This year marks five centuries since the death of Aldus Manutius, an Italian humanist who forever changed the direction of publishing, and got in one of its first copyright squabbles. Aldus Manutius: The Struggle and the Dream at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library celebrates the printer of classical Greek texts, who in working to make scholarship more portable and accessible innovated the smallest mass-produced books since Gutenberg debuted his goliath bibles, and introduced the italic typeface.
The Struggle and the Dream opened last month with a small display in the library’s proscholium, joined by an online exhibition. Curated by Dr. Oren Margolis, a historian of the Italian Renaissance, the display brings together some of the library’s “Aldine” editions marked with the signature dolphin and anchor. These “octavo” editions were pocket-sized, freeing them from their literal chains where previously pricy editions of the same books where so large and valuable they were kept linked to library desks, becoming the predecessor of the modern paperback. – Read more at: Hyperallergic.com