Out of the Flames

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Whatever the chronology, by 1450 Gutenberg was out of money again. He moved from Strasbourg back to Mainz, where he persuaded a local lawyer/financier named Johann Fust to become the latest in his string of partners. Fust advanced 800 guilders, a hefty sum, to allow Gutenberg to set up shop and buy tools and equipment, all of which were pledged to Fust as security for the loan, as was any product that Gutenberg might develop. Fust further agreed to loan Gutenberg 300 guilders a year for operating expenses. Instead, it seems, Fust loaned Gutenberg an additional 800 guilders in 1452. Whether or not Fust knew of Gutenberg's past associations before he put forth such a sum (which has been estimated at over one million dollars in today's currency) is unclear, but in any event, Fust turned out to be quite able to look after his own interests.

  By 1453, Gutenberg had entirely reinvented the process of making books. There was not a single element of the printing process that he had not improved. He not only created the design of the type, he invented the mold used to make the actual letters, an ingenious sliding-walled box that would ensure that each letter was the exact same height as the rest, while accommodating the varying widths of different letters. He developed a linseed oil-based lampblack ink that would adhere to the typeface, transfer to the paper without smearing, and then dry uniform and black. He invented a jig to hold a page of letters, and then developed a press, modeled after a winepress, to hold the paper against the type and create a clean, sharp image. Gutenberg's method of printing was so ingenious, so elegant, that it remained largely undisturbed as the prevailing technology for more than four centuries.

  All that was left was to pick a book on which to try the process. Since this was a commercial venture—posterity entered into his thinking very little, if at all-Gutenberg, not a particularly religious fellow himself, selected the Bible for his maiden effort because he thought it would be the easiest book to sell.

  Gutenberg began producing printed pages sometime after 1452 and, after extensive tinkering and fine-tuning, was ready in early 1455 to show his work to the world. He took some unbound gatherings (groups of pages not yet bound into book form) to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The response was one of amazement.

  Then, in November 1455, when the printing of all 1,286 pages of the new Bible had been completed and the commercial success of the venture assured, Fust sued for unpaid loans and compounded interest. Since Gutenberg had not had the time to actually sell any of his Bibles and realize any revenues, Fust won, foreclosed on the loans, and took over the entire operation, which he then put under the direction of his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer, who, as it happened, was by trade a printer and whose most recent job had been working as Gutenberg's foreman.

  When the completed Gutenberg Bible actually made its first appearance on the world stage, it was Johann Fust, not Johann Gutenberg, who introduced it. It sold out instantly and was immediately back-ordered. Not only did Fust and Schoeffer reap the profits of Gutenberg's invention, they did everything they could to perpetuate the notion that they had developed the process as well. In fairness, they did make some improvements. Schoeffer, for example, is generally credited with having invented the title page.

  So successful were Fust and Schoeffer in convincing the world that the printing press was their own invention that in 1515, Fust's grandson, Johann Schoeffer, then head of the family printing business, had the following inserted in the colophon of one of their books (a colophon is an inscription on the last page stating facts relating to the publishing and printing of the work):

  Johann Fust, citizen of Mainz, foremost author of the said art, who in due course by his own genius began to think out and investigate the art of printing in the year of the Lord 1450… and in the year 1452 perfected and by the favor of divine grace brought it to the work of printing, by the help, however, and with many necessary inventions of Peter Schoeffer of Gern-sheim, his workman and adoptive son, to whom also he gave his daughter Christina Fust in marriage as a worthy reward of his labor and many inventions. And these two, Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, kept this art secret, all their workmen and servants being bound by oath not in any way to reveal it; but at last, from the year of the Lord 1462, through these same servants being spread into divers parts of the world, it received no small increase.

  Gutenberg lived the rest of his life in obscurity. He continued to borrow money where he could and experiment to improve his art. In 1460, he produced a beautiful edition of the Catholicon, an encyclopedic dictionary by Johannus Balbus de Janua. Although this new book contained about the same amount of text as the Bible, Gutenberg had improved his type, and, at 746 pages, it was about a third smaller. The Catholicon was to be Gutenberg's last known work.

