The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance (2021) by Ross King

Fifteenth century Florence was known primarily for its wool-making and its banking (and eventually its art). In “The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance” (2021) pop historian Ross King argues that handcrafted book–making was another valued and important skill the Florentines were renowned for. Vespasiano da Bisticci (1433-1498) was the most prominent Florentine cartolai (paper merchant) of them all, “the king of the world’s booksellers,” King says. The cartolai of Quantocento Italy were more than simple bookshops. They were reading rooms, a classroom, a debating society, and a rumor mill all in one. Vespasiano and his fellow cartolai, scribes, and scholars were at the forefront of a revolution in knowledge known as Renaissance humanism

The Renaissance created modernity by, ironically, looking backward. It was the re-discovery and new appreciation of ancient classics from Cicero, Livy, Ovid, Horace, and Plutarch, among many others, that energized a moribund post-Roman Italian culture. Many of these classical texts were valuable because they provided skills that could be applied to timeless and concrete political and social problems. Moreover, the ancient Greeks and Republican Romans lived in (relatively) free societies where decisions were made by elected assemblies. (Interestingly, the percentage of the populations in Republican Rome and Republican Florence that could vote was very similar – somewhere between 10% and 20%). Knowing history and how to speak eloquently in public were vital political and social skills. When manuscript hunter Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) re-discovered a complete set of Quintilian’s “The Orator’s Education” at a monastery in Switzerland in 1416, it was “epoch making,” King says. The exile of Pope Eugenius IV also brought the brilliant and worldly humanists of the Papal Curia to Florence for an extended stay (1434 to 1444), which further established the city as a center of wisdom. New learned men of the Quatrocento who were also heavily engaged in civic affairs picked up the mantle left by the Greek and Roman greats. Men like Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), Chancellor of Florence and the translator of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” were “the most erudite and accomplished man since the fall of Rome,” according to King. The genius of the Renaissance mind, the author says, is that it could hold both the wisdom of the ancient pagans and the doctrines of the Christian religion in graceful equilibrium.

It’s amazing that any ancient classics survived to be rediscovered. They were written on long sheets of papyrus and wrapped in scrolls. These volumes had several weaknesses. First, papyrus lacked durability and were easily destroyed. Second, the lack of pagination made it extremely difficult to find passages. Third, scrolls were inefficient because only one side of the papyrus could be used. In the first century AD the papyrus scroll was slowly replaced by the parchment (animal skin) codex, the forerunner to the modern book, which allowed many classics to survive.

Most ancient writings did not survive the fall of Rome, and those that did often emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages unevenly. For instance, Plato’s writings took much longer to arrive in the West than his student Aristotle’s. By the mid thirteenth century all of Aristotle’s works had been translated into Latin and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) had reconciled much of his philosophy into harmony with the Bible and Christian theology. By the early fourteenth century, one Florentine scholar lamented: “The whole world has been seized by the Aristotelians.” The far more elusive thirty six dialogues of Plato, however, arrived in Florence largely with the Byzantine-Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (1350-1415) in 1397. Neo-platonism marked a spiritual shift. The fact-driven, Aristotelian pursuit of knowledge in the external world was replaced by the Platonic meditation on external verities. The Ciceronian ideals of combining scholarship with patriotism and civic virtue that had so inspired Leonardo Bruni and his flavor of Florentine civic humanism were being derailed in favor of mystical contemplation in pursuit of a divine realm of light and love.

Plato’s relationship with his gifted pupil had been contentious. Aristotle sought an approach to knowledge that was more scientific and empirical that focused on specifics over universal truths. The end result was a rigid formality to Aristotelian logic. Petrarch wrote: “More men praise Aristotle; better ones, Plato.” Meanwhile, Aristotle disparaged his former teacher’s philosophy as “empty phrases and poetical metaphors.” Plato, in turn, complained: “Aristotle spurns me, as a colt kicks out at the mother who bore them.”

