Who We Are

The sour looking character on the left is Aldus Manutius. That’s his name in Latin. He wasn’t an ancient Roman but was a Renaissance printer-publisher in Venice. His name translated back into Italian is Aldo Manuzio, which he was also known as, and sometimes called Aldo Manuzio il Vecchio, or Aldo the Elder. His original name was Teobaldo Manucci and he was born 1449 in Bassiano, the Papal States in Italy. He became a printer and publisher just as the remarkable invention of moveable type was spreading through Europe.

At that time, printed books were about the size of hand-written books, which means they were too large to be held in the hand, and had to be laid open on a small table, a lectern, to be read comfortably. Remember, the hand-written books were made of parchment or a finer version of parchment called velum. The word vellum comes to us from the French word veau which means calf, and the calf was usually a sheep or goat. The skin was scraped of to remove hair and flesh, then soaked, stretched and dried while held in a stretcher frame. Before being used to write on, the vellum would be trimmed to a rectangular shape, and the goal was to keep as much area to write on as possible. Because these vellum sheets were originally the size of the calf, they were much larger even when trimmed than any book page today. Indeed, in the Middle Ages most books were so large and heavy you needed both arms to to carry them.

Aldus revolutionized printing by producing books that could be carried in one hand, books so small you didn’t need a lectern in order to read them. The works he published were carefully edited and beautifully printed, and most of the classics from Greece and Rome that we read today appeared first as books from his Aldiine Press. In 1500 his type cutter, Francesco Griffo, produced the first italic type face.

Until this website is completely assembled and working, Critical Pages is using this brief biography of Aldus Manutius as a place holder. We think he’d understand.