  There is no firm record of when and where he died although it must have been around 1468. That is when a Mainz physician named Konrad Humery filed a legal action claiming that all of the late Johann Gutenberg's possessions, mostly printing materials, belonged to him as a result of unpaid debts.

  Fust and Schoeffer reprinted the Catholicon in 1469.

  “WITHIN MONTHS OF THE first printed Bible's appearance, printers were setting up shop all over Germany. Soon afterward, printing spread to Italy, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain, and England. Although, like Gutenberg's Bible, books were still laid out to approximate manuscripts as closely as possible (even Gutenberg had employed scribes to add lead letters and decorative borders to his pages once the ink had dried), improvements were made, mostly to make the operation more cost-effective. Paper was the most expensive element in the process, so typeface was made smaller to squeeze more words on a line and more lines on a page. New fonts, such as Nicolas Jenson's roman, were developed to replace Gutenberg's gothic, allowing for greater reduction still. Roman was also a crisper font and made reading easier on the eye.

  Demand burgeoned and printed books became the new craze, particularly among the merchant class, which was growing in numbers, wealth, and influence as people in Europe moved about more freely and markets expanded to a continentwide scale. For this group, nou-veau riche and desperate to be accepted, printed books were an announcement of arrival. For aristocrats with libraries, on the other hand—the old money—printed books were considered cheap and tawdry imitations compared to the beauty and stateliness of genuine handwritten manuscripts. Many an aristocratic bibliophile would no sooner have placed a printed book on his shelf next to a handcrafted manuscript than a modern collector would place a mass market paperback next to a Charles Dickens first edition.

  Many of the first printed books were Bibles or other religious texts, such as missals, books of hours, or manuals for confessors. These were easy to sell—every church needed a Bible, for example. Although literacy in the second half of the fifteenth century was still largely confined to ecclesiastics, academics, and the monied elite, businessmen, along with bankers, lawyers, and magistrates, also began to read and clamored for books to help in the conduct of their day-to-day affairs. Interest quickly spread beyond treatises on law and jurisprudence to a demand for scientific and general knowledge. There were books on botany, agronomy, animal husbandry, and architecture. A market even grew up around the desire for the occasional “light read”—a tale of chivalry, perhaps. With the rise of secular reading, university towns had trouble attracting printers to service them. The quick guilder was to be made near the courts and business centers.

  Tens of thousands of books were printed toward the end of the fifteenth century, and by 1500 more than three hundred presses had been set up across Europe. Still, books had largely remained the province of the wealthy, only trickling down to a now-thirsting populace. Guilds-men, the nascent urban middle class, and even wealthier members of the peasantry also wanted to avail themselves of the new knowledge but lacked the opportunity to do so. That was all to change in the very next year, because of one man, when the trickle became a flood.

  IN 1453, THE OTTOMAN TURKS overran the decaying Byzantine Empire and took Constantinople. The Ottomans were Muslims, originally follow
ers of a Turkish warlord named Osman who, in the early 1300s, united the Turkish tribes around Nicaea, now Iznik in western Turkey. Descendants of Osman ruled in unbroken succession until 1922, presiding over what was to become one of the world's great empires. The boundaries of the Ottoman Empire shifted constantly, at one point stretching deep into central Asia, through the Balkans into Serbia, and across the Mediterranean.

