30 
The History of the Book in Italy
30 NEIL HARRIS
Histories of the book in Italy, especially those assessing the impact of printing, often follow a predictable and all too conventional narrative pattern. They open with the German printers—who began publishing the works of antiquity at Subiaco in 1465 and at Rome in 1467—before switching to Venice in 1469, where yet more German printers and a French goldsmith cut the first roman types. They usually describe the extraordinarily rapid spread of printing through the Italian cities: Trevi and Foligno in 1470; Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, Milan, Naples, and Treviso, and possibly Genoa, Perugia, and Verona in 1471; Cremona, Fivizzano, Mantua, Mondovì, Padua, and Parma in 1472. Indeed, by 1500, presses had operated in almost 80 localities. They next offer detailed accounts of Aldus Manutius from 1495 onwards: his recovery of the Greek and Latin classics, his design of roman type, and his pocket-sized texts in italic. If space allows, they might say something about Venetian publishing’s Renaissance dominance and praise its illustrated books, before jumping to an account of the unique visual achievement of Giambattista Bodoni in Parma at the end of the 18th century. The conclusions of such standard accounts often comment on modern publishing in Italy, on the rise of Milan, and (perhaps) on the bestseller all’italiana in the 1950s and 1960s. None of this is wrong, since the salient facts are correct; even so, such a view is at best superficial, and the same pattern can be seen in a different light.
Rather than begin with the itinerant typographers, it may be useful to glance at the state of the book trade in Italy just before the advent of printing. The chief figure is the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, who organized on a huge and costly scale the copying and decoration of MSS for such clients as Cosimo de’ Medici and Federico da Montefeltro. Late in life, Vespasiano included in his memoirs a spiteful jab at the printing press, which was putting traditional bookmakers like himself out of business. His jaundiced claim that Federico would never have allowed a printed text in his collection is unfounded, but revealing. It shows that it is misleading to apply to Italy the idea—intrinsic to Lucien Febvre’s and Henri-Jean Martin’s French concept of the history of the book—of a sharp rupture between printing and the MS tradition (see 15), since, if anything, the two for a while flourished and intermingled.
In 1949, Roberto Ridolfi defined early printers as ‘gente di necessità intesa alla moneta’ (‘people who are obliged to deal with money’) (Ridolfi, 6). The German artisans, who hauled their possessions over the Alps on the back of a mule, had their eyes on a book market where fabulous sums were being paid for illuminated MSS on vellum. Italy was also undergoing a cultural revolution (characterized as ‘the Renaissance’ by 19th-century scholars) that consisted initially in the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman works. This innovation was prompted in part by the Council of Ferrara and Florence in 1438, which attempted a conciliation between the Western and Orthodox churches; although the council ultimately failed, it did establish a direct acquaintance with Greek culture and language, up to that time known to Italian intellectuals principally through medieval Latin. The subsequent fall of Byzantium (Constantinople) in 1453 precipitated a migration of Greek scholars, often with MSS in their baggage, who scraped a living in Italy through teaching. With its position athwart the Mediterranean, governing trade between West and East, with the wealth of its great banking families, and the influx of outside revenue ensured by the Catholic Church, 15th-century Italy (albeit fractured into feuding and sometimes warring states) was the richest and culturally fastest-moving ‘country’ in Europe. It was ripe, therefore, for a new way of making books.
Recent years have seen a lively discussion about the Parsons fragment, comprising eight leaves belonging to an octavo edition in Italian of the Leiden Christi (Passion of Christ), a popular German work circulated widely in northern Europe in the 15th century. Discovered in 1925 by the Munich bookseller Jacques Rosenthal, the fragment was described by Konrad Haebler in 1927, before disappearing the following year into the collection of the Louisiana bibliophile Edward Alexander Parsons (1878–1962); it was forgotten until 1998, when it resurfaced and was sold at auction by Christie’s in London. The bibliographical excitement it generated stemmed from the large rotunda type, whose sorts have been filed to make them fit together, suggesting an early date of printing. Since its metal-cut illustrations were used in southern Germany c.1459–61, the edition may have been printed soon afterwards, almost certainly in Italy; linguistic analysis suggests that the translation was done in or near the triangle formed by Parma, Bologna, and Ferrara. If the assumptions about the date and place are correct, the fragment is unquestionably the first surviving printed Italian artefact. (This same rationale acknowledges, however, that other texts may have been produced even earlier and have been entirely lost.) Following its purchase for the Scheide collection in Princeton, the fragment was connected to a document written in Bondeno, near Ferrara, in February 1463, containing an agreement between a German priest, Paul Moerch, and his compatriot, Ulrich Purschmid (or Bauerschmid), from Baisweil, near Augsburg. The agreement refers to making terracotta figures of a Pietà and of a Virgin and Child; it also discusses shaping formes to produce a Latin grammar (‘formam unius Donati’), a child’s psalter (‘formam unius Psalterii puerorum’), and an ABC for learning purposes (‘formam unius Tabule puerorum’). It has been argued that the fragment and the agreement are closely related, so that the dawn of printing in Italy should be antedated to Bondeno, c.1463 (Scapecchi). Yet, however beguiling at first sight, the presumption is a dangerous one. In Latin, forma designates any surface used as a matrix, while the agreement as a whole suggests that Purschmid’s expertise is in ceramic rather than casting in metal. Moreover, rudimentary printing techniques were employed in Italy in the pre-Gutenberg era. A Venetian document of 1441 talks of ‘carte da zugar’ and ‘figure stampide’ (playing cards and printed images); another of 1447 mentions ‘alcune forme da stanpar donadi et salterj’ (‘some formes to print grammars and psalters’)—two of the three items in the Bondeno document (Cecchetti). Although the 1463 agreement may well refer to a primitive process in which sheets were impressed on one side only from a surface moulded in relief, no verdict is yet possible on the Parsons fragment. Nonetheless, it does support the observation that, following the spread of printing north of the Alps, German artisans (who financed their move by printing small, easily sold books) might plausibly have arrived somewhere in the Po valley.
