Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900)

www.copyrighthistory.org

Identifier: i _1486

Commentary on Marcantonio Sabellico's privilege (1486)

Joanna Kostylo

University of Cambridge, UK

Please cite as:
Kostylo, J. (2008) ‘Commentary on Marcantonio Sabellico's privilege (1486)', in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org

1. Full title

2. Abstract

3. The early privileges for authors

4. Writing and publishing in fifteenth-century Venice

5. Privileges as an extension of the patronage system

6. ‘High and low circuit' books

7. References

1. Full title:

Printing privilege granted to the author Marco Antonio Sabellico to print his Decades rerum Venetarum.

2. Abstract

This is the first recorded privilege for an author, recognising the right of the humanist Marco Antonio Sabellico to authorize the publication of his history of Venice entitled Decades rerum Venetarum, and securing protection against illegal replication. Sabellico's privilege set the precedent for the custom of granting privileges not just to the printers but also directly to the authors. Such privileges are best understood as an extension of the traditional patronage system and as a form of reward rather than ownership. Sabellico's privilege was an exceptional arrangement in the sense that it was a form of reward for a literary work which promoted the public interest, rather than an assertion of the inherent rights of the author.

3. The early privileges for authors

The printing monopoly granted to Johannes of Speyer in 1469 remained an isolated episode until the 1480s. On 1 September 1486, however, the Venetian Collegio took another unprecedented step and awarded what is considered the first known privilege to an author. It was granted to the humanist Marcantonio Sabellico (1436-1505) for his history of Venice Decades rerum Venetarum. Under the terms of this privilege Sabellico was free to choose a printer who would publish the work at his own expense; anyone else who published it would be fined five hundred ducats.[1]

Sabellico's privilege set the precedent, but it was not until 1492, when a privilege was granted to Pietro Francesco of Ravenna for his work Foenix on the art of improving the memory, that writers began to make applications for privileges to the Venetian state on a regular basis.[2] Over the next 34 years, 254 privileges were granted, of which 79 (c. 30%) were given to authors (49 cases), editors, commentators and translators of original works.[3] The privilege of 11 October 1493, for example, was granted to a scholar from Rome, Sebastiano Manilio, for his translation of Seneca's Epistles. On 11 December 1493, the Venetian Collegio conceded Daniele Barbaro a ten-year exclusive grant to publish a book Castigationes Pliniane by his late brother, Ermolao, under condition that "only those upon whom this right and duty had been conferred should enjoy the use and benefit [of this right], and not others who could have taken it from them."[4]

In the early years of printing, it was customary to grant privileges not just to printers but also directly to the authors. But it would be wrong to view this practice as an advancement of author's copyrights in the sense of the current intellectual property system, or to assume that contemporary authors acquired a particular authorial conscience and sense of artistic proprietorship. Rather, we ought to view the contemporary author as an individual with a specific interest (economic and otherwise) that had to be safeguarded. As John Feather has argued in the case of pre-Revolutionary England, privileges granted directly to authors concerned books that "almost without exception [...] were learned works that had involved their authors in long periods of compilation, and sometimes great expense."[5]

In applying for privileges, authors and publishers relied on virtually the same arguments: the expenditure of time, skill and money involved in producing the new book and the need to recoup their investment. The high costs of production (for paper, characters, for the purchase of the manuscript, etc.) were frequently mentioned in Venetian privileges. On 15 July 1498, a Venetian editor and publisher Democrito Terracina complained in his supplication about "the very great and almost intolerable expense" ("grandissima fatica e spesa").[6] Six years earlier, Pietro Francesco of Ravenna, a teacher of canon law at Padua University who sought a privilege for his Foenix, argued that since he himself had invented this work he did not wish others "to reap the fruits of his labours and vigils".[7] Soon this kind of phrase would become a standard by which the authors and publishers justified their applications, in Italy and beyond. Similarly in France, one of the first privileges was granted on the economic grounds by Louis XII to the writer Eloy d'Amerval who wished to "benefit from [his book], as to recover and recompense the sums required for its making and composition" (see f_1507). As Elizabeth Armstrong argues: "the economic considerations which Eloy had put forward were to remain uppermost in most requests for privileges, whether by authors or publishers."[8] In this respect, the author's motivation to apply for a privilege was not different from that of a printer whose primary concern was to protect his investment. In applying for a privilege, authors did not necessarily display aesthetic or moral responsibility for their works, but, rather, business acumen.

