Fame Through Print
After Gutenberg the human instinct for display took a new form: the wish for fame in the world of the press. Satisfying it was costly in those days, since "copyright" meant only an exclusive privilege issued by civil or church authorities for printing a particular book. Such privileges were exceptional, and without one, publishers, even within a single country, undercut each other and printed any book they liked without the author's permission. If a book sold well the publisher usually paid the author a fee, but on the whole the only publications with a lively market and a fair profit were popular romances, tales of magic and marvelous creatures, and polemical tracts, which sold better the sharper and more insulting their tone. Scientific and philosophical works, even when very successful, merely covered their costs.
Publishers encouraged the authors of such works to dedicate them to statesmen, high clergy, influential judges or titled persons, in the hope that these would extend a generous hand in return for the honor done them.
Typefaces and Printing Centers
Printing and publishing were generally carried out by a firm, and the person or family that founded one gained great standing in the town and counted among its important figures. But fame seldom came from printing alone. Claude Garamond of Paris, for example, won it by retiring the "Gothic type" that German printers had copied from manuscripts and made common, and by designing (about 1540) a new typeface called "Roman," modeled on the Carolingian script that had spread in the ninth century and been developed by Italian humanists and the Aldine press. Italian, French and English printers adopted Roman type, while the Germans continued to use Gothic type until the nineteenth century. Some typefaces are still called "Garamond."
Germany led the world in printing. Active firms worked in Basel, Strasbourg, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Wittenberg, Cologne, Leipzig, Frankfurt and Magdeburg. Twice a year publishers and booksellers gathered at the Frankfurt fair to buy, sell and exchange ideas. In 1548 a Frankfurt publisher printed the first newspaper, a single sheet with the latest news, and published it at the same fair. When Christophe Plantin turned his small bindery into a printing house (1555), Antwerp became an important publishing center, so that two years later he could send 1,200 volumes to the Frankfurt fair. In France, Lyons became the center of the book trade, and a time came when this city, with its 200 printing establishments, challenged Paris for the position of France's "intellectual capital."
Etienne Dolet
Etienne Dolet, the humanist and famous French printer, was known as the firebrand of Lyons. Born in Orleans and educated in Paris, he was captivated by the works of Cicero, saying: "I acknowledge only Jesus and Cicero as right." Hearing that thought lived with unusual freedom in Padua, he hurried there and traded satirical witticisms with the skeptical Averroists. In Toulouse he became the leader and soul of a group of freethinkers who mocked pope and Luther equally; expelled from there, he made a name in Lyons by writing essays and poems, but in a quarrel he fought a duel with a painter and it ended in blood, and he had to flee to Paris. There Marguerite of Navarre obtained from the king a pardon for him.
Dolet made friends with Marot and Rabelais but after a time turned the friendship into dispute, and went back to Lyons, set up a press, and became known for specializing in the publication of heretical works. The Inquisition summoned, tried and imprisoned him; Dolet escaped from prison but was arrested again during a secret visit to his son. On 3 August 1546 Etienne Dolet was burned alive on a pyre.
The Estienne Dynasty
The most distinguished publishers of France were the Estienne family, a dynasty as durable in the printing trade as the Fuggers in commerce. Henri Estienne set up his press in Paris about 1500, and his sons Francois, Robert and Charles continued his work. France owes its finest printed editions of the great Roman and Greek classics to these four men. Robert compiled a dictionary called the Thesaurus of the Latin Tongue (1532), which became the foundation of all later Latin-French dictionaries. Latin was the second language of the family, and among themselves they usually spoke Latin.
Francis I admired the Estiennes' work, encouraged Marguerite to defend them against the Sorbonne, and once even took part in the circle of scholars that gathered at Robert Estienne's publishing house. It is even reported that the king waited patiently while Robert corrected a proof he held in his hand. With the king's financial help Robert hired Garamond to design and cast new Greek type, and Garamond's Greek letters turned out so handsome that they served as the model for most Greek books printed afterward. The Sorbonne objected to the king's Hellenism, and one of its professors warned parliament (1539) that "the publication of Greek and Hebrew works will have no other result than the destruction of all religious faith," as a monk said of Hebrew: "It is proven that anyone who learns Hebrew soon becomes a Jew."
After thirty years of attack and prosecution by the Sorbonne, Robert moved his press to Geneva (1552), and in that city, which saw his death in 1559, he revealed his inner leanings toward Protestantism by printing Calvin's Institutes. His son, Henri Estienne II, kept the family fame alive by publishing fine volumes of the classics and by compiling a five-volume dictionary, the Thesaurus of the Greek Tongue (1572), which remains the most complete Greek dictionary. He too drew the Sorbonne's wrath, with his Apology for Herodotus (1566), in which he described well the basic similarities between Christian miracles and the incredible marvels of Greek belief. He too first took refuge in Geneva but soon found that the Calvinists were as narrow-minded and strict as the Sorbonnists.
Bindings and Libraries
Many publications of the period are outstanding examples of the arts of printing, engraving and binding. The heavy, half-metal bindings of the fifteenth century gave way to lighter and cheaper ones of leather and skin. Jean Grolier de Servieres, treasurer of France, ordered in 1534 nearly 3,000 of his books bound in Levant morocco so finely that they are still counted among the most beautiful volumes. The private libraries were now beyond counting, and public libraries were founded in many cities: Krakow (1517), Hamburg (1529), Nuremberg (1538). Under Francis I the old royal library, gathered and founded by Charles VIII, was moved from the Louvre to Fontainebleau and grew far richer with new collections and fine bindings. After the French Revolution it became the "National Library." Many monastery libraries were lost in the disturbances of the Reformation; but some passed into private hands, and whichever had value in some respect found its way to the national collections. Much has been lost to history, but so many treasures survive that a hundred lifetimes would not suffice to study them.
The Collapse of the Schools
It was natural that the religious revolution should tear apart the fabric of western Europe's education, because that system was almost entirely a monopoly of the church, and the influence of the orthodox clergy could be overthrown only by breaking their control over public education. Luther accused the Latin schools of his time of teaching the pupil nothing "except a little imperfect Latin that would let him become a priest and read the prayers of the Mass ... and even so he would stay ignorant all his life, fit neither to cluck nor to lay an egg."
The universities seemed to him like dens of murderers, or temples of Moloch, or brothels of corruption: "Nothing more hellish has appeared on earth ... or ever will," and he concluded that the universities were "fit only to be leveled to the ground." Melanchthon agreed with him because he believed the universities brought up their students as unbelievers. The view of Karlstadt, the "prophets" of Zwickau and the Anabaptists that salvation is by grace found ready acceptance with parents who did not want to pay for their children's education. Some of them argued that since higher education mostly prepared students to become priests, and the clergy's trade had by then fallen on bad days, it was illogical to send children to universities.
The reformers expected part of the income from church endowments seized by the state to go to founding new schools to make up for those lost when the monasteries closed. But as Luther complained, "the princes and titled men were so busy with weighty matters in the wine cellar, the kitchen and the bedchamber that they had no time left" to spend on educating their fellow men. In 1524 he wrote again: "In the German states all schools are going to ruin." In 1530 Luther and Melanchthon lamented the extinction of the German universities. At the University of Erfurt enrollment fell from 1,311 in 1520 to 120 in 1521 and to 34 in 1524; at Rostock the number of students dropped from 300 in 1517 to 15 in 1525; at Heidelberg in that year the professors outnumbered the students; in 1526 only five students enrolled at the University of Basel (all figures as given in the book).