Unless an earlier example comes to light, it must be concluded that datable printing began in Italy when Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz set a press up in Subiaco, a small town 70 km east of Rome. Why they settled there, at the Benedictine monastery of Santa Scolastica, unfortunately remains unknown. Their first printed text was a Donatus, which has been lost. The first to have survived, in some twenty copies, was Cicero’s De Oratore; the edition is undated, but a copy once in Leipzig, now in Moscow, bears a note written on 30 September 1465. This was followed by a Lactantius in October and, in 1467, by Augustine’s De Civitate Dei. Thereafter, they sensibly shifted business to Rome. The ups and downs of their subsequent enterprise are delineated in the prefaces and dedications of their editor, the bishop designate of Aleria, Giovanni Andrea Bussi. Far from enjoying an overwhelming success, a combination of factors—including a policy of issuing large, humanist-orientated works, the overprinting of such sure sellers as Cicero, and competition from other Germans such as Ulrich Han (who in the meantime had gravitated to Rome)—ensured that, by the early 1470s, there was a book glut (Bussi). The early publishers’ pecuniary embarrassment is symptomatic of a wider difficulty: they failed to harness the dynamics of an expanding but largely unknown market.
The standard view of Italian book history states that, by 1500, printing had gained a foothold in numerous cities; what is generally not mentioned is how often that foothold was lost. Usually, a press was set up and operated for a short period of time (sometimes producing only a single edition), before moving elsewhere. One example is Treviso, where printing was introduced by Geraert van der Lys in 1471; some eleven presses worked there until 1494, after which printing was extinguished until 1589. Geraert also inaugurated printing at Udine in 1484, where it lasted for a couple of years; the next press did not appear there until 1592. Unlike Germany, where printing, once established, in most cases persisted, in Italy it failed to take root just about everywhere. Only five Italian cities (Rome, Venice, Ferrara, Milan, and Bologna) maintained unbroken publishing activity up to and including the 16th century. In another five (Florence, Naples, Parma, Modena, and Turin), printing had a false start, but was introduced a second time and afterwards proceeded steadily. In another two (Brescia and Siena), the new ars ran well during the 15th century, once under way, but suffered major setbacks in the 16th century. To understand why the printing seed was often sown but rarely flowered, one episode is particularly instructive, because those involved went to court and left a sheaf of documentation. These legal records tell the story of the partnership between Johannes Vurster, who in 1473 introduced printing at Modena, and a local paper merchant, Cecchino Morano, who saw in it a chance to expand his business. The two turned out several large books aimed at nearby Bologna University, but failed to find a market. In 1476, after being sued by his partner and narrowly escaping imprisonment, Vurster fled town, leaving behind him a shop full of unsold volumes (Balsamo). Although supporting evidence of this quality is generally lacking, it is plausible that many such early ventures regularly teetered on the brink of financial disaster and sometimes plummeted into the abyss. After all, the foreign prototypographers lacked both the local market knowledge needed to distribute what they printed (hundreds of copies of the same book) and the depth of capital necessary for a more gradual sales policy. Although printing failed to establish itself in 85 per cent of the places it touched, one city rapidly triumphed over all the others: Venice.
Introduced by John of Speyer in 1469, printing in Venice burgeoned extraordinarily in just a few years. According to the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC), Venice produced some 3,500 known editions, putting Italy as a whole—with some 9,900 impressions—just ahead of Germany’s 9,300, and far exceeding France’s 4,500 items. Venice outstripped Paris, its main European rival, by 25 per cent, and issued double the number of editions produced by Rome, its principal Italian competitor. Yet the editions do not tell the full story. In Venice, half the recorded output was in folio format and only 9 per cent in octavo or smaller; in Paris, folio represented only 12 per cent, quarto 58 per cent, and octavo the rest; in Rome, folio stood at 15 per cent, quarto 68 per cent, octavo 17 per cent, while many items there were orations confined to a single sheet of paper or less. In other words, most Venetian books were big and those of other centres were conversely small. Although the distribution of books has been much disturbed over the course of centuries, censuses of 15th-century books conducted in outlying European districts show the extent of Venice’s penetration: 23 per cent of incunabula now in Poland were printed in Venice, 27 per cent in Spain, 28 per cent in Hungary, 33 per cent in Portugal.
Venice’s dominance inside Italy grew constantly, and the city acted as a publishing magnet, attracting other enterprises. Among the presses that disappeared from Treviso, several reappeared in its powerful neighbour a year or so later. Precise counts are never possible, but it is estimated that some 230 printing businesses were active in Venice before 1501. In simple terms, Venetian books were better. Not only were they better designed and better printed, they also used better paper and were usually the first to employ illustrations and paratextual elements, such as indexes. At the same time they were less expensive. Not surprisingly, therefore, booksellers and customers in cities all over Europe accorded their preference to Venetian products, so that local printers had to fall back on narrower markets. William Caxton’s patriotism was genuine, but by publishing mostly in the vernacular, he tacitly admitted his inability to compete with the elegant Latin imprints of Nicolas Jenson and the like. The technical superiority of Venice appears above all in her printers’ mastery of the more complex typographical procedures, such as liturgical texts in red and black. The existence, sometimes fragmentary, of breviaries and missals ‘ad usum Sarum’, for the diocese of Salisbury, bears witness to commissions received from the far-off English market. Once the industry was well established, continuity with the tradition of hand decoration was translated into supremely elegant woodcut illustrations, inspired by major artists such as Mantegna, which again increased the product’s marketability. Likewise, European music printing, in which the staves, the notes, and sometimes the words required separate impressions, was dominated by Venetian firms, beginning with Ottaviano de’ Petrucci in 1501 and followed later in the century by Antonio Gardano and Girolamo Scotto.
The question why this happened in Venice is rarely asked. Naples possessed a larger population, Florence was at the height of its Renaissance glory, while Rome boasted the luxury and splendour of the papal court. Italian cities such as Milan and Ferrara had ruling dynasties offering patronage, while Bologna, Padua, and Pavia had flourishing universities. Albeit with a mountain range at its back, a city such as Genoa shared many similarities with Venice: a maritime republic, with a papermaking industry at nearby Voltri, and an almost identical political system, in which a doge was elected by a hereditary aristocracy. Yet printing there took several attempts to get off the ground, establishing itself securely only in 1534. What Venice had on a greater scale was a highly ramified mercantile and financial organization, definable as a predisposition to risk, based on the lucrative but financially dangerous trade with the Middle East and East Asia. Even before the time of Marco Polo, luxury commodities such as silk and spices had passed through Venice for distribution elsewhere in Europe. The economy of the city revolved around the sortes (shares) purchased in trading ventures, which, if successful, recouped the original investment several times over; if the ship failed to return, as in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the participants lost some or all of their money. The system involved society at all levels, even very small investors, such as widows and orphans; this induced a mentality in which Venetians instinctively grasped the economics of the new publishing business, where a raw commodity (paper) was transformed into a value-enhanced, finished product (printed text) that required further monies in order to distribute it and ensure a profit.