4. Writing and publishing in fifteenth-century Venice

The variety of recipients of privileges - authors, editors, translators, printers and publishers - suggests that it is not always possible to draw a sharp distinction between these various figures. In general, the Renaissance book industry was characterized by fluidity and a lack of rigid specialisation. So a printer could hire the author as a proofreader of his own work, or an author could act as a publisher and pay for the expenses incurred in the process of printing of his work. As Roger Chartier has pointed out, "authors do not write books: they write texts that become written objects."[9] In the process of manufacturing these objects, writers were involved in a variety of activities. In order to appreciate this, we need to understand how the contemporary business of publishing was conducted.

The printing of early incunabula editions was rarely an initiative of just one person, the printer, but a group of people often linked through jurisdictional agreements and sometimes mentioned in the colophon of the published work.[10] Thus in the Rhetorica by George of Trebizond (1395-1486), published by Johannes of Speyer in 1470, one can read: "Correxit Veneta rhetor Benedictus in urbe: /hanc emag, orator qui bonus esse velit."[11] The strong humanist tradition in Italy meant that the reading public looked for respectable standards of scholarship in the printing of the Latin and Greek classics, as well as in legal, philosophical, theological and medical works. If a printer did not have a reading knowledge of Latin, he could hire local scholars and grammarians to help with proofreading or ask the authors themselves. Thus authors could be involved in the process of proofreading and editing or they might personally supervise the press operators in order to control the material production of their books. Famous writers and humanists such as Erasmus, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) and Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) were particularly keen on overseeing the printing of their works and were all involved in the correction of Manuzio's and Jenson's proofs. Ariosto, for example, corrected proofs of the 1532 edition of the Furioso, and the agreement between the Florentine printer Filippo Giunti and the humanist Scipione Ammirato for the printing of the latter's Istorie fiorentine in 1600 stated that the author would carry out a second correction.[12] Writers could also be involved in negotiating with paper manufacturers, borrowing money from financiers, submitting their work to the scrutiny of censors and requesting a printing privilege. They could also act as financiers of their own literary productions - say, a writer who made a contribution towards printing costs, or an editor who purchased the manuscript to edit it and make it public.[13] One author spoke of retrieving the costs which he had invested in the production and emphasised the need to protect his investment and ensure that some of the initial costs would be returned.

Sometimes, the initiative to publish a work could come entirely from the authors. In Bologna, for example, Filippo Beroaldo singed a contract with Benedetto di Ettore Faelli for the printing of 1,200 copies of The Golden Ass by Apuleius with Beroaldo's own commentary. Both scholars had edited the texts concerned and were partly responsible for selling the volumes; Beroaldo was to give extra publicity to his edition by lecturing on the text at the local university.[14]

These practices suggest that the medieval conflation of writing and producing books persisted well into the early modern period.[15] Indeed, as late as the 1750s, a German economic lexicon defined the writer as just one among the numerous craftsmen involved in the production of a book: "The scholar and the writer, the paper maker, the type founder, the typesetter and the printer, the proofreader, the publisher, the book-binder, sometimes even the glider and the brass-worker. Thus many mouths are fed by this branch of manufacture."[16]

As Martha Woodmansee has argued, the notion of the writer as a unique, original creator is a relatively recent invention, informed by the Romantic mystification of writing and belief in creative genius.[17] As we look back, however, the collective, corporate and collaborative aspects of writing and producing books are apparent. One of the major problems of speaking about fifteenth- or sixteenth-century notion of authorship is that the contemporary writers operated within value systems profoundly different from those involving more modern economic or intellectual property assumptions. Rather than thinking in terms of any simple presence or absence of a sense of authorship we need to think instead of a more or less acute consciousness of authorship. In doing so we can just follow St Bonaventure's distinction between scribes, compilers, commentators and authors according to the degree of independence they exhibited.[18] Writing in the thirteenth century, he described four ways of producing a book, none of which fit the concept of an author as a sole originator and owner of a work:

"A man might write the works of others, adding and changing nothing, in which case he is simply called a "scribe" (scriptor). Another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a "compiler" (compilator). Another writes both others' work and his own, but with others' work in principal place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a "commentator" (commentator) . . . Another writes both his own work and others' but with his own work in principal place adding others' for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an "author" (auctor)."[19]

In this context, new writing derived its value and authority from its affiliation with the text that preceded it. This process of derivation rather than deviation from prior text became a central issue in the Renaissance debate on the nature of literary imitation. In the age of recovery of the ancient classics, when writers were preoccupied with the restoration, interpretation, adaptation and emulation of Greek and Latin authors, the imitation and copying of earlier works was part of humanist training and provoked profound cultural discussion over the proper models and goals of imitation. If the stationers ad scholars of earlier centuries had worked out in the peciae system a method of writing out books to make new copies, sixteenth century writers sought to understand how to imitate texts in order to make their own. In Rome in 1512, for example, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469-1533) argued for an eclectic approach to imitation, while Pietro Bembo argued in favour of the imitation of individual writers emphasizing the need for the complete assimilation of the style to be imitated (Cicero for prose, and Virgil for poetry).[20] Similar assumptions underlined the system of cultural production in the visual arts (see i_1504). In his description of the frescoes on the vault of the Sistine chapel, a work completed the year that Bembo and Pico were discussing imitation, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) suggested that Michelangelo's paintings were the ultimate model to be imitated: "Indeed, painters no longer need to seek new inventions, novel attitudes clothed figures, fresh ways of invention or sublime subjects, for this work contains every perfection possible under those headings.... You artists should strive to imitate Michelageno in everything you do."

5. Privileges as an extension of the patronage system

Another aspect of the older system of cultural production was the patronage system. Before books became commodities exchanged in the advanced marketplace society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, authors used the non-contractual mechanisms of dedications and gifts in order to initiate wider diffusion of their work or to extract both material and immaterial rewards from their patrons. The medieval custom of dedicating books to influential persons and friends carried on from the manuscript age well into the sixteenth century. Far from demoting the use of dedications, printing stimulated writers to exploit their work even more than previously as a means of obtaining patronage by making it relatively easy to dedicate printed works and use them as gifts to more than one person simultaneously. One had only to have the type reset for the text of the dedication, including an alternative name. As late as 1599, a Veronese poet Giovanni Fratta in his On the Dedication of Books, With Correction of the Abuse in this Matter (Venice, 1590), complained that dedication had become a mercenary matter and attacked those writers who send their work to someone they consider generous, but obtain nothing in return and so "tear up their dedicatory letter and put one or more others in its place", until they find someone suitable (see i_1590). [21] This practice was carried over into the world of privileges.

In contrast to modern copyright, printing privileges were not conceived as the inherent right to which the author was automatically entitled, but as a favour - a privilege (priva lex, that is law-exempt) graciously conceded by the sovereign conferring a commercial concession to the author or printer. Hence the Latin formula Cum Gratia et Priuilegio which is frequently found on the title-page of the works which received a privilege. Printing privileges, then, are best understood as an extension of the patronage system and a form of reward rather than ownership.[22] Indeed, in applying for privileges, the petitioners would often rely on the support of a patron. Thus Bernardus de Landriano was assisted in his supplication by the ambassador to the Duke of Milan, Taddeo Vimercati, while Silvestro de Torti was recommended by the ambassador of Ferrara, Aldobrandino de Guidoni.[23]

Similarly, the privilege granted to Sabellico was conceded with the support and by the favour of Benedetto Trevisano, a patrician and friend and one of the councillors who signed the document.[24] And it was a form of reward rather than the recognition of Sabellico's rights as the author.[25] The early privileges to authors were often granted for reasons of prestige or in recognition of the particular value and quality of their work. Hence, Sabellico's legal right to his work was recognised not because his book was his 'legitimate property' but to reward him for the effort he had undertaken to compose a work of great local interest and public benefit. The councillors emphasised the elegance and historical accuracy of his history of Venice, a work which deserved to be brought to the attention of everyone. The Republic was eager to grant a privilege to disseminate widely the work which would boost her reputation.

