credit to Johann GUTENBERG, who formed a printing company in Strasbourg in the late 1430s. He moved to Mainz and formed another company with Johann Fust in 1450, and by 1454 the printing technique he used was well developed.

The printing press combined several existing technologies. A steel punch, like that used to make coins, impressed the image of a letter into a soft metal. A metalworker then turned this imprint into a mold to create forms, or units of type, for this letter. A compositor arranged the type inside two frames to create the text. The letters in these frames made up the text for two sides of the same page. An inker set the frames in the press, one above the other. He smeared ink on the letters and placed a sheet of paper between the frames. The press operator then swung a lever that brought the frames together to make the print. This type of mechanism, known as a screw press, had long been used for making wine, linen, and paper.

A good press team could print 1,000 sheets a day, but training a good team and purchasing equipment could be very expensive. In addition, it took time for a publisher to make money from his books. Many early printers went bankrupt; even Gutenberg had to sell his business. In its first years, the printing industry was restricted to a small region along the Rhine River in Germany. Printers closely guarded the secrets of their trade, limiting the spread of the business. In 1462, however, attackers
sacked* the Rhine city of Mainz, and some of the city's printers fled to Italy and France, bringing their knowledge with them.

Spread of Printing. In 1465 two printers established a press near Rome. Over the next three years the price of books in that city dropped 80 percent. By 1480 printers had established themselves in 50 Italian cities, outstripping the 30 printing centers in Germany. Paris had a press by 1470, but only eight other French towns followed its lead in the next 10 years. Spain and England also set up their first presses in the 1470s. Book prices continued to drop steadily over the next two decades. In Venice, the price of a basic reading textbook fell by 75 percent between 1484 and 1488, making it affordable to most people. Wealthy collectors and average citizens joined schools and monasteries as large consumers of books.

Despite the number of presses, a small number of cities dominated publishing in each country. The leading publishing centers of the late 1400s and early 1500s were Venice in Italy, Paris and Lyon in France, Basel in Switzerland, and Cologne, Augsburg, and Nürnberg in Germany. Within those cities, two or three publishers usually controlled 40 to 60 percent of the business with several smaller ones competing for the rest.

GROWTH OF RENAISSANCE PRINTING

By the late 1400s, merchants and investors had financial interests in the publishing industry. However, the second generation of printers faced new challenges and problems. One major concern for publishers was protecting their financial interest in a book. Printers often made illegal copies of other printers' works, and these pirated copies took money out of the pocket of the original publisher. In Germany, cheap imported copies drove locally produced books out of profitable academic markets.

Words and Images. Most early printed works used the Latin alphabet, but printers soon began publishing in other languages. By 1475 there was a small but steady market for Hebrew language works. In the early 1500s, the Aldine Press in Venice concentrated heavily on Greek texts. It built a reputation as a leading publisher of works in Greek, including grammars and texts for the study of the New Testament in its original language. Other publishers printed works in Slavonic, Cyrillic, and Arabic.

As printing became more sophisticated, publishers expanded the number and type of illustrations in their works. Books often included woodcut* illustrations and decorative capital letters. A publisher also might leave space in the text to be filled in by an artist hired by the customer. Combining an image with text on the same page helped to explain a passage or to make a work accessible to those who could not read. However, illustrated books were difficult and expensive to produce. From 1490 to 1499 only 26 illustrated books went to press in Strasbourg, but from 1500 to 1509 the total was 91.

The printing of music posed other technical challenges for printers. Combining notes, staffs, and text on the same page was very complex. In many cases one of these elements had to be added by hand. It was not until the 1490s that printers designed moveable type that fit accurately enough to set all elements of music with the press.

Renaissance Publishers. Various publishers of the Renaissance specialized in certain types of books. Humanist* publishers joined forces with intellectuals in the effort to revive the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Other presses focused on religious works, a more reliable source of income. Two of the most important publishers of the Renaissance were the Froben and Aldine presses.

For almost a century—from 1491 to 1587—the Froben press in Basel, Switzerland, was among the leading printing and publishing establishments of Europe. It produced over 900 titles. Its founder, Johannes Froben, began his career publishing religious works. Although Froben was not a scholar, he knew enough to look for quality manuscripts. He also took great care with the appearance of his books. Known for its variety of elegant type, the Froben press set the technical standards for other printers.

During the 1510s and 1520s, Froben's workshop became a meeting place for young humanist scholars. They brought the printer manuscripts, gave editorial advice, provided translations, and acted as proofreaders. Froben printed a great deal of humanist literature, including most of the writings of the Dutch scholar Desiderius ERASMUS, who became his close friend. Erasmus wrote of Froben's press, "No workshop can serve the interests of the great authors better than his."