As far as an early concentration of capital is concerned, Jenson’s career provides valuable insights. Known today for the marvellous mise-en-page of his editions and for a roman type surpassed only by Aldus, he was the front man for a publishing consortium that included the merchant-bookseller Peter Ugelheimer (Nuovo). The annals of his output can be read in ISTC, but a project worth undertaking would be an exhaustive census of surviving copies to establish what proportion were printed on vellum and how many were rubricated and/or illuminated. In the one edition subjected to such an inquiry, the 1478 folio Roman Breviary, 24 of the 45 known copies are vellum and almost all exhibit hand-added decoration of the first order (Armstrong). Publishing in the long term went in the opposite direction, as large, high-quality, hand-embellished, polychrome books on parchment (which approximated MSS) were replaced by small, sometimes shoddily printed, monochrome books on paper. Nonetheless, the luxury, high-cost product filled something more than a niche market; holding its own up to the beginning of the 16th century, it was fully exploited by Jenson, who was followed by Aldus and emulated in Paris by Antoine Vérard.
A book industry which produced vastly more than the local market could ever have absorbed had to export on a large scale. Venice’s other great advantage was its pre-existent distribution network, allowing it to send goods via water along the Adriatic seaboard and through a system of rivers and canals covering the whole of northern Italy, as well as by road, with trains of mules that crossed the Alps into Germany and France. This same network was exploited in parallel by the paper and textile trades, with which the book trade had many affinities—some publishers are also known to have been cloth merchants. The concentration of commercial expertise from elsewhere in Italy ensured furthermore that, once the publishing industry was fully established, few in it were bona fide Venetians. The places of origin of the city’s printers, proudly declared in the colophons of its Renaissance imprints, mostly form a pinpoint map of the Po valley, with a grouping of dots around Brescia and the Italian lakes (Toscolano on Lake Garda was also the heart of the Venetian papermaking industry) and, further off, the Piedmont town of Trino.
Venice’s bookshops and printing offices were concentrated between the Rialto and St Mark’s Square; from the Renaissance to the 18th century, travellers’ accounts speak of a vast emporium, where buyers spent hours browsing in dozens and dozens of shops. An early measure of this intense bookselling activity is the Zornale of Francesco Maggi, which from 1484 to 1488 provides a record of each day’s sales: entries are concise, usually no more than the title, but the ledger scrupulously records prices, which can be compared to other commodities, and the nature of the purchases. Although most items are sold singly, sometimes a buyer takes two, three, even up to twenty books together. At the same time, the book trade perceptible through the Zornale remains conservative; for all the speed with which Italian printers mastered the technology, their prime concern was to transfer the textual heritage of the Middle Ages into the new medium. As Victor Scholderer observed in 1935, ‘while Italian incunabula form the most varied and interesting body of books of their class, the culture which they reveal is so fully elaborated as to appear to a large extent static’ (BMC 7. xxxvii). Rather curiously, when the shake-up came, it was produced largely by a return to an even greater antiquity.
The importance of being Aldus, to misquote Oscar Wilde, is undeniable. After that of Johann Gutenberg, his name is probably the best known in the whole of book history. On the other hand, although Gutenberg’s claim to fame is established by his invention of the printing press, why precisely has Aldus gained such renown? After all, he was a latecomer to the profession; in 1495, when he opened shop, over 200 other presses had already worked or were working in Venice. While rivers of ink have been lavished on his achieve-ment—and there is no doubt that there was an achievement—its nature is not always clear; indeed, it is necessary to remember that the first, and most diligent, purveyor of the myth of Aldus was Aldus himself. After his death in 1515, the Aldine brand was assiduously marketed for the rest of the century, first by the Torresani family, later by his direct heirs, so that, matters of pietas apart, the legend must have been good business. Consequently, the whole story abounds in pitfalls: even today some bibliographical writers assert that Aldus launched a 16th-century proto-paperback revolution with low-cost, octavo-format classics, despite the fact that his enchiridions were expensive by contemporary standards, so much so that it was profitable to counterfeit them in Lyons.
A proper assessment of Aldus would concentrate on his personality as a schoolteacher and on the fact that, like another remarkable typographical innovator, John Baskerville, he came to printing late in age by Renaissance terms, in his mid-40s. He did so in the guise of a frustrated intellectual, one who had failed to succeed as a humanist or as a scholar in the mould of his teacher, Battista Guarino. Education, therefore, was the lynchpin of the Aldine project, because he aimed not only at recovering the texts of classical antiquity, but at finding readers for them. He was the right man at the right time, but he also found the right collaborators: Torresani and the aristocrat Pierfrancesco Barbarigo, whose deep purses financed the enterprise; Francesco Griffo, whose extraordinary eye and hand produced the required typefaces; Marcus Musurus and Pietro Bembo, whose intellectual prestige and editorial abilities guaranteed the quality of the texts. The central idea was that the study of Greek and, to a lesser extent, Latin should be at the heart of the educational canon; however, the correct printing of Greek, with its numerous combinations of breathings and accents, presented a considerable obstacle. The first individual to overcome these challenges successfully, Aldus placed at the core of European pedagogical thinking the concept that the education of young gentlemen and of governing elites should be based on the intensive study of a remote dead language. The net outcome was that, for 400 years, students sweated over Aeschylus and Sophocles in the classroom, becoming adults who shared a common forma mentis.
Focusing on Aldus’s part in this intellectual upheaval allows Italy’s role in book history to be better defined. Most of the high moments in the canonical interpretation sketched out in the introduction of this essay have common ground in the same element: in a word, design. Early in 1496, after issuing his first books set entirely in Greek, Aldus published De Aetna with a new roman type that elaborated upon and strengthened Jenson’s already remarkable character of 1470, and that, with refinements, culminated in the unreadable but visually splendid Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The type’s subsequent versions, remodelled by Claude Garamont, culminate in Stanley Morison’s Times New Roman (1932), the common default character on today’s computer screens. Yet, it remains recognizable as Aldus’s offspring. Much the same is true of italic; the first Aldine design of 1501 may have no direct modern progeny, but nobody has ever questioned the significance of his innovation.
By the end of 1500, the Italian publishing industry (mostly in Venice) had taken on a recognizable physiognomy that in many respects would remain unaltered until the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. However, its dominance and success simultaneously held the seeds of its own decline, one that would last for centuries. At the cost of some simplification, five interrelated factors are examined in this digression: political structure, new world exploration, religious reform, national language, and readership.