In the last decades of the fifteenth century, when most Italian cities and states were torn by civil conflicts and wars, and Venice narrowly escaped the combined forces of Spain, France, and Rome, at the battle of Agnadello (1509), the Venetian leadership was particularly concerned about the public image of the Republic. It was then that they began to promote traditional patrician values in a more active way and appointed official writers to pen histories of Venice that provided the apology for the ruling classes.[26] It was also at this point that they recognised the power of printing as a great means of advancing learning and social discipline and took the opportunity to use the press to generate public support for their actions. It is no coincidence that the first printing privileges were conceded for works of local interest which were concerned with the public image and history of Venice: for Sabellico's Decades Rerum Venetarum and for Bernardo Giustiniani's Historia de origine urbis Venetiarum (31 January 1492).[27] Another privilege which was granted "to promote the fame of this excellent city" ("ad fama de questa excelsa cità de Venetia") was for a woodcut print, an aerial view of Venice, granted to a German merchant from Nuremberg, Anton Kolb, the first work of art to obtain a commercial privilege.[28]

There are many other episodes where the actions of the authorities are best understood in terms of honour and reward in recognition of the particular value and quality of the work, rather than compliance with a general principle that ideas were property of their authors. In applying for privileges, the supplicants were expected to offer an explanation why the work deserved to be printed. They often quoted enhancement of the reputation and prestige of the Republic, advancement of knowledge, and in general the hope to foster public good and utility as the reasons why the privilege should be granted. In 1494, Paganino de Paganini (c.1450-1538) argued that "he was beseeched and exhorted by many distinguished doctors to print in portable form the texts of the canon and civil laws, which would be a major convenience and utility for poor students"; while Democrito Terracina extravagantly claimed that the Arabic and Armenian medicinal tracts which he intended to publish would foster scientific knowledge and public health. To print these books would be "of utility to the Christian republic, and the exaltation of the faith, and the augmentation of the natural sciences, as well as medicine, in the conservation of the health of the soul and bodies of many and all faithful Christians."[29] On 16 January 1503 [1502 m.v.], a privilege was granted to Francesco Sechino who believed that the publication of the never-before-printed liturgical work (Camaldolese missal) would be "a thing that would bring honour to this city."[30]

6. High and low circuit books

If early printing privileges were granted by the sovereign's grace, not all supplicants could hope for such a favour. The authorities were not always prepared to give financial support and protection to such an expensive and uncertain business. When in November 1470 Clemente Donati, an early financer of printing based in Rome, asked the Ferrarese state for a loan to enable him to operate eight presses there for three years, he received the brusque reply that, if printing was as lucrative as he claimed, he should find private sources of capital, namely partners and merchants.[31]

Only a small fraction of the books printed in Venice were protected by privileges. Initially, printers, like the scribes before them, did not see the need to have monopoly in the text they wanted to publish, as there was enough publishable material from ancient Greece and Rome available in manuscript. Only when the market became saturated with copies of Greek and Latin classics did publishers begin to apply for privileges to protect themselves from competition and piracy. And it was precisely the works with striking commercial character that became the subject of their petitions.

The tactics pursued by Nicholas Jenson (1420-1480) and Andrea Torresani (1451-1529), and other early Venetian printers shows that publishers ‘played safe', investing in those categories of works from which a relatively secure return of costs could be expected.[32] Among various categories of books which were granted privileges in the first years of printing were classical texts, Latin grammars, law books, bibilical, patristic and liturgical works, in other words the classes of books for which there was a steady demand.[33] The analogous case is provided by privileges granted in England where at least until the end of the sixteenth century, they covered almost exclusively lawbooks, catechisms, Bibles, ABCs and almanacs, in other words books which represented a considerable investment by printers and were at risk from pirate editions.[34]

It seems that the system of privileges was designed for a restricted category of publications, namely those which could secure commercial success. In fact, we can speak of a plurality of ‘circuits' within which specific classes of books circulated. At the top, there were books destined for a refined Latin-reading and cosmopolitan readership. These were often distributed through international networks and book fairs and often protected by a special papal or imperial 'supranational' privilege. A notable example is the famous first edition of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1515) which received a series of privileges from Venice, Ferrara and Rome, or the privileges granted to works by other men of literary fame, including Pietro Bembo, Marino Sanudo and Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1572), (see i_1515; i_1531). Beneath this 'high circuit' of fast selling titles and elite authors protected by privileges ran a slow undercurrent of titles which received little protection if any at all.[35]

