A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Read online

  Boccaccio compromised by swearing to write no more racy stories, but devoted himself with renewed conviction to the recovery of ancient manuscripts, and made some stunning discoveries. In addition to locating the verses of the satirist Martial, he found the Ibis of Ovid and the erotic poems of the fourth-century writer Ausonius known collectively as the Priapeia, of which the oldest copy now extant is written in Boccaccio’s own hand. He also was the first humanist to quote the works of the Roman scholar Varro (116–27 B.C.).

  In his zeal to rescue ancient documents, Boccaccio may have removed several unique manuscripts from the library at Monte Cassino in 1370 without telling anyone what he was doing. He never mentioned his visit to the Benedictine monastery in his writings, yet such a trip was described in detail by one of his pupils, Benvenuto da Imola. “Boccaccio stepped up the staircase with delight,” Benvenuto wrote, “only to find the treasure-house of learning destitute of door or any kind of fastening, while the grass was growing on the window-sills and the dust reposing on the books and bookshelves. Turning over the manuscripts, he found many rare and ancient works, with whole sheets torn out, or with the margins ruthlessly clipped.” Boccaccio “burst into tears” and asked a monk he met in the cloister “to explain the neglect.” He was told that in order to generate income, some of the monks occasionally tore out “whole handfuls of leaves and made them into psalters, which they sold to boys,” and “cut off strips of parchment, which they turned into amulets, to sell to women.”

  What specific items Boccaccio may have acquired during this secret visit is not recorded, but later scholarship suggests that while he was there he “recovered” significant portions of both the Annals and History by Tacitus, the Roman historian admired most by Edward Gibbon in the eighteenth century, yet totally forgotten prior to this fourteenth-century find. Within a year of his visit to Monte Cassino, Boccaccio was making numerous references to Tacitus in his own writings.

  Because the document that survives is written in the tiny cursive script used in the eleventh century at Monte Cassino, there is little doubt it originated there. Whether Boccaccio took it remains a mystery, because even though he is the first Renaissance scholar to quote directly from Tacitus, the original codex cannot be proved to have been in his hands. Instead, it quietly made its way into the Laurenziana Library in Florence, which was formed in 1444 by Cosimo de’ Medici with books gathered by Niccolò de Niccoli, a second-generation humanist and the last known owner of the Tacitus codex. When Niccoli died in 1437, he had the greatest library in Florence, assembled, he boasted in his will, “with great industry and study, avoiding no labor from youth and sparing no expense.” Niccoli left his books to a board of trustees that included Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Giovanni Poggio Bracciolini, and Leonardo Bruni. Because Niccoli died owing the Medici bank a considerable sum of money, Cosimo was able to secure custody of the books as part of a settlement. They soon became the centerpiece of the Medici family library designed by Michelangelo that remains one of the most graceful monuments of the Italian Renaissance.

  As for the Tacitus codex and the Varro manuscript, Niccoli never disclosed how he acquired them, but fifty years earlier, as an up-and-coming young humanist, he briefly served as curator of Boccaccio’s books after the poet died. When Poggio Bracciolini borrowed the Tacitus from Niccoli in 1437, he gave cryptic assurance that the matter would never be mentioned. Niccoli, it must be noted, earned tremendous respect for his willingness to lend books from his library to scholars, and was remembered warmly for his generosity.

  So the question is: Did Niccolò de Niccoli “liberate” the Tacitus and the Varro manuscripts from Boccaccio’s estate and not tell anyone? It seems likely that he did. And had Boccaccio previously “liberated” them from an indifferent monastic library? That seems likely as well. As for motivation, perhaps Boccaccio’s pupil Benvenuto explained his teacher’s reasoning best by citing one of his comments on the consequences of the neglect and decay he witnessed in 1370 at Monte Cassino: “‘So then, O man of study, go to and rack your brains; make books, that you may come to this!’”

  Petrarch and Boccaccio died within a year of each other, prompting Coluccio Salutati, a humanist writer and the chancellor of the Florence signorie, to declare that “both of the luminaries of the new eloquence” had been extinguished. Salutati was a great collector of Latin manuscripts in his own right who located additional letters of Cicero, which he added to Petrarch’s material. He successfully conducted explorations for lost works of Livy and Catullus, and was the first to possess a copy of Cato’s De Agricultura, the elegies of Maximianus, the Aratea of Germanicus, and the commentary of Pompeius on the Ars maior of Donatus. One of his most prescient acts was to arrange for the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (1353– 1415) to leave Constantinople and teach Greek in Florence for four years. His student Leonardo Bruni said he was able to learn a language that no Italian had understood “for the last seven centuries.” Another consequence was that new expeditions mounted outside Italy now targeted Greek classics, and the most aggressive new collector to come along was yet another student of Chrysoloras, Poggio Bracciolini.