During this period, Italy had no single dominant political entity. The peninsula was broken into small states, of which the two strongest, Venice and the papacy, depended on the election of a gerontocrat ruler. In Venice, the doge was little more than a figurehead: real power generally rested with the faceless aristocrats of the Council of Ten. The system ensured political continuity, but constrained initiative, since the favoured policy was to hedge, block, and wait for the problem to go away. The papacy did elect a real ruler, but usually at an advanced age: an energetic figure, such as Julius II (r. 1503–13), could mould events, but reigns were so short that enemies rode out the storm. The political set-up meant, therefore, not only that there was no single central market represented by a capital (such as Paris or London), but also that, when by the late 18th century the book industry needed vigorous institutional measures, the Italian states were too weak and too divided to supply them.
The second event contributing to the long-term decline of the Italian publishing industry was the discovery of America in 1492 and of the sea route to the East in 1497–9, which gradually shifted the balance of power in Europe from the Mediterranean to the more dynamic nations along the Atlantic seaboard, gradually nullifying Venice’s role as an entrepôt for trade with the Orient. The third historical consideration is the religious metamorphosis caused by the success of Protestant reform in northern Europe and by its failure in Italy. The long-term outcome of the Reformation was a gradual closing of the frontiers to the Italian book, linked also to the decline of Latin as a universal means of communication.
Although these first three factors were external to the book trade, the two remaining were internal, and require lengthier treatment, starting with the national language. From the 16th to the middle of the 20th century, an averagely educated Italian was expected to master two languages, apart from what was spoken at home, through schooling and reading. The first was classical Latin (often with the rudiments of Greek)—a dead language, but necessary to understand the importance of Italy’s cultural heritage. The second language was Italian, which at that time was neither dead nor living. Outside school, the average Italian employed a dialect whose range of intelligibility varied considerably. In the north and in Tuscany, the same dialects covered large regions; in the agricultural and poverty-stricken regions of the south and in the islands, however, linguistic zones were more restricted, meaning that people living in one village could hardly talk to those 20 miles away. Italian’s growth into a national spoken language is that of an artificial tongue, to some extent an ideology, that was largely book-disseminated. Its progress originated in two key periods. First, in the 14th century, three works written in Tuscan vernacular—Dante’s Divina Commedia, Francesco Petrarca’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron—set new literary standards and started the long, slow march of European modern languages. Secondly, in the 16th century, Bembo decreed in his Prose della Volgar Lingua (1525) that the norm for written Italian should be Petrarca in poetry and Boccaccio in prose. To some extent, he only expressed as theory what had been posited previously by others, such as Fortunio’s Regole Grammaticali della Volgar Lingua (1516), and what Venetian printers were already doing. What made the difference was his authority as a nobleman, as an editor, and as an author, who in 1539 received a cardinal’s hat, in modern parlance ‘for services to literature’. Bembo and his fellow theorists were not, however, concerned with whether the establishment of a single written norm would lead to a unified spoken language. That process would not occur for another four centuries, when other media were introduced.
The application of a Tuscan norm based on the literature of the Trecento (i.e. writers of whom the youngest was 30 years older than Chaucer) was facilitated by the example of Renaissance masterpieces such as the Cortegiano (1528).
Written by the Mantuan career diplomat and papal nuncio Baldassarre Castiglione, the archetypal conduct book went through several drafts in order to obtain the right linguistic patina; it was seen through the press in the author’s absence by a Venetian corrector, Giovan Francesco Valier, whose final emendations are visible in the printer’s copy kept by the Aldine press and given to Jean Grolier. The case of the Ferrarese poet Ludovico Ariosto is even more interesting, since his Orlando Furioso (1532) continues an earlier poem, the Orlando Innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo, first published in 1482–3 in a lost editio princeps, with a third book added in 1495 (Harris). Telling the story of the paladin Roland—who falls in love with the beautiful but evil-intentioned Angelica and thus forsakes his duty to Charlemagne and to Christendom—Boiardo’s story enthralled 15th-century readers with its breathtaking adventures and spectacular sword fights; however, it was written in a Po valley cadence, whose rhymes offended the ear of Italian purists. The first version of Ariosto’s continuation, in 40 cantos, published in 1516 was a half-way stage that maintained dialect forms and rhymes; a partial revision appeared in 1521, followed by a fully-fledged Tuscanized definitive edition, with the addition of six cantos, in 1532. The 287 press variants and a cancellans sheet described by Conor Fahy show the author fiddling with the text up to and even after the last possible moment. The virtuosity of the outcome was hailed as a triumph, and its stature as Italy’s Renaissance chef-d’œuvre has rarely been questioned; it also proved to be a commercial success for publishers such as Giolito and Valgrisi, who turned out editions in multiple formats augmented with illustrations, commentaries, and other sorts of paratext. In the 1580s it was temporarily eclipsed by the Gerusalemme Liberata, initially entitled Il Goffredo, which contained a poetical, allegorical account of the First Crusade that profoundly influenced other European writers. Its author, Torquato Tasso, can claim to be the first genuine pan-Italian writer, since in childhood he travelled widely and thus avoided growing up speaking a local dialect. All these writers, who grappled with the task of creating literary works in what was effectively a foreign language, are comparable to a novelist such as Conrad, who wrote in English, his third language after his native Polish and after French.