Not all books were destined to become instant bestsellers and therefore considered worthy of applying for privileges. It has been estimated that of all the books published in Paris in the period from 1505 to 1526 only about 5% of the total output was covered by privileges.[36] A similar calculation carried out on Venetian publications for the period 1741 to 1757 shows that privileged books amounted to 20% of the total.[37] Even if the use of privileges increased over time, it always involved a small number of publications. Similarly, the practice of applying for privileges by authors and literary celebrities such as Sabellico was an exceptional arrangement far removed from the common practice. Nevertheless, it was a step in the right direction. It heralded the emergence of a new concept of the Renaissance author as a professional man of letters making a career out of the new technology of the printing press.

7. References

Armstrong, E., Before Copyright: the French Book-Privilege System 1498-1526 (Cambridge: University Press, 1990)

Chavasse, R., "The first known author's copyright, September 1486, in the context of a humanist career", Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 69 (1986-7): 11-37

Chaytor, H. J., From Script to Print: an Introduction to Medieval Literature (Cambridge: University Press, 1945), 115-37

Eisenstein, E., The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: University Press, 1979)

Gaeta, F, "Storiografia, coscienza nazionale e politica culturale nella Venezia del Rinascimento", in Storia della cultura veneta, ed. by G. Arnaldi and M. Pastore Stocchi, vol. 3/I (Dal primo Quattrocento al Concilio di Trento) (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1980), 1-91

Gerulaitis, L. V., Printing and Publishing in fifteenth-century Venice (Chicago: American Library Association, 1976)

Hirsch, R., Printing, Selling and Reading, 1450-1550 (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1967)

Pozza, N., "L'editoria Veneziana da Giovanni da Spira ad Aldo Manuzio", La stampa degli incunaboli nel Veneto, Saggi e note (Verona: tipografia Editoriale Aldo Manuzio", 1983), 9-35

Richardson, B., Printing, writers and readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Rose, M., Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (London: Harvard University Press, 1993)

Trovato, P., Con ogni diligenza corretto: la stampa e le revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani, 1470-1570 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991)

[1] Sabellico selected Andrea de' Torresani da Asola who published his work in 1487. On the historical context of this privilege see Ruth Chavasse, "The first known author's copyright, September 1486, in the context of a humanist career", Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 69 (1986-7): 11-37.

[2] Fulin, 102, nr. 4.

[3] According to the privileges recorded by Rinaldo Fulin for the years 1469-1526: "Documenti per servire alla storia della tipografia veneziana", Archivio Veneto 23 (1882): 84-212, 390-405. Cf. Brian Richardson, Printing, writers and readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 70.

[4] "arbitrantes, quoad qui onus et impensiam habuerunt, consequantur etiam utilitate et commodum, non autem alii illud ab eis auferant." Fulin,109, nr 18.

[5] John Feather, "From Rights in Copies to Copyright: The Recognition of Author's Rights in English Law and Practice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century", in Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (eds.), The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 191-209 (193).

[6] Fulin, nr. 22.

[7] Fulin, 102, nr. 4.

[8] Elisabeth Amstrong, Before Copyright: the French Book-Privilege System 1498-1526 (Cambridge: University Press, 1990), 79, 84.

[9] Roger Chartier, The order of books: readers, authors, and libraries in Europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 9-10.

[10] Angelo Colla, "Tipografi, editori e libri a Padova, Treviso, Vicenza, Verona, Trento", in La stampa degli incunaboli nel Veneto, Saggi e note (Verona: tipografia Editoriale Aldo Manuzio", 1983), 37-80; Pier Silverio Leicht, Rapporti giuridici intorno al libro nel primo secolo di stampa, in AA.VV., Studi e ricerche sulla storia della stampa nel Quattrocento (Milano, 1942).

[11] Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi, Il mestiere di scrivere: lavoro intellettuale e mercato librario a Venezia nel Cinquecento (Roma : Bulzoni, 1988), 19.

[12] Richardson, 15.

[13] ibid., 28.

[14] ibid., 32.

