Printing and the Renaissance: A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New YorkSlater, John Rothwell
History
Printing and the Renaissance: A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York
Slater, John Rothwell
Printing -- History -- Origin and antecedents; Renaissance
As a printer Froben was distinguished by the singular beauty of his
roman type, the perfection of his presswork, and the artistic decoration
of his books. In this last respect he was much indebted to the genius of
Hans Holbein, whom he discovered as a young wood-engraver seeking work
as Basel. With that keen eye for unrecognized genius which marked his
career he employed Holbein to design borders and initials for his books.
Later, with an equally sagacious and generous spirit, perceiving that
the young artist was too great a man to spend his days in a printing
office, he procured for him through Sir Thomas More an introduction to
the court of Henry VIII, where he won fame and fortune as a portrait
painter. I narrate the incident because it illustrates a very attractive
and amiable aspect of some of these men of the Renaissance, an
uncalculating and generous desire to help gifted men to find their true
place in the world where they might do their largest work. This, in an
age when competition and jealous rivalry in public and in private life
was as common as it is now, may give pause to the cynic and joy to the
lover of human kindness.
ANTON KOBERGER
(=No printer's mark known=)
We are in a different world when we turn to the fourth of our five
representative printers, Anton Koberger, of Nuremberg. During the forty
years of his career as a publisher, between 1473 and 1513, he issued 236
separate works, most of them in several volumes, and of the whole lot
none show any taint of reforming zeal. Koberger was a loyal Catholic,
and his published books were largely theological and all strictly
orthodox in nature. He is distinguished in two respects from the other
German printers of his time, the time between the death of Gutenberg and
the rise of Martin Luther. In the first place his work showed great
typographical excellence, with many fonts of handsome Gothic type and a
lavish use of woodcut illustrations. In the second place, his publishing
business was far better organized, far more extensive in its selling and
distributing machinery, than that of any other printer in Europe. We
learn that he had agents not only in every German city, but in the very
headquarters of his greatest competitors at Paris, Venice, and Rome, and
in such more distant places as Vienna, Buda-Pesth, and Warsaw. The
twenty-four presses in his own Nuremberg establishment were not
sufficient for his enormous business, and he let out printing jobs on
contract or commission to printers at Strasburg, Basel, and elsewhere.
The true German spirit of discipline appears in a contemporary account
of his printing plant at Nuremberg. He had more than a hundred workmen
there, including not only compositors, pressmen, and proof-readers, but
binders, engravers, and illuminators. All these were fed by their
employer in a common dining-hall apart from the works, and we are told
that they marched between the two buildings three times a day with
military precision.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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