The last factor bearing on the history of the book in Italy is the absence of a solid middle-class readership. The term ‘middle-class’ here is a deliberate anachronism, designating a numerically consistent body of users who see the book as an instrument for self-improvement and as an expression of their own upward aspiration. Since Italy had enjoyed a higher level of urban literacy than elsewhere in Europe during the early Renaissance and has never since lacked erudition nor scholars, to speak of the absence of a whole class of readers appears to be a contradiction. Nevertheless, this is what happened and, though the causes were many and complex, the key moment in this literacy-failure probably occurred in 1559, when the first Roman Index Librorum Prohibitorum banned the Bible in Italian. Quite independently of the sacred text’s content and import, the Bible is a large book and therefore its removal from circulation had important and damaging consequences for the general standard of literacy. Before that date, reading the scriptures, even by those who knew little or no Latin, was fairly widespread in Italian society. The earliest volgarizzamento of the Bible by Nicolò Malermi had appeared in Venice in 1471. The 16th century saw further translations, especially that by Antonio Brucioli (1532) which seemed tainted with heresy. The Catholic Church’s fears about uncontrolled and uncontrollable reading of the biblical text thus resulted in a wider clampdown on the circulation of ideas. From 1559 (or rather from 1564, when the definitive Tridentine Index confirmed the ban), a split emerged in Italian reading practice and habits. At one extreme, an elite educated on the Aldine model consumed works in both quantity and quality; however, because members of religious orders constituted a significant portion of this category, family reading was generally excluded and women were often discouraged from becoming literate. At the other end, readers with minimal formal education sought out and perused texts, sometimes incurring the wrath of the authorities. For example, at Udine in 1584 and again in 1599, a miller, Domenico Scandella (known as Menocchio), was accused of heresy before an Inquisition tribunal, which recorded his reading and what he thought he found there (Ginzburg). The trial has a bibliographical import, since the books Menocchio liked best, such as Mandeville’s travels, were second-hand and dated back half a century and more. Otherwise, as a direct consequence of the clampdown, the books of the last third of the 16th century are unappetizing fare and there is little to attract a middle-of-the-road reader. Textual censorship may not have wholly deterred lovers of literature, but episodes such as the rassettature of the Decameron between 1573 and 1588, in which negative references to the clergy were removed and some tales were substantially rewritten, demonstrate that the conduct of the book trades was materially altered, and not for the better. A sea-change is visible also in the catalogues of firms such as Giolito, which abandoned its predominantly literary output in favour of markedly religious productions. To attribute this metamorphosis merely to publishing timidity is to oversimplify: society was changing, readers were changing, and books merely followed the trend. This crack in social literacy created in the 16th century became a chasm by the 18th century.
The minute tallying of Venetian daily existence in Marin Sanudo’s diaries, kept from 1496 to 1533, is silently eloquent when it reaches the last day of 1500. No jubilant throng of printers, publishers, and booksellers gathered in St Mark’s Square to cheer the ending of the incunable age and dance into the small hours of the incoming century. This is hardly surprising, since the bibliographical threshold of New Year’s Day 1501 is a later demarcation, long recognized as artificial and undesirable; it is, nevertheless, a convenient moment for taking stock (Norton). The ongoing Italian census of 16th-century books (Edit16), together with its sister system, Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale (SBN), shows that, in 1501, slightly more than 200 titles were published in a dozen cities. The lion’s share appeared in Venice (64 per cent). Its closest rival was Milan (16 per cent), which had a plethora of small printers and two large publisher-booksellers, Legnano and Nicolò da Gorgonzola. Thereafter came Bologna (7 per cent), mainly with large tomes for university use, then Rome (3 per cent) and Brescia (2 per cent). Reggio Emilia (2 per cent) was surprisingly active, publishing its statutes in that year, while token presences mark the output of Turin, Parma, Pavia, Perugia, Ferrara, and Florence. Centres that temporarily appear dormant, however, such as Modena, may have produced ephemera that have not survived (see 16), or undated imprints that have been classified as possible incunabula. A pattern emerges that remained true up to the 17th century: Venice dominated the trade and other centres struggled to compete. Although important literary works might have a first edition elsewhere (e.g. Sannazaro’s Arcadia in Naples, or Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in Ferrara), subsequent editions invariably migrated to Venice.
This dominance was reinforced by legislation and by the lobbying power of the publishers themselves, who from 1549 were organized in their own guild (Brown). John of Speyer’s 1469 monopoly concession was followed by a hiatus, but around the turn of the century requests for privileges came thick and fast. Aldus was especially assiduous: he obtained protection for his Greek texts in 1496 and 1498 and for his new italic type in 1501; the year after, he demanded measures against the counterfeit printing of his octavo editions. The system was open to abuse, so much so that in 1517 the senate, irritated by the number of blanket applications for authors and titles, cancelled all extant concessions and—recognizing the need for tighter controls—in 1545 placed the book trade under the charge of the Riformatori dello Studio di Padova. Like other Italian states, Venice kept its university in a satellite city, Padua, where, owing to the disastrous war of the League of Cambrai (1508–16), all teaching had ceased; in 1528, therefore, this new magistrature was created to reopen the university and oversee its running. Elective by nature and considered prestigious, the Riformatori became the equivalent of a culture ministry with powers over academies, libraries, and the book trade. Printers had to submit any work they intended to publish for approval, and permission followed swiftly—as long as nothing was found against religion, against princes (i.e. other governments), or against morality in general. With the promulgation of the Index, the Inquisition’s attempts to impose censorship led to bitter disputes, not only with publishers but also with the Venetian authorities, who resented and obstructed Roman interference (Grendler). In 1596 a concordat was signed, however, ratifying a system of double approval, in which the inquisitor verified that the book contained nothing against the Catholic faith. However, owing to frequent—and often justified—complaints about his overstepping his jurisdiction, it became increasingly common to obtain only state approval and to evade church control by a false imprint describing the place of publication (Infelise).
Statistics defining early book output are misleading at the best of times, but evaluating Italian Renaissance production is akin to a blindfold obstacle race. First, a significant percentage of imprints no longer survive. Second, large-scale export at the time and bibliophile collecting in the interim have ensured that approximately half the surviving copies of pre-1601 books—sometimes the sole witnesses of their respective editions—are now found outside Italy. The largest single collection is in London: rough counts suggest that, if the British Library took part in Edit16, it would hold just under 40 per cent of the total, whereas the National Central Libraries of Florence and Rome both average fewer than 30 per cent. Third, inside Italy itself, there is no tradition of concentrating early books in a few major collections. Instead, small towns have collections besides which the well-known public library parameter of one book per inhabitant appears almost absurd: Poppi, in Tuscany, with 5,300 inhabitants boasts 500 incunabula, while not-too-distant San Gimignano, with a population of 7,400, owns 1,600 16th-century books. Up to now, therefore, attempts at quantification—such as those constructed on the BL’s holdings—have proved inaccurate. However, the existence of electronic media not only simplifies counting, but also offers new opportunities.
