Inky Fingers

The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe

Anthony Grafton

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780674271210
  9780674237179
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674245655
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

An Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year

"Grafton presents largely unfamiliar material…in a clear, even breezy style…Erudite."
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

In this celebration of bookmaking in all its messy and intricate detail, Anthony Grafton captures both the physical and mental labors that went into the golden age of the book—compiling notebooks, copying and correcting proofs, preparing copy—and shows us how scribes and scholars shaped influential treatises and forgeries.

Inky Fingers ranges widely, from the theological polemics of the early days of printing to the pathbreaking works of Jean Mabillon and Baruch Spinoza. Grafton draws new connections between humanistic traditions and intellectual innovations, textual learning and the delicate, arduous, error-riddled craft of making books. Through it all, he reminds us that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands, and the nitty gritty labor of printmakers has had a profound impact on the history of ideas.

"Describes magnificent achievements, storms of controversy, and sometimes the pure devilment of scholars and printers…Captivating and often amusing."
—Wall Street Journal

"Ideas, in this vivid telling, emerge not just from minds but from hands, not to mention the biceps that crank a press or heft a ream of paper."
—New York Review of Books

"Grafton upends idealized understandings of early modern scholarship and blurs distinctions between the physical and mental labor that made the remarkable works of this period possible."
—Christine Jacobson, Book Post

"Scholarship is a kind of heroism in Grafton's account, his nine protagonists' aching backs and tired eyes evidence of their valiant dedication to the pursuit of knowledge."
—London Review of Books

CHAPTER 1

Humanists with Inky Fingers

THE CORRECTOR IN THE PRINTING HOUSE

SPECTERS HAUNT THE history of publishing and of humanistic scholarship in early modern Europe: lean, shabby ghosts. Correctors, as they were usually called, prepared manuscripts for the press, read proofs, and often added original material of their own. They were everywhere in the world of print, and many early modern humanists—including those whose names remain familiar—either praised or denigrated them and their work. The Basel scholar Theodor Zwinger makes an ideal Vergil to guide a descent into the literary underworld in which they lived and suffered. Zwinger was the sixteenth century’s master theorist of learned travel. In his Methodus apodemica, which appeared in 1577, he offered readers a set of neatly diagrammed questionnaires or templates that they could take with them when they set out on their grand tours.¹ Firmly clutching their copies of Zwinger’s book, they would read, interview natives, and look around themselves alertly every time they visited a new city. Zwinger made clear that his method could apply equally to the present—he offered accounts of model tours to Paris, Basel, and Padua—or the past—his last model tour took the reader to ancient Athens. Looking at Basel, he offered a schematic introduction to one of the city’s special institutions: its printing houses.

A skilled ethnographer, Zwinger used branching-tree diagrams to help his readers make sense of the complex scene that they would encounter in a printing house.² A single chart offers both a table of organization and an inventory of equipment, materials, and operations to be performed with them (Plate 1). At the top right, Zwinger notes that printers have employees of two sorts: theoretical and mechanical. The theoretical employees, the correctors, compare the text printed in the shop with the “example,” or copy, that it reproduces. The mechanical employees come in two categories: compositors, who set the type, and pressmen, who ink the forms and print the pages. Both theoretical and mechanical employees have servants to help them. Readers work with the correctors, in an inferior capacity, while menials help the workmen.

Zwinger’s second diagram is a crisp flowchart that shows how a printed text takes shape (Plate 2). Correctors and readers, he explains, examine the proofs produced by the pressmen and correct the errors in them, in a formal sense; then the compositors make material corrections, replacing type that was incorrectly set. Evidently they correct the first and second proofs in the same way: presumably, by collating them with the original copy. The third proofs, by contrast, they compare with the corrected second proofs. This description neatly matches what other, less abstract sources report about practices in the great Basel printing houses. On July 1, 1534, for example, the Frisian jurist and statesman Viglius Zuichemus described the routines of Hieronymus Froben’s celebrated printing house to a compatriot, Dooitzen Wiaarda. He explained that a shop like Froben’s normally employed a scholarly corrector, “who reads over the composed formes with understanding and checks whether all types and letters are correctly joined together, and all words and paragraphs properly separated,” and who benefits from the help of a lector or reader.³ He also noted that “in well-regulated shops it is customary for THREE PROOFS to be produced, and duly to be READ individually, by which faults and errors may be expurgated throughout.”⁴ Zuichemus confirms that Zwinger’s diagrams were generally accurate—at least for the larger houses, which actually employed correctors.

