Supplementary Notes on the First Aldine Romans Used by Augereau and Francis Gryphius in 1531

Fifteen years ago I tried to show that Francis Gryphius should be counted among the small number of elite printers in Paris who, at the time of the founding of the Royal Lectureships by King Francis I, were able to cut or (in Gryphius's case) to purchase Roman founts in the prestigious Aldine style. ¹ It was apparent, by the autumn of 1530, that Robert Estienne had outdone his father-in-law Simon de Colines in funding a series of new founts of this kind. By the end of 1531 Augereau and Gryphius, as well as Christian Wechel, were employing similar 'Aldine Romans'. By 1533 Colines himself had adapted some of his founts to this new style. ²

The conclusion seemed evident: Gryphius, who had recently set up shop in Paris, was able to catch the Aldine wave by purchasing type from the Parisian typecutter and shortly to be printer-publisher, Antoine Augereau, whose career was the subject of detailed analysis fifty years ago by Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer. ³ But how many sizes of type? Over the years, the hypothesis that Gryphius purchased a fractionally reduced set of Augereau's Cicéro (Pica) seems to have held up: twenty lines of Augereau's Roman measures in the neighbourhood of 82 mm, while Gryphius's is usually closer to 80 mm, but the design is so similar as to exclude the existence of a second typecutter.

Recently, however, Hendrik Vervliet has proposed that Gryphius was either a punchcutter himself or had someone working for him and perhaps living in his house. ⁴ This theory is much stronger than the one I proposed. According to Vervliet, Gryphius appears to have been responsible for several founts, the oldest of which seems to be his Gros Canon (Double Pica: R 280), the first close imitation of Estienne's dramatic new upper- and lower-case Gros Canon, used for titles and introduced in September 1530, which Gryphius began using during the last months of 1531. ⁵ I proposed that Gryphius had purchased this large fount from Augereau, who apparently never employed it himself. How can these two views or claims be reconciled?

Let us begin by looking at the most detailed information available concerning Augereau, the 1991 description, in vol. 5 of Philippe Renouard's Imprimeurs et libraires parisiens du xvi^e siècle, of the edition of Melanchthon's Virgil printed in 1531 by André Bocard, who seems to have been Augereau's father-in-law. Copies of this Virgil are reputedly preserved at the British Library, at the Bodleian Library, and at the University Library in Cambridge. According to the 1991 description, it appears that Augereau had two new Aldine founts ready by that time: his Cicéro (R 82) and his Gros Canon (R 280), the upper- and lower-case titling fount. ⁶ Furthermore this edition contains side notes in a small, antiquated Roman, an R 54, and some Greek with accents. All of these types appear on fol. 94^r of the Bodleian copy, which I reproduce as Fig. 1. ⁷

On closer examination this view has to be modified. In reality there exists only one exemplar of the 1531 Virgil, printed by Bocard, in part with Augereau's type. It is the one housed at the British Library, and it contains only one Aldine fount (and a few lines from a second), as will be shown. The Oxford and Cambridge Virgils are reprints of the same Melanchthon edition, but the types are quite different from the copy in the British Library, as will become clear. In fact, in their current state, the Oxford and Cambridge copies should be noted as undated. Only the edition preserved in London has the date 1531 in the colophon. I say their current state because all three copies represent in reality the 1582 reissue of the book by Jean Macé, with a recomposed first quire and title-page, thus making it easy to confuse the two embedded editions. The edition represented by the Oxford and Cambridge exemplars, which has no colophon at all...