At the time of writing, Edit 16 lists 6,800 entries for 1501–20 (39 per cent from Venice); 6,300 for 1521–40 (54 per cent); 10,800 for 1541–60 (56 per cent); 16,900 for 1561–80 (43 per cent); and 21,100 for 1581–1600 (34 per cent). The sort of plateau in early production is attributable to the anti-Venetian war and to the subsequent sack of Rome in 1527, accompanied by an outbreak of the plague, so that the century’s publishing nadir came in 1529. Otherwise, from 1501, inspired by the Aldine model, Venice reversed its earlier practice of publishing large-format books. According to ISTC, in 1465–80 54 per cent of Italian editions were in folio, 41 per cent were quarto, and 5 per cent were octavo or less; in 1481–1500 these proportions have already shifted respectively to 39, 50, and 11 per cent. By comparison in Edit 16, by 1521–40 folio shrinks to 13 per cent, quarto holds at 32 per cent, octavo reaches 52 per cent, and even smaller formats—mainly duodecimo—make themselves known at 3 per cent. In 1581–1600, folio remains constant at 10 per cent, though some titles are large, multi-volume publications; quarto climbs again to 46 per cent; octavo drops back to 31 per cent; and smaller formats make inroads to reach 13 per cent. The objective of resorting to smaller formats was to save paper, which in a Renaissance book could lead to savings of up to a third, though paradoxically the first edition in a new format often employs a greater number of sheets than its immediate predecessor. A large work never out of print, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, shows a characteristic evolution: after the folio editio princeps c.1470 (127 sheets), it reached its maximum size with the Ripoli edition c.1483 (151 sheets), although from 1504 to 1518 a more compact layout reduced the sheets to 63. The first quarto in 1516 contained 91 sheets, reduced to 68 by 1541; the octavo format first introduced in 1525 required 84 sheets, which fell to 56 by 1540; a trial sextodecimo imprint in 1542 has 23 1 2 sheets, although the first duodecimo in 1550 uses 38 1 2.
In this competitive market, books had to be attractive to buyers and Venice pioneered the innovation of the title-page and the consequent shift of publication-related information from the colophon to the front of the book. Publishers there swiftly caught on to the importance of clearly recognizable brand names. In incunabula, the traditional sign, or mark, of the medieval stationarius (stationer)—an orb with a double-cross, hanging over the shop door—appeared as a woodcut printer’s device, often with the addition of the proprietor’s initials, in conjunction with the colophon. This usage gave way, by the following century, to a more distinctive publisher’s mark that visually identified the bookshop, at times with a pun on the owner’s name, as with the Tower (Torresani), the St Bernard (Bernardino Stagnino), and the St Nicholas (Nicolò Zoppino). Other establishments employed an easily remembered symbol, such as the Anchor (Aldus), Cat (Sessa family), Dolphin (Garanta), Lily (Giunta family), Mermaid (Ravani), and Phoenix (Giolito). Publisher-printers were also adept at other tricks, such as modifying the date on the title-page, typical of Giolito’s output (so that the book would appear to be ‘new’ for more than a year at a time), or edition-sharing (where the name and mark of one publisher were substituted in press with those of another). This last habit in particular might cause migraines for those who have to catalogue such books, but it reveals substantial alliances within the Venetian industry, especially in the last part of the 16th century, when the market for large editions of patristic authors experienced an upturn after the regeneration of monastic libraries following the Council of Trent and the creation of a network of seminaries to train priests. A consortium of Venetian publishers, therefore, issued editions where each owned a personalized quota, the most striking example being the eleven-volume quarto edition of the works of St Augustine in 1570 (republished in 1584), split between Giunta, Nicolini, Sessa, Valgrisi, Varisco, and Zenaro.
The number of titles published in Italy peaked in 1588. The publishing crisis that followed—in full swing by the early 17th century—was mainly Venetian and had various causes, some of which have already been noted, such as the introduction (or often return) of printing to minor centres, usually as a service industry catering for local needs; thus, by 1601 presses were solidly implanted in more than 40 localities. In 1606 the jurisdictional conflict between Venice and Rome reached its height, with the interdict, largely disobeyed, forbidding priests from holding religious events in the city. The opposing factions engaged in a pamphlet war, in which Venice’s spokesman, the Servite friar Paolo Sarpi, demolished the papal arguments. In retaliation the Church intensified its attack on the economic base of the Venetian industry—the publishing of liturgical texts in red and black—by issuing privileges that favoured Roman editions and encouraging Venetian printers to relocate to Rome. With the trade elsewhere in Europe crippled by the Thirty Years War (1618–48), the final blow for a struggling industry came with the 1630 plague, which decimated the population of northern Italy. In the decade that followed, Venetian output dropped to 20 per cent of its former height, overtaken within the Italian market (albeit temporarily) by Rome and within the international market by Paris. Italian dominance of the European market had always been favoured by the role of Latin as the universal language: around mid-century, a different economic and political hegemony imposed French as the new lingua franca.
By the 18th century, a qualitative split is apparent. The top end of the market was occupied by works of notable, if to modern eyes dusty, erudition: the age’s leading intellectual was a librarian, Ludovico Antonio Muratori. Just as the Encyclopédie was the most important French book of its time, so its Italian counterpart was the immense assemblage of medieval sources Muratori edited as the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (25 vols, 1723–51). Second place on the scale of importance belongs to his later successor at the Estense Library, Girolamo Tiraboschi, whose Storia della Letteratura Italiana (10 vols, 1772–82) imposed a nonexistent national identity on a very existent literature. The publishing trade revived, bolstered by large-scale printing projects and aided both by the decline of traditional rivals Lyons and Antwerp and by the recession caused in France by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). Venice in particular, led by the Baglioni firm, recovered its pre-eminence in the printing of liturgical texts, which were exported mainly to the Spanish dominions in the New World. Another proof of revival was the success enjoyed by what to all intents and purposes was an academic press, set up in the house of a Padua University professor and managed by the printer Giuseppe Comino, with an essentially Aldine programme of Greek and Latin classics in elegant typography. The exclusive market for quality printing also sustained and largely justified the remarkable career of Bodoni, who transformed type design more profoundly than anyone since Aldus. But however extraordinary as typographical artefacts, his books are not intended to be read: his best-known publications therefore are his specimens, including the misleadingly titled Manuale tipografico issued by his widow in 1818. The steady advance of francophone culture is marked also by editions of the Encyclopédie in Lucca (1758–76) and in Livorno (1770–78), as well as by the reprint of the later Encyclopédie méthodique undertaken by the Seminary of Padua.
Contorni, printers’ ornaments (fleurons or borders), from Bodoni’s widow’s celebrated type specimen book, Manuale tipografico (1818). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Arch. BB. c. 2–3, vol. 2, p. 258)
The other end of the market was formed by a large-scale production, often in minor centres, of almanacs, chapbooks, works of popular piety, and so on, much of it anonymous and largely uncharted by bibliographers. To Venetian eyes, the most damaging producer was the Bassano Remondini firm, which, after opening a branch in Venice, attacked the publishing establishment from 1750 onward by systematically undercutting the price of steady-selling works whose privilege had recently expired. Savings were obtained by crowding half as much text again on to the page, with deleterious results for its quality, so that they were accused, rightly, of provoking a lapse in printing standards, in which others followed suit.