Yet Zwinger’s neat diagram might deceive us if we take it too literally, for the people and operations that he describes on the neat lines of his Ramist diagram were not neatly separated in day-to-day work. The first handbook of correction, Jeremiah Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia, included a wood engraving that shows a printer’s shop in action.⁵ In this version, the theoretical and the mechanical members of the printer’s team work intensively together, in close quarters. Workmen dressed in simple clothing moisten paper so that it will hold ink, then pull the sheets and raise them to dry on a rack just below the ceiling. Men of higher standing dressed in doublets and ruffs argue, perhaps about a text to be printed. Another man in a ruff sets type. A woman enters the room, bearing a mug of beer for the workman. And the master printer, in a lavish robe, presides over the whole scene. Different kinds of clothing, whose styles were laid down by sumptuary laws, set craftsmen apart from members of the privileged orders.⁶ Yet they all occupied and labored in the same noisy, dirty space. Learned men who worked in a shop like this could not escape without inky fingers.

PLATE 1 Theodor Zwinger, Methodus Apodemica (1577): divisions of the workforce in a printing house. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

PLATE 2 Theodor Zwinger, Methodus Apodemica (1577): flowchart of typesetting in a printing house. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

In the early modern period, this situation was unusual. The society of the Ancien Régime distinguished sharply—as Zwinger’s diagram shows—between those who worked with their hands and those who worked with their brains: in his terms, between “theoretical” and “mechanical” workers. In the printing house, however, the work of craft required, at every point, the presence of intellectual supervisors. And the supervisors, in turn, could not avoid touching metal type and forms that were wet with ink. Aldus Manutius was a Roman scholar, the author of his own Latin grammar. But Martin Sicherl, a pioneering student of the Aldine press, used the inky fingerprints still present in manuscripts of the Greek texts Aldus printed as vital clues by which to identify the Vorlagen, or base texts, from which Aldus and his correctors worked.⁷ Aldus himself inserted a missing line of Greek, by hand, in dozens of copies of the Psalter that he printed between 1496 and 1498.⁸ One way or another, the scholar who worked in a printing house was likely to wind up with ink on his fingers: mute evidence that the preparation and correction of texts were not a purely cerebral matter. Authors, for their part, underlined the drudgery involved in correction by their own complaints when made—or allowed—to correct their own proofs.⁹ As scholars investigate the rich remaining documents from early modern printing shops, they find increasing numbers of visual and tactile clues to the working world of the corrector. There is thus every reason to take the wood engraving as an accurate representation of a social world where abstract knowledge and oily black ink merged in a single product.

THE CORRECTOR’S TASKS

What, then, did correctors and readers do? The account books of some of the great firms survive, and they provide first-hand evidence. The surviving ledger of the Froben and Episcopius firms, for example, records the wages paid to employees from 1557 to 1564.¹⁰ Each list of employees begins with a corrector or castigator: clear evidence that these learned employees, whose names appeared before those of the compositors and pressmen, enjoyed a certain status, which was higher than that of those who worked with their hands. Each list also includes a lector, whose pay is usually half that of the corrector or less. To that extent, the account books confirm Zwinger’s diagrams. But they also supplement them. Sometimes the document states that a given corrector or reader received payment for other activities as well. In March 1560, for example, the lector Leodegarius Grymaldus received payment both for reading and for two other named tasks: making an index and correcting a French translation of Agricola’s work on metals.¹¹ In March 1563, Bartholomaeus Varolle was paid for correcting but also for preparing the exemplar, or copy, of a thirteenth-century legal text, Guillaume Durand’s Speculum iuris, and for drawing up an index for the work.¹²

Percy Simpson described the correctors’ tasks comprehensively in a massive book, Proof-Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Unfortunately, he also sowed confusion, since the title of his vast collection of material indicated that it would deal with proofreading alone.¹³ Historians of printing from Rudolf Wackernagel to Barbara Halporn and Edward Malone have emphasized that the term “corrector” can best be translated, in modern terms, not by its English or other derivatives, but rather by a much more general term like “print professional.”¹⁴ Once we move from general descriptions to other forms of evidence, it will become clear at once that they are right. True, a corrector was paid, in the first instance, for correcting or castigating the proof. But this was an activity that others—above all, authors—carried out as well. Viglius Zuichemus, for example, informed his friend Wiaarda that he was staying in Basel for two months while his commentaries on Justinian’s Institutes went through the press so that he could correct the proofs himself.