  Born in 1380, Poggio started out as an ambitious young scribe whose exceptional skills attracted the attention of Salutati, who taught him how to make accurate copies of old texts, fired his enthusiasm for the hunt, and encouraged him to study Greek. By the early 1400s, Poggio was writing accomplished apostolic letters for the papal Curia; he was elevated to the position of papal secretary in 1414, which permitted him to travel widely for close to half a century and undertake the systematic recovery of material in Italy, France, Germany, and Switzerland. His most spectacular accomplishments came while he was an aide at the Council of Constance in southern Germany from 1414 to 1418, a church summit called to settle the Great Schism—in which three men claimed to be pope—and confirm a single new pope. With few duties to perform, Poggio was able to go off on numerous scouting trips. In 1416, he traveled through twenty miles of narrow paths up a series of steep slopes to St. Gall in Switzerland, a monastery founded by Irish monks in the seventh century and well known as a repository of many books and manuscripts. There, he made a number of discoveries, most notably a complete manuscript of the Institutio oratoria (“education of an orator”), by Marcus Fabius Quintilian, a famous teacher of rhetoric at Rome. Poggio described the recovery in a lengthy letter to a friend, one of more than six hundred he wrote over a thirty-year period that give an unequaled window into the soul of a Renaissance bookman:

  I verily believe that, if we had not come to the rescue, he [Quintilian] must speedily have perished; for it cannot be imagined that a man magnificent, polished, elegant, urbane, and witty could much longer have endured the squalor of the prison house in which I found him, the savagery of his jailers, the forlorn filth of the place.… In the middle of a well-stocked library, too large to catalogue at present, we discovered Quintilian, safe as yet sound, though covered with dust and filthy with neglect and age. The books, you must know, were not housed according to their worth, but were lying in a most foul and obscure dungeon at the very bottom of a tower, a place into which condemned criminals would hardly have been thrust.

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  In 1453, while Pope Nicholas V was establishing the Vatican Library in Rome, an obscure visionary in the German city of Mainz was refining an invention that would forever relieve monastic scribes of the burden of preserving words on vellum and paper. The first forty-two-line Bibles printed by Johannes Gutenberg were produced between 1450 and 1455, several years before Poggio Bracciolini’s death in 1459. Whether Bracciolini, who spent his adult life as a master copyist, ever handled a printed book is not recorded, though the possibility that he did is remote.

  The first volumes known to have been printed in Italy were produced seven years after Poggio’s death by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, two Germans who briefly operated a shop in Subiaco before setting up permanent quarters in Rome. The event was noted in a work about the
reigning pope by Gaspare da Verona, who wrote that the two craftsmen arrived in Italy “and in a single month” published three different titles, and quickly followed that feat by “making 200 such books every month” thereafter, “all of which they sold at a very low price.” Gaspare explained how difficult it would be “to give an account of their craft, which was the invention of great genius, if many did not know the whole truth,” and added: “They are intending to produce other books in the same way.”

  One portent of how times were changing is illustrated by the rapid evolution of new commercial functions. In one instance, a man who began his working life as a scribe found success later as the first modern bookseller. Vespasiano dè Bisticci (1421–1498) alertly applied his superior knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew manuscripts to the needs of a changing society. When Cosimo de’ Medici wanted to establish a library for the monks of San Lorenzo, Vespasiano arranged for forty-five copyists to produce two hundred manuscripts, a chore that took two years to complete. When Tommaso Parentucelli, later known as Pope Nicholas V, was assembling a manuscript collection at the Vatican, Vespasiano, now a bookseller in Florence, became his principal assistant.

  Most telling of all is the work Vespasiano performed for Federico Montefeltro (1422–1482), duke of Urbino, a collector of exquisite manuscripts whose exacting tastes separated him from the seismic changes then afoot in Europe. The bookseller spent fourteen years building a collection of all the Greek and Latin authors who had recently been discovered and had them all bound in crimson and silver. The duke insisted that each be in perfect condition and that each be unique. None of the printed books then coming into fashion was allowed in his library. All of his books had to be “written with the pen,” Vespasiano recalled years later; anything else would have made the collector feel “ashamed.” Florentine bibliophiles were fiercely proud of their calligraphic traditions, and did not warm immediately to the idea of books that were mass-produced.

  Printing came to Florence in 1472, but in the meantime, Venice had firmly established itself as capital of the publishing industry. By 1474, an overworked scribe would complain that the city already was “stuffed with books.” By 1480, presses were operating in more than one hundred other cities throughout Europe, forty-seven of them in Italy. By the close of the fifteenth century—when the “cradle” period of the printed book came to an end—about 150 Venetian presses had manufactured more than four thousand editions, approximately twice as many as in Paris, the city’s closest competitor, and about an eighth of Europe’s entire production during this pivotal period.

  At first publishers saturated the bookstalls with the new editions of Latin classics, resulting in a temporary glut that prompted the emerging industry to evaluate the dictates of the market. Conferences and book fairs were held, trends were surveyed, and sales strategies were developed. The first known author’s copyright was issued to Marcantonio Sabellico in 1486, and though classic texts of widely varying quality remained popular, other works printed in vernacular languages were produced for a voracious new readership. Publishers experimented during the 1490s with books that included maps, music scores, and Oriental languages.