The French revolutionary armies that swept through Italy overthrew the Venetian Republic in 1797 and, among other things, turned the book trade inside out. When the dust settled in 1814, much appeared the same, but new ideas were stirring in the north. In particular, there was a growing sense that Italy was more than a geographical expression, and in the Risorgimento (resurgence) that followed, the existence of a national language and literature, however virtual, thrust the country towards unity. The cause was significantly espoused in publishing circles by foreign nationals, such as the Frenchman Felice Le Monnier and the Swiss Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, together with francophone Piedmontese such as Giuseppe Pomba and Gasparo Barbèra, who with their respective series, the ‘Biblioteca Italiana’ and the ‘Collezione Diamante’, insisted on the nation’s de facto cultural homogeneity. The cities of the north were also more amenable to technological progress; Pomba in Turin was the first to invest in a mechanized printing office, and Milan rapidly became Italy’s main publishing centre (Berengo). In the period 1814–1900, book production increased tenfold, leaving aside the growth of newspapers and magazines.
The century was also marked by a search for readers. Now that Italian publishing was confined to Italy, with few opportunities for export elsewhere, the domestic market proved suffocatingly small. The one exception to this rule was music publishing, dominated by Ricordi, for Italian opera ruled the European stage in the period from Verdi to Puccini. In the 19th century, two important factors emerge regarding the question of the absence of a middle-class readership. The first is the failure of the circulating library to take root, presumably because not enough native Italians were willing or able to disburse the sums involved: the one splendid exception, Vieusseux in Florence, was funded by foreign tourists. The second is the meagre fortune enjoyed by that archetypal middle-class genre, the novel, with its obligatory happy ending bringing marital, monetary, and social advancement. The first successful European novel, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), was translated into Italian in 1744, whereas the first indigenous attempt, Pietro Chiari’s La Filosofessa (1753), significantly pretended to be the translation of a French original, made as the sheets came off the press in Paris. Although other titles were produced, for a long time only one was accepted as literature, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed). Sharing with Richardson a story-line where a young girl is kidnapped in order to be seduced, it involved a significant effort to erase the dialect forms of the first edition and to create the pure contemporary Tuscan of the final version; thus, it established a new standard for the Italian language. The two other most successful fictional works of the 19th century were both aimed at the children’s market: De Amicis’ Cuore (1868) and Collodi’s worldwide bestseller Pinocchio (1883) (see 17).
Outside the French-reading, educated classes, fictional narrative otherwise struggled with a dearth of readers and with the backwardness of the educational system. For Italy as a whole, 75 per cent of the population was unable to read or write in 1870; in the rural south, this figure reached 90 per cent. Primary schooling became obligatory in 1877, but a lack of resources and the opposition of the clergy meant that the law remained a dead letter in many places; in 1911 the number of Italians with inadequate literacy skills still averaged 38 per cent.
In 1901, the Italian book trade presented geographical and cultural anomalies that remain substantially true today. Rome was the political capital; Milan, dominated by the rivalry between Sonzogno and Treves, was the economic and publishing capital; Florence—with the official home of the Italian language at the Crusca Academy, the country’s most important libraries, and publishers such as Barbèra, Bemporad, Le Monnier, and Sansoni—was the cultural capital. Although once-glorious Venice had almost disappeared from the map, other cities had publishing houses of considerable standing, such as Utet in Turin and Nicola Zanichelli in Bologna. An important novelty was the arrival of professional booksellers from the German-speaking world, such as Loescher, Ulrich Hoepli, and Leo Samuel Olschki, who took over established firms and subsequently broadened their scope. Beyond the handful of large companies, much publishing was local in character, revolving around a network of bookshop-stationers in small centres. Unity had also left the country with a network of libraries, including those of the universities, belonging to the former Italian states. Although enormously wealthy in terms of manuscripts and valuable printed books, most of these collections had little to offer for a population with low-grade reading skills.
Italy entered World War I in 1915 to settle its outstanding account with the Austro-Hungarian empire, suffered a shattering defeat at Caporetto, and obtained little more than crumbs at the Versailles peace table. Resentment opened the door to Mussolini, who took power in 1922. Fascism was not, as Benedetto Croce subsequently claimed, a Hyksos invasion by an external enemy that had to be borne and resisted; it began as a movement of army veterans, led by a man who started his political career on the left and veered to the right; and it happened with the support, outspoken or silent, of many institutions, including the Catholic Church. In the circumstances, the connivance of publishers, who bowed to the regime or actively profited from it, such as Arnoldo Mondadori and Vallecchi, is comprehensible; it makes the stand of the few who did not, especially Giulio Einaudi and Laterza, all the more admirable. As a totalitarian dictatorship, Fascism strongly exploited publishing as propaganda: from 1926, books had to display on the title-page the year in the Fascist era. The government also imposed a central control on the industry, both by censorship, through what in 1937 became the ministry for popular culture (usually known by its Orwellian semi-acronym Minculpop), and by incentives, including substantial loans to modernize printing works. The central figure and intellectual of a regime otherwise notoriously short of brainpower was Giovanni Gentile, a philosopher, university professor, owner of the publishing firm Sansoni, and driving force behind Giovanni Treccani in producing the Enciclopedia Italiana. Though anti-Semitism was not intrinsic to Fascism but borrowed from its nastier stablemate, with the passing of the racial laws in 1938 lists were compiled of Jewish authors and of writers judged ‘decadent’, who were banned, while publishing houses with Jewish links were taken over (such as Treves) or renamed (such as Olschki, which became Bibliopolis).
Despite the devastation and the chaos brought by World War II, in the aftermath newspapers, publishing houses, and cinema production companies in Italy remained in substantially the same hands. The Christian Democrat party, after the 1946 referendum transformed Italy into a republic, won a landslide election victory in 1948 and remained in power for the next 50 years. If the institutions and the government were in the hands of the Right, the intelligentsia was synonymous with the Left, and a heady mixture of economic boom, the expansion of university education, a steep rise in the birthrate, and ideas—sometimes music—from across the Alps, the Channel, and the Atlantic, set a cultural revolution in motion. From 1945 until the 1980s, Italy had the most politicized publishing output in Europe. Although the two publishing giants, Mondadori and Rizzoli, remained middle-of-the-road, thinkers and political activists were catered for by Einaudi and Feltrinelli; university texts were supplied by Il Mulino and Angeli; the dictionary market was covered by Zanichelli and Utet; while specialist academic publishing was the preserve of a renewed Olschki.