A serious problem that humanist scholars had to contend with was keeping the language of the classics “pure.” There were many problems with the scribal system of manuscript writing. Most obviously, it was slow, laborious, and therefore expensive work that required years of training. Less obviously, it was highly error prone, which only compounded over time as sloppy scribes made errors using already faulty manuscripts. Even with a rigorous system of inspection and cross-checking, scribal errors still continued to creep into new manuscripts. This led to a hunt for “exemplar” copies of classic works. That is, the translations of Greek and Roman manuscripts that were considered the most authoritative and trustworthy, and least corrupted by scribal error over the centuries.

The word manuscript comes from the Latin manu scriptus – “written by hand.” Manuscript writing was a highly valued craft skill. Scribes were like goldsmiths or sculptors who delivered beautiful manuscripts of simplicity, regularity, and symmetry. Their services accounted for roughly two-thirds of a book’s production costs, and this at a time when most books were printed on goat- or calf-skin. (It could take up to 200 animals to produce a Bible.) King says the average scribe earned more than 50 florins a year and churned out perhaps ten manuscripts a year, which must have included many short announcements and Papal bulls. Florentine scribes at the end of the fourteenth century moved away from the Gothic script or “modern letters” of the Middle Ages in favor of the more lucid and elegant style known as Carolingian script or “antique letters.” King says this transition was hastened by the support of Manuel Chrysolaras and Poggio Bracciolini around the year 1400.

Libraries came back into fashion in humanist Florence. It is believed that ancient Rome ultimately boasted twenty public libraries. In 1444, Cosimo de Medici acquired the magnificent 800 book collection of Niccolo Niccoli to serve as the foundation of his library at San Marco. Cosimo turned to noted scholar Tommaso Parentucelli to compile a list of important books still missing from his library. Cosimo then turned to Vespasiano to find the books. On one trip to a Franciscan monastery in Lucca he acquired 49 manuscripts for 250 florins. Cosimo turned to Vespasiano again in 1456 when he lavishly refurbished Badia Fiesole, an Augustinian abbey in Florence, and wanted to add a library. This time Vespasiano would be building the collection from scratch. He hired forty-five scribes and churned out 200 manuscripts in less than two years.

Pope Nicholas V, who was pontiff from 1447 to 1455, was perhaps the first great humanist pontiff. He was a scholar and a bibliophile who was intent on building the greatest library since the one at Alexandria. Vespasiano was commissioned to find the best books in the world to fill it. Meanwhile, on the eve of Constantinople’s capture by the Turks in 1453, Cardinal Bessarion hastily assembled the finest libraries of Greek manuscripts in Europe in the hopes of capturing a complete transcript of Greek culture itself. In the end, perhaps as many 100,000 Greek manuscripts were destroyed in the plunder of the city. King says that Bessarion believed that the domains of Plato and Aristotle had been “violently extinguished by a tribe of barbarians.” According to Nicholas V, the catastrophe of Constantinople was “the shame of Christendom.” To many across Europe, it was punishment from God for failing to unify the Greek and Latin churches.

The printing press arrived just as the craze for library building was getting started. The story of the printing press is remarkable and improbable. First, it was slowly developed over decades in the mid-fifteenth century in the relatively remote German town of Mainz, a village of little more than 5,000 people. Second, Johannes Gutenberg, the primary inventor, was sixty-years-old when he created his miraculous printing device. Third, his one critical skill was in casting metal and he first started experimenting with type face in the 1430s. Fourth, book production seemed in little need of reform in the mid-fifteenth century (more manuscripts were produced in the thirteenth century than in the previous seven hundred years put together; during the fifteenth century almost five million handwritten codices were produced and manuscript production was increasing by 40% every decade in the years before Gutenberg’s invention). Finally, Gutenberg’s endeavor was financially supported by Johan Fust, who acted as a Renaissance version of a venture capitalist. The first printing was a 180 copy run of the Bible – known as “B42” or the Gutenberg Bible – in 1453. It is believed that about 75 percent of the Gutenberg Bibles were printed on paper, the rest on parchment. The impact of the printing press would prove to be revolutionary; the technology of the printing press was not. Historian David Landau once quipped that on the scale of human ingenuity, the printing press ranked “somewhere below the discovery of how to make a souffle.” But there was no denying the results: “[Gutenberg] prints in one day what cannot be written in a year!” exclaimed one contemporary Italian cardinal.

