The Bookseller of Florence

It turns out that the Renaissance was all about Sales and Marketing, who knew? Plus, I’m about to spread some truly awful gossip, so if you have any self-respect at all you’ll back out now.

The book at hand is The Bookseller of Florence by one Ross King. I was looking for a detail piece, having recently taken in all of Ancient Greece in one shot. And this book was heavily promoted on Amazon with all sorts of breathless publisher mentions, which might have been a flag. The work is set in the early Renaissance, spanning 1422 to 1498 as its prime concern. It is not history for sissies: King attempts to tell the tale of Greek literature entering Latin thought, while also tracing the technological changeover from handwritten manuscripts to printing. All of which has us time-shifting in truly kaleidoscopic ways among third century B.C. philosophers and humanists, first through third century A.D. historians, waves of manuscript copying and translations under Charlemagne in the eighth century and Basil II in the eleventh. Plus some schtick about Plutarch, just to give the fourteenth century a nod.

Bearing that in mind...

Our central character is the kid who became what rulers and scholars called “the King of the Booksellers” in Florence. His name was Vespasiano da Bisticci, born in 1422 or thereabout. Vespasiano is such a lovely name…a lingering name. I found myself calling him VP, just to keep the read moving. Despite that, he was a real person, and one who contributed a lot to Renaissance thought. Also the title page, he invented the title page…with better Intellectual Property representation, there’s no reason that Titles by Vespasiano® couldn’t have been as big as Gowns by Adrian. And here’s where the gossip starts: King gives us no written physical description of VP and makes absolutely no speculations of any sort about his sexual or even emotional life. No hairpins are dropped, not a single bead hits the floor. But as Al Smith used to say, “Let’s look at the record.” VP had the usual hard-luck childhood: father died young, wife with kids and debt. Mom wanted VP to do something practical like go into the wool trade and pay off the debt, but VP stayed true to his star and held out for a career in the glamorous world of bookbinding. He was at it for the briefest of time before a certain Cardinal Bessarion stopped by the book shop, liked what he saw, and offered to send VP to college, all expenses on the Cardinal, provided the boy promised to go into the clergy after. In a move that would put Lorelei Lee to shame, VP demurred stating that the clergy wasn’t for him; so the Cardinal invited him over to his house and set him up as part of an all-male intellectual circle that included the most powerful politician in Florence and the richest banker in Italy, Cosimo d’Medici. Plus VP, the kid from down at the copy shop.

So I’m figuring VP for a major homosexual. One with at least stunning cheekbones and maybe an ass for days, I thought, because although VP did turn out to be an intellectual power I’ve never known a Prince of the Church to point across a crowded workshop and shout, “Who’s that boy?…the one with the big intellect!” My dreams were bashed, however, when deep into the volume King gives us an image of an illuminated capital letter showing VP in profile. Looking unfortunately like Barbra Streisand with a really, really bad bob. We do know he was a gossip…several men commented that whether it was local news or where to find a good, used Quintilian, “our dear Vespasiano is the best guide for these things.” VP explicitly eschewed the notion that a book’s content was more important than its binding because things should be, well, pretty. His specialty involved red velvet coverboards with sliver clasps, and when Pope Callixtus III saw the bindings VP had done for the Vatican Library, he ripped the gemstones right off the covers. To sell for the poor he said, but he was a Borgia so you never know. He did not, however, dispose of the volumes, despite the tale VP was telling around town, and he kept the silver clasps. One day a new customer, a young scholar, visited VP’s shop and as the kid left VP turned to a friend and said, “He’s never slept with a woman.” So we at least know that VP could spot a Friend of Dorothy when he saw one…and tell the truth, with only a very slight change of pronoun and emphasis, “She’s never slept with a woman!” kinda flows. Sadly, VP never married. King puts it off to his “strong views on women,” mainly that they should stay inside unless they were going to church and keep their knees together unless they were making a legitimate baby. I’m sure that was it: wealthy men who hang out with the powerful so often fail to get the girl.

To which end, world scholarship owes a surprising debt to Margaret Kremer. Of Erfurt.