In one sense, the paperback revolution had its beginning in Italy in 1932, when Giovanni Mardersteig designed the Albatross Verlag layout in Mondadori’s Verona printing works; but otherwise the difficulty of finding a mass Italian readership has continued to trouble publishers. The postwar market was dominated by translations of English-language writers, ensuring steady growth for firms such as Longanesi and Bompiani; more recently, European authors have been catered for by the elegant Adelphi. If the novel is taken as a mirror of the society it depicts, a list of the most successful 20th-century titles whose first edition appeared on Italian soil offers food for thought. The top two works are not Italian at all: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which Lawrence self-published in Florence (1928), and Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago (1957), which Giangiacomo Feltrinelli had smuggled out of the USSR. Third on the list is another triumphant Feltrinelli intuition, Il Gattopardo by Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958); fourth place goes to Eco’s medieval whodunnit Il Nome della Rosa (1980). Further places are occupied by a string of 1960 bestsellers all’italiana, including Cassola’s La Ragazza di Bube (1960), Sciascia’s Il Giorno della Civetta (1961), and Bassani’s Il Giardino dei Finzi Contini (1962). Several of these have highly successful film versions; indeed, Italian narrative is closely interwoven with cinema, dominated by the neo-realism of De Sica, who in 1960 filmed Moravia’s 1957 novel La Ciociara, and the luxuriant imaginings of Fellini, who in the same year made La Dolce Vita. Successful cinema versions have also reinforced the genuine popular success of Guareschi’s Don Camillo stories (1948); although the anti-communist satire was anathematized by left-wing critics, they have sold in the millions and been translated into 20 languages.
Change has also been manifest in librarianship, where the static network of state-owned and municipal collections—with valuable holdings of rare material, but with little to interest the contemporary user—has been challenged by the genesis of numerous libraries in small urban centres, especially those under communist administrations in Emilia Romagna and Tuscany. Here the example of Einaudi—who donated a library to his family’s home town, Dogliani, and published the catalogue as a guide to a model collection (1969)—proved hugely influential.
Through the advent of new media (cinema, radio, and television), a sort of linguistic unity was reached—though even in the 21st century dialect is still spoken in the mountains to the north, in the south, and in the islands. The task begun by the Tuscan writers of the Trecento, continued by Bembo and Manzoni, was rounded off through popular TV culture, whose abundant quiz shows—with long-standing comperes such as Mike Bongiorno—regularly oblige contestants to display their knowledge of the Italian language.
Italy remains a complex, contradictory publishing market, with lots of books, lots of bookshops, lots of book lovers, lots of libraries, and few readers. Obligatory secondary education and the freedom of university access have significantly redrawn the literacy map, especially for women, who form up to 90 per cent of arts faculty students. Nonetheless, there remains an unbridged gap between a highly educated intellectual class, often with impressive personal book collections, such as Umberto Eco, and a vaster general public, whose interests are bounded by the sporting newspapers. Nationwide publishing is mostly controlled by larger media corporations, which sustain this relatively unprofitable activity, almost as a front activity, in order to guarantee the circulation of certain ideas and concepts. The media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, at the time of writing Italy’s third-time prime minister, is also the country’s largest publisher by virtue of his ownership of the Mondadori group. Lastly, the economic ‘miracle’ of the 1960s made Italy the world leader in the field of colour printing, both in product packaging (e.g. Barilla pasta) and in advertising material for the luxury goods industry, which exports worldwide such Italian brands as Versace, Ferragamo, and Ferrari. The availability of this technology has an obvious spin-off in the market for glossy, lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogues, where the leading firm is Electa. Another application for this expertise has been developed by Panini in Modena, which patented collectable cards with pictures of footballers, and which now offers many card albums on diverse subjects, including Harry Potter. In the 1990s, it applied its skill in polychrome printing to make perfect facsimiles of Medieval and Renaissance MSS, most notably the Bible of Borso d’Este, marketed in numbered editions intended for wealthy bibliophiles. The success enjoyed by this and other initiatives shows that in some ways the book market in Italy has little altered in nearly six centuries—or perhaps it is necessary to admit, like the main character in Il Gattopardo, that ‘for everything to remain the same, everything must change’.
L. Armstrong, ‘Nicolaus Jenson’s Breviarium Romanum, Venice, 1478: Decoration and Distribution’, in Incunabula: Studies in Fifteenth-Century Printed Books Presented to Lotte Hellinga, ed. M. Davies (1999)
L. Balsamo, Produzione e circolazione libraria in Emilia (XV–XVIII sec.) (1983)
M. Berengo, Intellettuali e Librai nella Milano della Restaurazione (1980)
H. F. Brown, The Venetian Printing Press (1891)
G. A. Bussi, Prefazioni alle edizioni di Sweynheym e Pannartz prototipografi romani, ed. M. Miglio (1978)
B. Cecchetti, ‘La stampa tabellare in Venezia nel 1447’, Archivio Veneto, 29 (1885), 87–91
Edit16 (Edizioni Italiane del XVI secolo), vols A–F (1989–2007), on-line version on SBN site
G. Fragnito, La Bibbia al Rogo: la Censura Ecclesiastica e i Volgarizzamenti della Scrittura, 1471–1605 (1997)
C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, tr. J. and A. Tedeschi (1980; Italian original, 1976)
P. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press 1540–1605 (1977)
N. Harris, Bibliografia dell’ ‘Orlando Innamorato’ (2 vols, 1988–91)
—— ‘Ombre della storia del libro italiano’, in The Books of Venice, ed. L. Pon and C. Kallendorf (2008)
M. Infelise, L’Editoria Veneziana nel ’700 (1989)
P. Needham, ‘Venetian Printers and Publishers in the Fifteenth Century’, LaB 100 (1998), 157–200
F. J. Norton, Italian Printers 1501–1520 (1958)
A. Nuovo, Il Commercio Librario nell’Italia del Rinascimento, 3e (2003)
B. Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy (1994)
—— Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (1999)
R. Ridolfi, ‘Proposta di ricerche sulle stampa e sugli stampatori del Quattrocento’, LaB 51 (1949), 2–9
SBN (Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale), www.sbn.it, consulted Sept. 2007
P. Scapecchi, ‘Subiaco 1465 oppure [Bondeno 1463]? Analisi del frammento Parsons–Scheide’, LaB 103 (2001), 1–24
G. Turi, ed., Storia dell’Editoria nell’Italia Contemporanea (1997)