At roughly the same time that the printing press was being developed, the western world was experiencing a dramatic shift from the use of parchment to the use of paper. King suggests that the Black Death played a large role in this transition as the plague killed tens of millions of people who left behind clothes that could be turned into rags and then paper. It also infected and killed tens of millions of livestock, which were then too contaminated to be used for parchment. During the 1300s, King says two-thirds of European manuscripts used parchment, which dropped to nearly a quarter in the 1400s. Paper filled the vaccuum. Cost played a significant role: paper cost only 15 percent of the cost of parchment. The printing press further removed the need for a scribe, the single most expensive line item in manuscript production cost. And, of course, the printing press was much faster – in fact, 30 times faster – than a scribe producing over 300 pages a day. Thus, a Gutenberg Bible cost 80 percent less than handwritten equivalents, which King suggests was how much printing reduced the cost of books no matter the size or quality. “Knowledge was about to get much cheaper and much more plentiful,” according to King.

Yet, in the decades after the introduction of the printing press, the manuscript book and the job of the scribe seemed as secure as ever. In the decades leading up to the printing press roughly 190,000 manuscripts were being copied per decade; in the decades after the printing press the number of manuscripts copied per decade jumped to 457,000. Some of this was because printing was treated as a closely guarded trade secret. The first written description of how the printing press functioned was published until 1534 – over 80 years after it had been invented! Moreover, printing was a risky business. Unlike creating manuscripts, printing required significant upfront costs and relatively large production runs, which could ruin the printer if the inventory of books didn’t sell well.

Vespasiano sought clients in other Italian cities, such as the humanist King Alphonso of Naples (1396-1458), who was also working toward building a library. “Vespasiano was exporting the advanced culture of humanist Florence aboard,” King writes, “a bold, speculative attitude that by the middle of the century was feeding a growing appetite for humane letters far beyond the walls of Florence.” Again, Pope Nicholas V, the first Humanist Pope, laid the foundation of the papal library. By the time of his death, King says, the Vatican library was “one of the largest and finest in the world, making Rome a center of culture and learning for the first time in more than a millennium.” Vespasiano also devoted years to building a world class library of over 900 books for Federico de Montefeltro of Urbino.

Book-making wasn’t particularly profitable. It was a labor intensive, low margin business. King says that we have Vespasiano’s records for 111 books he produced for the Badia in Fiesole. The average codex was sold for about 14 florins and made a little over 3 florins in profit. King says that this profit likely stayed the same regardless of the price of the book. That is, the book-maker made about the same profit whether the book sold for 15 florins or 50 florins. Vespasiano earned about 75 florins a year, which means he was producing about 20 books a year.

Between 1465 and 1475 printing press operations had arrived in most of the leading cities of northern Italy. Nearly all of the books published were in Latin. The price of books dropped dramatically, but sales were nevertheless anemic. King says that one publisher in Rome held an unsold inventory of 10,000 books on a publication run of less than 13.000. Over production by competing operations (some 12.5 million printed books appeared between 1454 and 1500) combined with limited demand for works in Latin (70% of books in the incunabular period were in Latin) drove many early printers out of business. By 1475 there were over 100 printers operating in Italy – and another 155 operating around Europe. Venice alone had 18 printing presses. The exception was Florence, which by 1475 had not a single printing press in operation, a fact the author finds “simply astonishing.” King says that Florence was late to embrace the new technology for several reasons. First, Lorenzo de Medici showed no interest in it. Second, Florence had no major university and thus no need for the hefty academic works frequently published in centers of learning. Finally, Vespasiano’s old school bookshop and scribes could easily keep up with the demand for beautiful bespoke books sought by the literate and affluent public. Fra Domenico established the first printing operation in Florence in 1476. He had to raise roughly 40 florins in startup costs, a third of which went to buying paper.

