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  • Corpus Chartarum Italiae ad rem typographicam pertinentium ab arte inventa ad ann. MDL. Vol. I: Bologna
  • Neil Harris
Corpus Chartarum Italiae ad rem typographicam pertinentium ab arte inventa ad ann. MDL. Vol. I: Bologna. By Albano Sorbelli; ed. by Maria Gioia Tavoni, with the collaboration of Federica Rossi and Paolo Temeroli; preface by Anna Maria Giorgetti Vichi. (Indici e cataloghi, 16.) Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Libreria dello Stato. 2004. 482 pp. €150. ISBN 88 240 1109 8.

Nearly sixty years ago, in a short, programmatic piece in La Bibliofilía, Roberto Ridolfi defined early printers as 'gente di necessità intesa alla moneta' (Proposta di ricerche sulla stampa e sugli stampatori del Quattrocento, 51 (1949), p. 6). This phrase, by now almost proverbial, has served in recent years as a touchstone to differentiate Italian Renaissance book history compared with its European compeers and rivals. When the new ars artificialiter scribendi, usually borne by impecunious German wayfarers, began to disseminate itself through the opulent cities of Northern Italy, it encountered businessmen who were not so very interested in the promotion of knowledge, but who were very interested in becoming even richer than they already were. The new technology didn't come cheap, though, since the capital investment required to set up a press was akin to the cost of a mainframe computer for a business or a university in the 1970s. So the investors, in order to protect the conspicuous sums involved, drew up agreements in the presence of lawyers, who of course congregate round money like vultures round carrion. The good side of the equation is that such documents, held in official repositories, have a better chance of surviving than an informal handshake, so that for a long time now a major theme in Italian bibliographical research has been the systematic excavation and publishing of archive material relating to the history of early printing. As readers of this journal know, the main exponent in this field has been Arnaldo Ganda, whose loving and laborious trawl through the Milan archives has brought volumes on Antonio Zarotto (see The Library, vi, 7 (1985), 270–72), Nicolò da Gorgonzola (vi, 12 (1990), 58–59), and Filippo da Lavagna (vii, 8 (2007), 196–98; all three reviews are by D. E. Rhodes). Earlier examples are the enormous collection of materials relating to the Aldine family assembled by Esther Pastorello, and Gian Ludovico Masetti Zannini's useful 1980 study of publishing in Rome in the second half of the sixteenth century (still available from the publisher). The present book however restores a missing link.

This first and only volume of the Corpus chartarum Italiae has taken a mere sixty years to get from proof to its final published form. The work's original author, or compiler, was Albano Sorbelli (1875–1944), who from 1904 directed Bologna's Archiginnasio Library. His stature as a historian of printing and as a digger in the city's archives was established by the monograph produced in the same year on the figure of Baldassarre Azzoguidi, who in 1471 published the first book there. Obviously Bologna, which at the time was a feud of the Church and up to 1512 was ruled over by the Bentivoglio family, acted as a magnet for early typographers. Its university, founded in 1088, was the most ancient in the Western world and had a well-regulated, flourishing book market, revolving around the figure of the stationarius who rented manuscripts out to students for copying. It also had an abundance of academics who could be called on to ensure the correctness of the texts published and to push the books among their pupils. The elaborate structure of the medieval comune ensured that the contracts signed between printers and financiers were safely hoarded, so that Bologna today boasts archives that are among the most complete in the world for this period. (It was here, for instance, that Briquet uncovered the earliest known example of a sheet of paper bearing a watermark, dated 1282.) [End Page 446]

As his title makes clear, Sorbelli's objective was to gather the documents relating to printers or to printing and make them available, in chronological order, as a coherent...

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