But correctors did many other things as well. They corrected authors’ copy as well as proofs. They identified and mended typographical and other errors, to the best of their ability. They divided texts into sections and drew up aids to readers: title pages, tables of contents, chapter headings, and indexes. This pattern of activities recurs in many careers. The Franciscan Conrad Pellikan, an expert corrector who worked for the Amerbachs and the Frobens, got his start as a print professional when Johann Amerbach lost the services of another member of his order, Franciscus Wyler, who had been preparing the copy for Amerbach’s edition of Augustine but was transferred away from Basel. “He came to me,” Pellikan recalled, “for young as I was, I also worked very hard, and he asked me to take the place of the man who had been transferred. I was to take the rest of Augustine’s works, which had not been divided into chapters, to divide them up and to add a brief summary for each chapter.”¹⁵ He claimed that he took on the task unwillingly, but eventually took such pride in his work that he recorded, in the copy of the edition that Amerbach gave him, exactly which texts he had laid out for the compositor.¹⁶

Pellikan, in other words, began his distinguished career as a professional corrector by editing copy rather than correcting proofs. Later he became a specialist in making indexes. Eventually he transferred his skill at making information accessible from the printing house to the Zurich library, which he catalogued.¹⁷ But he also worked for Amerbach and others as a corrector in the strict sense. Looking back, Pellikan made clear that he had mastered the best practices of the craft by watching a master at work and learning both his methods and his standards: “Amerbach was a man of great learning and of extraordinary diligence. He expended both money and effort in large quantities on the correction of his books, always with the help of two or three readers, with as many copies, so that his negligence would not be at fault for any defect in the work. Anyone who carefully examines one of his editions will see that if a single word was misprinted, he preferred to repeat the day’s work, with all its costs.”¹⁸

Some correctors composed texts as well as paratexts, serving as what might now be called content providers. In 1512, Henri Estienne set out to print an edition of one of those ancient books that were as popular in the Renaissance as they are now forgotten: the world chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea, in the Latin translation by Jerome. This rich and fascinating work laid out the history of nineteen ancient civilizations in parallel columns, from the time of Abraham to that of Eusebius himself, around 300 CE. Lists of rulers defined and bounded the course of history, showing how ancient states rose and fell, until only Rome and Israel were left, and then only Rome, as the world was unified in time for the Savior’s message to reach all its inhabitants. Between the long columns of names, short notes located in time the lives of famous men and the invention of everything from triremes to tragedy. The book offered vital information, not only about states and cities, but also about the history of culture, wrapped in an attractive if complicated passage. Jerome translated it into Latin and brought it up to date a century after Eusebius, integrating Roman literature into the story and extending the story, which Eusebius had brought to a climax with the accession and conversion of Constantine, into his own more troubled times.¹⁹ Augustine crafted his polemical arguments about the shape of the past and the priority of Jewish to pagan writings on the new last that Eusebius and Jerome had crafted.²⁰ Almost a millennium later, it was still both useful and popular. Petrarch covered his copy, now lost, with annotations.²¹ Through the Middle Ages and after, writer after writer brought the work up to his own time, writing supplements that followed the history of emperors and bishops over the centuries.²²

Estienne wanted to add value to his edition. One of his correctors, Jehan de Mouveaux, drew up a detailed index—which he adapted, without saying so, from an earlier edition. By doing so, he transformed the book. A linear timeline designed, in the age of manuscripts, to be consulted by readers who hoped to follow the movement of history from year to year and epoch to epoch, it became a sort of database t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. Making Book: The Way of the Humanists
• Chapter 1. Humanists with Inky Fingers
• Chapter 2. Philologists Wave Divining Rods
• Chapter 3. Jean Mabillon Invents Paleography
• Chapter 4. Polydore Vergil Uncovers the Jewish Origins of Christianity
• Chapter 5. Matthew Parker Makes an Archive
• Chapter 6. Francis Daniel Pastorius Makes a Notebook
• Chapter 7. Annius of Viterbo Studies the Jews
• Chapter 8. John Caius Argues about History
• Chapter 9. Baruch Spinoza Reads the Bible
• Conclusion: What the Ink Blots Reveal
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index