Early objections to the printing press echo modern concerns about social media platforms. For instance, in 1471 Angelo Poliziano, librarian and tutor to the Medici family, wrote about the printing press to say: “Now the most stupid ideas can, in a moment, be transferred into a thousand volumes and spread abroad.” Others shuddered at the thoughts of advanced knowledge easily and cheaply falling into the hands of ordinary people. What was once “remote and hidden and unknown to those of average learning” was after the printing press “repeated at cross-roads among the lower classes as common knowledge.” Surprisingly, there were no protests from the scribes whose living was clearly imperiled by Gutenberg’s invention. King says that there are no recorded instances of printing presses being smashed by disgruntled scribes and almost no record of any kind of political protest or civil protest against the printing press. Some correctly grasped the potentially revolutionary impact of inexpensively putting the Word of God in the hands of the common man who would no longer require the guiding hand or selective sermons of a small band of clergy. Indeed, the printing press’s impact on the Protestant Reformation is believed to have been significant.

The Ripoli Press was established inside a Dominican convent in Florence in 1476. It posed a serious threat to Vespasiano’s bookshop, which remained committed to the craft of hand scribed manuscript production. Ripoli remained in operations for only eight years but produced approximately 100 titles, including both religious and secular works. Ripoli churned out a new book roughly every month with the typical run being between 200 and 300 copies. The Ripoli Press persevered in its production of humanist classics and gained a wide audience. In 1483, Ripoli published Boccaccio’s Decameron. It took over a year to print and required over 4,000 man-hours of typesetting. Each page required the compositor to set over three thousand pieces of type. At most only four or five pages could be printed in a day. Slightly more than 100 copies were published, but only one was sold in the first four months on the market. King says that, “Italian society was still not quite liberal enough for full-frontal Boccaccio.”

In 1482 Marsilio Ficino published “Platonic Theology,” “the fifteenth century’s most ambitious and visionary philosophical work,” according to King. Ficino aimed to do for Plato what Thomas Aquinas did for Aristotle two centuries before. That is, in Ficino’s words, “to paint a portrait of Plato as close as possible to the Christian truth.” In 1484, Fra Domenico, the director of the Ripoli Press, landed a commission to print over one thousand copies of Plato’s Opera (Works) as translated by Ficino. King calls it “one of the most formidable printings ever attempted anywhere.” The paper supply alone (six hundred thousand sheets) cost 240 florins. The cultural impact was enormous. Scholars have argued that the gradual recovery and translation of the Platonic corpus ranks the most important scholarly achievements of the fifteenth century. It may have also been among the more controversial. “Suspicions of turpitude still clung to the [Platonic] dialogues,” King says, but the Ripoli Press was nevertheless “the magic lantern from which the awakened Platonic genie was released to the world.” Ficino’s translations were republished 24 times over the next century. King writes that Ficino’s Plato played a pivotal role in the “construction of modernity.” Today, 120 original copies survive. Fra Domenico died the summer it was published. It would be the last book Ripoli ever produced.

Vespasiano retired from the book trade in 1480 at the age of fifty-eight. He had little money and was increasingly disillusioned. He had lost the humanist faith in the classics to illuminate the world. King says that competing with printed books was becoming increasingly difficult for Vespasiano, but refused to embrace printing and even refused to sell printed books. Vespasiano had made roughly 75 florins a year, but the Ripoli Press and others were likely causing those earnings to drop significantly (between 1400 and 1500 the price of books dropped by two-thirds). Nevertheless, King credits Vespasiano with being “the most accomplished, prolific, and influential producer of manuscripts during the fifteenth century.” He died in 1498, two months after Savonarola was tortured and hanged in the middle of Florence almost on the same spot he torched seven tiers of artwork, cosmetics, musical and gambling instruments, mirrors – and books and manuscripts, many of them, no doubt, from Vespasiano’s bookshop. “The difference between Plato and a Christian,” Savonarola is reported to have said, “is as great as that between sin and virtue.”