  The Byzantines, the last remnants of the Roman Empire, had long been champions of Greek culture, and Constantinople, their capital, was a hub of Greek scholarship. Some of those scholars were already in Italy when Constantinople fell, trying to cajole support for the defense of the empire, while others, leery about subjecting themselves to the hospitality of the onrushing Turks, took to boats and fled west. Many members of both groups, some with their entire personal libraries intact, settled in the thriving port of Venice, on the Adriatic Sea in northern Italy. One of these émigrés, Johannus Bessarion, the bishop of Nicaea, brought over more than five hundred Greek manuscripts, all of which he donated to his adopted city, an act for which, among other things, Pope Pius II demonstrated his gratitude by making Bessarion a cardinal. The Biblioteca Marciana, where his library ended up, suddenly held the largest collection of Greek manuscripts in Europe, and Venice was transformed into the center of classical learning. In 1469, printing arrived, and soon more books were being produced in the city than anywhere else on the continent.

  THE GROWTH OF LITERACY and the interest in books and in the Greek classics were a direct result of a major intellectual and literary movement called humanism.

  For centuries, scholarship and learning had been dominated by a Church-controlled educational system called scholasticism (from the Latin schola, or school). In scholastic doctrine, all knowledge was divided into four strictly delineated areas—theology, philosophy, jurisprudence, and medicine—with an equally specific list of approved scholars or Latin versions of books as the unquestioned authorities for each. Every major university established in the Middle Ages was divided into faculties along scholastic lines.

  In any of these faculties, a student would first undertake the lectio, a long, painstakingly detailed, closely supervised reading of one of the approved works, such as Euclid's geometry, or the writings of Saint Augustine or Thomas Aquinas. He would then engage in the disputatio, a debate using strict Aristotelian logic to examine some issue arising from the text. It was not permissible to question the overall veracity of the source—that was heresy—only the meaning of a particular passage or phrase. The disputatio itself was carefully monitored to ensure that no proscribed interpretations crept into the discussions.

  Courses of study lasted for five, ten, even fifteen years. While the limitation on sources promoted exhaustive, even microscopic familiarity with those materials that were made available, after a while it was inevitable that all this intellectual inbreeding would result in disputatios that descended to minutiae. In the universities of the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for students to spend weeks, even months, on such esoteric topics as whether or not God could reverse time or whether, as Alister McGrath noted in In the Beginning, “Christ could have become incarnate as a donkey, or perhaps a cucumber, rather than a man.”

  Church fathers were all too aware that it was far more important to set the boundaries within which debate might occur than to decide where within those boundaries to actually undertake it. As scholasticism matured, those boundaries were tightened so as to serve only to support the authority of the Church itself. Their raison d'être became the alignment of Christianity as defined in the Bible—more specifically the Vulgate, the officially recognized Latin translation completed in the fourth century by Saint Jerome—with the often shifting interpretations of Rome. In other words, canon law as set down by the pope and other Church leaders was irrefutable, even more irrefutable, for example, than the word of a king.

  Humanism began at the same place as scholasticism—the teachings of the ancients—then spun off in a completely different direction. Unlike the cold, inward analysis of the scholastics, humanists looked outward to the realm of human experience and values. Minute examination of translated phrases as the sole tool of learning, humanists argued, distorted understanding of the nature of man and his place in God's universe. After all, Aristotelian logic is not a particularly useful vehicle for understanding poetry. Humanists thus encouraged breadth of scholarship as well as the reading of materials in their original languages.

  The discipline had been around since Dante and Petrarch in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, beginning as an approved offshoot of scholasticism, exploring ancient secular values that did not conflict with Church teachings. By the early fifteenth century, however, humanism had broken away. Classical Greek had largely supplanted Latin as the language of choice, and humanist scholars were reading Plato, Homer, playwrights like Euripides, and the narratives of Plutarch and Xenophon.

  Humanism encouraged free inquiry every bit as much as scholasticism discouraged it, and soon humanist thought began to work its way into the educational system. The term studia humanitatis came to mean a well-defined curriculum that included grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, all based on Greek and Latin authors and classical texts. After a while, this expansion of learning piqued the interest of the more sophisticated elements of society at large, and a demand sprung up not only for the classics but also for books and reading in general.

