Essays in Librarianship and BibliographyGarnett, Richard
Science
Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography
Garnett, Richard
Bibliography -- Methodology; British Museum; Library science
When we see how largely these German emigrants settled in Italy and
France, and had almost a monopoly of Spain, we perceive that they must
have been men of great enterprise. How did they overcome the
difficulties that must have beset them as settlers in foreign countries?
Is it not a fair conjecture that the difficulty of language was partly
overcome by their being men of liberal education, and speaking Latin?
Still they would have workmen to direct; did they bring journeymen of
their own country with them, or instruct foreigners? The interest
attaching to this question tempts me to a brief digression into a
subject not properly comprised in my essay; the colophon, so far as I am
aware, throwing no light upon it. It seems probable that foreign
printers were attended in their migrations by bodies of journeymen; for
in the privilege granted by the Venetian Senate in 1469 to Joannes de
Spira, the first Venetian printer, he is said to have come to live in
Venice with his wife, his children, and his entire _familia_. The
_familia_, then, is expressly distinguished from his wife and children;
besides which the word never means in the classical writers, nor, so far
as I can discover, in the mediæval either, family in our sense of
kindred, but only in that of household: and as he is not likely to have
brought domestic servants with him, must be understood to denote here
the troop of workmen of whom he was the head; who had evidently also
immigrated with him. We are also told that a priest, Clemente Patavino,
probably the first Italian who ever exercised the art of printing,
taught himself by his own ingenuity, without having ever seen any one at
work. From this we may infer that the presses were jealously guarded,
and that the workmen were not Italians, or Clemente could not have been
the first Italian to learn the craft. His first book was printed in
1471, several years after the introduction of printing into Italy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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