Printing, New/Old Books, and Dangerous Ideas

The story goes that when Cosimo de’ Medici decided to build a library of the basic books most necessary for being a learned individual, he turned to the noted book dealer Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421–1498) to produce it. Vespasiano was well known for his abilities in this area. He had also worked with Pope Nicolas V and the duke of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, a noted condottiere, patron, and scholar, to build their famous book collections. On his advice Cosimo commissioned two hundred books. To produce them in the minimum of time, Vespesiano hired forty-five professional scribes who took twenty-two months to complete the task. This works out to each scribe taking approximately five months to produce one book in manuscript form. Vespasiano prided himself on the high, virtually artistic quality of his books, and there were many shops that could have produced hand-copied books more cheaply and more rapidly, employing the assembly-line techniques used for textbooks or legal and medical reference works, where each scribe repeatedly copied a small group of pages rather than the whole book.

Shortly after midcentury, however, the printing press arrived in Italy from Germany, and relatively quickly printed books began to appear, produced more rapidly and cheaply. Vespasiano, outraged at this novelty, which he saw as undercutting the artistic and cultural aesthetics of hand-copied books, retired to his country estate to write a collection of lives of the most famous men of his day, his Vite d’uomini illustri del secolo XV (The Lives of Famous Men of the Fifteenth Century), which included a brief biography of Cosimo. Evidently he felt that printed books fell into that dangerous and to-be-avoided category, “the new” – a novelty that he despised, not a positive innovation.