  The humanists' emphasis on the personal worth of the individual and the central importance of human values was eventually going to set itself in opposition to religious dogma. An uneasy truce developed between the Church and the humanist philosophers. Humanist scholars and writers were tolerated as long as they avoided direct challenges to either the Church's authority or its interpretation of theologic or scientific principles. In other words, they could write poetry but not question the nature of God. But as the essence of humanism involved intellectual speculation, this truce became more and more difficult to maintain.

  IN THE MID-1480S, an obscure young humanist scholar and Gre-cophile from an undistinguished family named Aldus Manutius secured a pleasant assignment as private tutor to the sons of the Princess of Carpi, the sister of one his classmates in Rome. Carpi was in north-central Italy, about two hundred miles west of Venice. Although Carpi itself was not a center of anything, the princess, something of a patron, often invited some of Venice's learned refugees to be her guests.

  Aldus, for his part, found it difficult to properly instruct his charges in the classics. Many of the works of classical authors were not available at all even in manuscript, and others only in uncertain translation. The visits to Carpi by all those walking textbooks gave him an idea. When he told the princess what he had in mind, she not only agreed, but even provided the seed money to get the venture off the ground.

  In 1490, Aldus moved to Venice to establish a printing business. He set himself up in a large old house, in which he designated Greek as the official language, and converted the entire premises to a combination living quarters, editorial office, and factory.

  Aldus was a genuine visionary, and nothing was going to come out of his press that did not fit that vision precisely. Developing a vision takes time and money, however, and Aldus was soon forced to supplement his initial stake from the princess by selling off an additional share of the business to a savvy venture capitalist named Andrea de Torresani. Torresani knew an exploding industry when he saw one. He had recently bought out Nicolas Jenson and his roman font, and Aldus's scheme seemed a good way to further expand his influence in the market. (Later on, in 1505, taking a cue from Peter Schoeffer, Aldus expanded his influence with Torresani by marrying his daughter.)

  Aldus held strongly to the humanist view that a book should be read in the language in which it was written—“without intermediaries,” as he put it—so he intended to publish his beloved Greeks in Greek. For his first work, therefore, he chose to publish a Greek lexicon, essentially a Greek-Latin dict
ionary and phrase book. He purchased fine linen and hemp paper from the Fabriano mills and mixed the ink on the premises. He was experimenting with Greek typefaces when he noticed that his chief compositor, a brilliant Cretan scholar named Marcus Musurus, had a beautiful, flowing handwriting. He copied Musurus's characters and, in 1494, published his lexicon. He followed that quickly with Opusculum de Herone et Leandro (The Story of Hero and Leander), and then, in 1495, he published a Greek grammar. Later that year, Aldus also published the first volume of what was to be a four-volume set of the works of Aristotle. Everything he printed sold out, and suddenly Aldus's notion of making the works of the ancients available to book buyers across Italy had leapt to the forefront of the printing stage.

  For the remainder of the century, Aldus published classics, eventually adding Latin ones to those in Greek. For his Latin works, Aldus used the roman font developed by Jenson (now owned by his partner), adding some wrinkles of his own, such as small capitals. In all, he published thirty-eight titles. He expanded print runs from the usual 250 to 1,000 in order to better amortize his costs.

  As the fifteenth century drew to a close, Aldus began to experiment, both with content and with style. As to the former, in December 1499 he published the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Dream of Polifilo) by a Dominican monk named Francesco Colonna. The story itself, of Po-lifilo's pursuit of his lover, Polia, through a fantastic world of buildings and gardens, is an amalgam of fable, history, architecture, and mathematics written in an odd hybrid of Latin and Italian. The Hypnerotomachia is one of the most beautiful of the Aldine books, done in a graceful typographical arrangement with many finely drawn illustrations. These illustrations, filled with fountains and obelisks, are unsubtly erotic (one, of Priapus, Greek god of procreation, is overtly pornographic), and Colonna himself was a very un-Aldine type of author. He was expelled from his order more than once for misdeeds and in 1516, when he was in his eighties, was convicted of seducing a young girl.