[15] In general, see H. J. Chaytor, From Script to Print: an Introduction to Medieval Literature (Cambridge: University Press, 1945), 115-37.

[16] Georg Heinrich Zinck, Allgemeines Oeconomisches Lexicon 442. Cf. Martha Woodmansee, "On the Author effect: Recovering Collectivity", The Construction of Authorship, op. cit, 15-28 (16).

[17] Woodmansee, 16.

[18] Eisenstein, 121-122.

[19] Cf. Elisabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 121-122.

[20] Thomas Green, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 171-6.

[21] Giovanni Fratta, Della dedicatione de' libri, con la correttion dell'Abuso (Venetia, 1599), fol. B3v-B4r and D2v. Translation quoted from Richardson, 56-7. In addition, see, Marco Santoro, Uso e abuso delle dediche: A proposito del "Della dedicatione de' libri" di Giovanni Fratta (Roma: Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 2006).

[22] Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 17.

[23] Fulin, nr 27 and 30.

[24] On Sabellico's relations with the Trevisano family see, Chavasse, 20.

[25] The copyright aspect of Sabellico's privilege has been minimized by Rudolf Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading, 1450-1550 (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1967), 9 and 80-81; against H. F. Brown's interpretation: The Venetian Printing Press 1469-1800: An Historical Study Based upon Documents for the Most Part Hitherto Unpublished (London: John C. Nimmo, 1891), 53. See also, Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance: prints and the privilegio in sixteenth-century Venice and Rome (Boston, MA: Brill, 2004), 53-4.

[26] Franco Gaeta, "Storiografia, coscienza nazionale e politica culturale nella Venezia del Rinascimento", in Storia della cultura veneta, ed. by Giorolamo Arnaldi and Manilio Pastore Stocchi, vol. 3/I, Dal primo Quattrocento al Concilio di Trento (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1980), 1-91.

[27] This privilege was granted to a typographer Bernardino Benalio Giustinaini, a member of an eminent patrician family who died in 1489. It is possible that Benalio had agreement with Giustiniani's heirs for printing his work; otherwise they could no doubt have prevented Benalio from receiving the privilege. Benalio published the Historia on 31 January 1493. Leonardas V. Gerulaitis, Printing and Publishing in fifteenth-century Venice (Chicago: American Library Association, 1976), 37. For Benalio's privilege see, Fulin, nr 6.

[28] The print, measuring about 4.5 by 9 feet, is attributed to Jacopo de Barbari. Kolb asked the Collegio for the right to sell this print throughout the dominions of the Signoria ‘without any tax and impediment.' The councillors granted him a four-year concession. ASV, CN, reg. 18, f. 26r, 30 October 1500. Fulin, 142, nr 105.

[29] "per utilità della republica christiana, et exaltation de la fede, et augmento de la scientia naturale, et ancor de la medicina, per conservation de la salute de le anime et corpi de molti et infiti fidel[i] christiani." Fulin, 134, nr 82. Translation quoted from Witcombe, 38. On Paganini see idem, 40 and Fulin, 117, nr 33.

[30] Fulin, nr 129.

[31] Richardson, 27.

[32] Rudolf Hirsh, Printing, Selling and Reading, 1450-1550 (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1967), 149-51.

[33] For 596 books estimated to be published between 1469-1480 there were 130 classical texts, 76 Latin grammars and abridged editions of classics, 121 theological works, including 28 biblical and patristic, 38 doctrinal, 39 sermons and 23 liturgical, 100 lawbooks and 71 scientific (including 13 aristotelian) and 95 vernacular editions of literature and poetry. Cf. Neri Pozza, "L'editoria Veneziana da Giovanni da Spira ad Aldo Manuzio", La stampa degli incunaboli nel Veneto, Saggi e note (Verona: tipografia Editoriale Aldo Manuzio", 1983), 9-35 (12).

[34] Rose, 11.

[35] For the idea of ‘high circuit' books and a general discussion of the problem of printing privileges see the introduction to Maurizio Borghi, La manifattura del pensiero. Diritti d'autore e mercato delle lettere in Italia, 1801-1865 (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2003).

[36] Amstrong, 78.

[37]Mario Infelise L'editoria veneziana nel 700 (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1991), 289.