  As a consequence, printers and publishers attracted attention to themselves. The Venetian diarist and bibliophile Marino Sanudo used a single word to describe Nicholas Jenson, the most famous printer of the 1470s: richissimo. The historian Marcantonio Sabellico described a fanciful walk through Venice’s busy bookselling quarter in a 1493 work. One of the strollers, a visitor to the city, was left alone by his companion among aggressive merchants who offered every sort of title for sale. Several hours later, the man had not left his original position, though a massive variety of volumes was stacked high on the ground around him.

  A harsh critic of the Venetian press was the Dominican friar and poet Filippo di Strata, who accused the city’s printers and publishers not only of “vulgarizing intellectual life,” but also of being nothing more than vagabonds and idlers who shamelessly thrust armfuls of printed trash at unsuspecting people on the street “like cats in a bag.” Fra Filippo also complained that because the texts were hastily prepared by “ignorant oafs,” they were hopelessly inaccurate, and because they were inexpensive, they tempted uneducated fools to “give themselves the airs of learned doctors.”

  About 1490, a forty-year-old Roman scholar and teacher with no previous background in printing moved to Venice and set up an operation that would demonstrate convincingly that commerce and excellence could be combined in a single enterprise. Aldus Manutius (1449– 1515) spent several years as tutor to the sons of the prince of Capri, one of whom later expressed his gratitude by underwriting the new venture. Beginning with the idea of creating a Greek press in Italy, Aldus brought with him a number of craftsmen from Crete. His earliest project was the printing of ancient Greek classics that had remained unpublished and the issuing of revised texts of works that had appeared in corrupted versions. From 1494 to 1515, when he died, his Aldine Press printed no fewer than twenty-seven editiones princeps of Greek authors and works of reference. (An editio princeps is the first printed edition of a work previously circulated in manuscript form, before printing became common.) He also published books in Latin, Italian, and Hebrew. As a printer’s mark he used the familiar symbol of a crossed anchor and dolphin to indicate both speed and stability, which is usually identified with the Renaissance motto “Make haste slowly.”

  Aldus also produced the first italic type, a cursive form based on chancery script and modeled on the handwriting of Petrarch. Up until that time the German “gothic” typeface was in common use. The immediate result was a more condensed letter, which allowed for the production of a more compact format, known as octavos, that might “more conveniently be held in the hand and learned by heart.” Books became even more accessible and affordable. Aldus’s business relationship with Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most famous European scholar of the period and the first person actually to make a living as a writer, enhanced his status ever further. Aldus’s son, Paulus, eventually took over the management of the Aldine Press.

  Printed texts, meanwhile, began to achieve the kind of stature enjoyed before only by manuscripts. In 1512 one German collector wrote to a friend, “I shall buy my Hebrew books in Italy, where Aldus has printed them in beautiful texts,” and noted that his own country, where the printing craft had been invented just six decades earlier, “owes a great debt to Aldus.” A half century later, John Dee, the English mathematician, book collector, and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, pointedly kept the “Aldines” in his library apart from all the other volumes he had gathered.

  Aldus also did business with Jean Grolier de Servières (1479–1565), the French nobleman whose dedication to beautiful books and bindings qualify him to be considered the first modern bibliophile. Grolier spent considerable time in Italy on diplomatic missions and acquired a number of volumes for his library which were so distinctively bound that they continue to be associated with his name. Of the 350 or so surviving books known to have been Grolier’s, about half are Aldines, forty-two produced during the lifetime of Aldus Manutius the Elder. (A grandson had the same name.) Grolier also bought many copies on vellum, and often had illuminations added at additional expense. The quality of work done for him is similar to that executed for the Venetian nobility, prompting the historian Martin Lowry to suggest the “real possibility that special orders were prepared for him in the Aldine workshop itself.” The Grolier Club in New York was named in the French bibliophile’s honor, and a fanciful painting in the lobby pictures a visit of its namesake to the shop of Aldus Manutius.

  In his seven-volume history of the Italian Renaissance, John Addington Symonds put the rediscovered passion for collecting and the new art of printing in perspective. “All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labours of these men,” he declared, and pointed out that the first publishers “needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for
the accomplishment of their titanic task. Virgil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind.” He concluded that it is to these people “we owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the future of human culture.”

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  Rule, Britannia

  History’s first great tribute to bibliomania was written by a fourteenth-century prelate so consumed with the hunt that he undoubtedly caused a sensation in the book marts of Paris, Antwerp, Flanders, and Rome. As bishop of Durham and trusted adviser to King Edward III of England, Richard de Bury (1287–1345) is said to have traveled with a colorful entourage of twenty clerks and thirty-six esquires, a clear indication that he could indulge his lifelong passion with enviable vigor. And the medieval bibliophile did not disappoint; wherever he went, he sought out “the heavenly food of the mind” which he found so essential to a meaningful life.

  Born Richard Aungerville near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, de Bury was the son of a knight whose Norman ancestors had helped conquer England two centuries earlier. Orphaned as a child, Richard was raised by a maternal uncle who decreed a life of piety and contemplation. While studying theology and philosophy at Oxford, he gained prominence as a scholar and attracted the attention of King Edward II, who needed a tutor for his son, the heir apparent. When the prince became sovereign in 1327, the wise mentor—by then called de Bury in honor of his birthplace—remained with his grateful pupil as counselor and confidant.