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New Facets on the Financing and Marketing of Early Printed Books

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Florence Edler de Roover
Florence Edler de Roover
Affiliation:
Aurora, New York
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Extract

The earliest printers in Europe faced financial, storage, and marketing problems not unlike those of new industries today: how to attract operating capital for production and for carrying inventories, where to store a slow-moving and bulky stock, and how to overcome the prejudice against a new product, in order to create an extensive market. These were the three major difficulties that the first printers in Italy as well as elsewhere had to surmount.

In the Benedictine monastery, at Subiaco, south of Rome, in 1465, two German printers, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, had set up a printing press, which two years later they moved to Rome. Other Germans introduced printing into Milan and Venice in 1469 and the following year into Foligno and Trevi. By 1472, Venice had over a half dozen competing printing offices established by German and by French printers. About fifteen other Italian cities had at least one printing office.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , December 1953 , pp. 222 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1953

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References

1 Scholderer, Victor, “Printing at Venice to the end of 1481,” The Library, 4th series, V (1924–1925), 132.Google Scholar

2 The diary of Girolamo Strozzi is in Carte Strozziane, 3rd series, No. 127, Archivio di Stato, Florence. It is being published as an appendix to my article, “Le voyage de Girolamo Strozzi de Pise à Bruges et retour à bord de la galère bourguignonne ‘san Giorgio’,” Annales de la Société d'Emulation de Bruges, 1954.

3 See “A Prize of War: a Painting of Fifteenth Century Merchants,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, XIX (Feb., 1945), 3–12.

4 Giovambattista Ridolfi, member of another prominent Florentine family, was twenty-eight years old in 1476. He may have already in that year been in the employ of the Medici in their Venetian branch. We know he was a factor in that branch in 1479 and 1480. Later he was transferred to Naples, where he was branch manager from 1486 onward.

5 Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carte Strozziane, 5th series, No. 52 (Libro di debitori e creditori di Girolamo di Carlo Strozzi, segnato C, 1472–1476) and No. 53 (Giornale e ricordanze, segnato C, 1472–1476). The memoranda section of the journal has furnished most of the information about the venture in printed books. For more details see my article, “Per la storia dell'arte della stampa in Italia: Come furono stampati a Venezia tre dei primi libri in italiano,” La Bibliofilia, 1953.

6 Fulin, Rinaldo, “Documenti per servire alla storia della tipografia Veneziana,” Archivio veneto, XXIII, Parte I (1882), 20–22.Google Scholar

7 The instructions are published as an appendix to my article in La Bibliofilia.

8 Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carte Strozziane, 5th series, No. 36 (Libro di debitori e creditori di Filippo di Matteo Strozzi e compagni di Firenze, 1480–1483 [with some later entries]), vols. 141, 149v.

9 In Germany, about this time, merchants began to finance the printing and marketing of some books. Such a merchant is called a Verleger (“a puter-out”) by modern historians to distinguish him from a merchant who formed a partnership with a printer. Kapp, Friedrich, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels bis in das siebzehnte Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1886), pp. 278 ff.Google Scholar