King’s comparison of the arrival of the printing press to the fall of Constantinople seems operatic, even in context. True, history does back him up: Constantinople fell in 1453 and the press arrived in 1454. Now, when you say “Gutenberg,” I say “Bible!” But it turns out that Johannes had a slightly racier past. Recall that Constantinople fell to the Turks, who were making very real and very credible threats to Italy. So of course there was a mania for all things Turk in Florence. Enter Gutenberg, who invented none of the technologies of printing, but was the first one to productize it into something practical. Like a radical with a new mimeograph machine, Gutenberg set out printing cheap, inflammatory anti-Turk pamphlets, including a dandy riff on an Advent calendar. All of which went over big time and caught the eye of Pope Nicholas V, a noted Turk critic who was busy selling indulgences to finance a war against them. For reasons impenetrable to non-Medieval Catholics, an indulgence in the spiritual next life somehow required a written token in this one…maybe they had coupons you could clip as you went along or something. But scribes writing out all those personalized indulgence documents cost a fortune, eating into the funding round, so Nikki turned to Gutenberg who set up printing personalized indulgences…at a fifth the cost! That’s right, Gutenberg could sell at twenty cents on the dollar and make margin. Brilliant. And the earliest surviving printed name is not that of a king, pontiff, or saint, it is the aforementioned Margaret Kremer. Maddeningly, the document does not tell us what she wanted to be indulged for. And true, technically it’s “Margarethe” on the document, but we don’t know…she could have gone by Peg.

Our next sighting of Gutenberg is at the Frankfurt Fair of 1454, manning a booth. That’s right, the guy who could in all modesty call himself “Mr. Bible” was, in fact, a booth babe. And quite a successful one at that, it appears: he was hawking leaves from his famous Bible at the Fair, and the whole run sold before they struck the booth. Plus, he got sued a lot by business partners and at least once for alienation of affection, by Ennlin of the Iron Gate. All good signs of an effective Sales executive.

Much business ensues, including a great deal of Florentine history. King’s discursions are many and varied, including how to make your own black and red inks (not recommended for apartment dwellers) and the origin of every book-related word starting with the infamous Papyrus Embargo at Byblos. He takes us through the transitions from scroll to codex and from papyrus to parchment to paper. He follows lives of the principals, including our old friend Cardinal Bessarion who chaired the Council of Florence, which among other things reunited what we now know as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, plus resolved the Arian Heresy which had been causing friction for a millennium. (His payoff was a seat on the Pope’s big three-man Alum Board, alum having become a papal monopoly.) And he takes us through the evolution of calligraphy and type styles, from the Gothic (confusingly called “modern” at the time) to the newer, more legible style based on Charlemagne’s scribes (thereby called “antique” even though it was new). All fascinating stuff, and King mostly, but not always, keeps the balls in the air. You sort of have to take it like the song, “American Pie:” a series of loosely connected images all connoting a very specific time and place.

As to VP, he had quite an eventful life. Italian civil war, a thing called the Pazzi Conspiracy, pitted the two richest and most powerful Florentine families, the Pazzi and the Medici, against one another. It was a nasty affair that began with a murder and an attempted coup in the basilica. VP was intimately acquainted with both families, having sold many commissions to each, and he was pressed into service as an ambassador in a highly precarious position. The negotiated settlement had everything to do with the Turks and the peace was uneasy.

In the end VP retired to his house in the countryside, disillusioned. His friends and former colleagues were mostly dead, and their kids had limited interest in manuscripts. In addition to making a lot of money and having a great deal of fun, VP and his friends really did believe that bringing Greek and Roman thought forward into the modern world would improve it. Time proved them wrong. Vespasiano never embraced printing although many of his competitors happily and profitably sold printed editions beside manuscripts. To him, printing was too ugly to stand beside longhand manuscripts, and while printed books were never truly cheap, they were available to a much wider audience, “the dregs of the people” he kept from his shop. Others would talk in wonder of printed books being “books without number” and worry about their effect, but VP turned from translating and transcribing to writing, about his friends.

It is through his Lives of 103 Illustrious Men that we know most of those men at all, and even the famous ones like Bessarion are illuminated by VP’s volume. Vespasiano died in 1498. By then a younger bookseller – one turned navigator, Christopher Columbus – had made his world irretrievably antique.