The Aldine Press was an Italian publishing company, active in Venice and Rome from 1495 to 1597. Aldo Manuzio, a scholar and printer, established the press in Venice with the help of other investors. The press was the first to print the bulk of the classics of ancient Greece. During the early years of the 1500s, when Greek studies were spreading throughout Europe, it was the only press that produced Greek texts.

Like Froben, Aldo was concerned with the appearance of his books. He set his Greek books in type that resembled script. This type helped to blur the lines between print, a new form of communication, and manuscripts, a more highly regarded form. In 1501 Aldo introduced two important new ideas in printing books—he made books more convenient by reducing their height to about seven inches, and he pioneered a cursive, or "italic," type for the Latin alphabet. He also experimented with his use of illustrations and page designs.

PRINTING AND SOCIETY

Printing had a profound effect on cultural and religious movements in the Renaissance. It played a particularly important role in the success of the Protestant Reformation*.

Religion and Publishing. Printing helped spread the ideas of Protestant reformer Martin LUTHER throughout Europe. In a single month—August 1520—one publisher in the city of Wittenberg distributed 4,000 copies of Luther's Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. Two years later the first printing of his German New Testament sold out in three months. In 1523, 418 of 498 texts printed in German were either Luther's works or works about his ideas. Modern scholars claim that the use of woodcut illustrations in these books greatly increased the impact of Luther's words. Many works in support of Protestant ideas included woodcuts borrowed from other works. Originally designed as monsters, these images appeared in Protestant works as demonic monks or cardinals.

Protestant reformers in France and Switzerland also had a close relationship with the press. Some French reformers were scholars who had worked with humanist publishers in Paris since about 1500. In 1534 the publication of an anti-Catholic pamphlet turned the king against the Protestants and the printers who aided them. Several publishers fled France and settled in Geneva, Switzerland, eventually turning it into a major center of Protestant publishing. Religious reformer John CALVIN aided in this effort. Between 1525 and 1550 six presses operated in the city and published 42 titles. Between 1550 and 1564, the number of presses grew to 40. Over the course of this period Geneva's presses produced 527 books, 160 of which were works by Calvin.

The Catholic Church hierarchy* seems to have treated printing with suspicion from almost the beginning. When Pope Paul III established the Roman INQUISITION in 1542, one of its main duties was to draw up lists of forbidden books. These lists had a dramatic effect on Italian publishing. For example, before 1560 over half of the books published by the Giolito press in Venice were secular works. However, during the 1570s more than 70 percent of its titles were religious.

Catholic and Protestant leaders competed with one another for the services of leading publishers. Catholic officials entertained French printer Henri Estienne II when he visited Italy in the 1550s. In 1560 Pope Pius IV asked Paolo Manuzio, the son of Aldo, to become the official printer to the papacy*. Manuzio used an earlier offer from a Protestant leader to improve his bargaining position with the pope. Printer Christophe Plantin worked for Philip II, the Catholic king of Spain, from 1568 to 1576—but nine years later he took a job as printer to the Protestant University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

Effects on Society. With the growth of printing, book production became concentrated in a few cities and in the hands of a few publishers. This small group of people had considerable power over what the public read. Their influence created new cultural divisions in Europe. During the Middle Ages, all types of people had had access to the main sources of culture—markets, festivals, and wandering entertainers. Printing changed this, widening the gap between city and country as well as between literary and popular culture. As printing spread, professionals and intellectuals turned to solitary reading instead of public lectures or presentations. Over time they shared less and less with the majority of illiterate or semi-literate people.

* secular: nonreligious; connected with everyday life

* sack: to loot a captured city

* woodcut: print made from a block of wood with an image carved into it

* humanist: referring to a Renaissance cultural movement promoting the study of the humanities (the languages, literature, and history of ancient Greece and Rome) as a guide to living

Publishing and the Arts

Many Renaissance artists took a strong interest in books, creating an overlap between the fields of publishing and the arts. In the early 1500s, for instance, Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarroti turned to an illustrated Italian Bible for some of the images that he painted onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. German artist Albrecht Dürer included a section on the design of letters for printing in his book Manual for Painters (1525). Dürer saw the art of letter design as part of a lost tradition from ancient Greece and Rome.

* Protestant Reformation: religious movement that began in the 1500s as a protest against certain practices of the Roman Catholic Church and eventually led to the establishment of a variety of Protestant churches

* hierarchy: organization of a group into higher and lower levels

* papacy: office and authority of the pope

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