Anthony Grafton: Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe
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Anthony Grafton: Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, UK, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020, 379 pp., $39.95, Hardcover, ISBN: 9780674245655 Albrecht Classen1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
The title of this book indicates, at least to this reviewer, that it deals with the actual book production in the print workshop, offering insights into the practical aspects involved with the typeset, ink, paper, binding, etc. This is, however, not the case. On the contrary, well-known historian Anthony Grafton turns to the history of bookmaking by humanists from the late fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, offering a number of separate essays on the actual work by various humanists hard at work to compile, edit, proofread, correct, revise, or change their books, if not forge sources, at least at times. The term ‘inky fingers’ serves as a catchword to attract modern readers’ attention, whereas the real focus rests on the hard labor by individual famous authors trying their best to produce good scholarship and to prepare their books for the market. All of us who have authored and published books know only too well how much labor and sweat goes into this effort, so the present book serves as a direct guide to many of our famous forerunners in the early modern age. In an introduction and subsequent nine chapters, Grafton takes us from the early sixteenth century (Johannes Boemus, Omnium gentium mores: leges et ritus, 1517) to the late seventeenth century (Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1677), discussing major authors determining the humanistic movement, who all, of course, took great pains to edit their works with much erudition and also meticulous strategies to achieve the highest possible level of scholarship. This is what Grafton means with ‘inky fingers.’ Chapter one illuminates the significant but often overlooked role of the correctors in the process of the early modern book production, such as the Franciscan Conrad Pellikan (1478–1556; dates here were not provided), active in Zürich, above all. Of course, correctors were already heavily at work throughout the Middle Ages, as * Albrecht Classen [email protected] 1
Department of German Studies, The University of Arizona, 302 Learning Services Building, 1512 East First Street, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
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Grafton admits himself, but he wants to bring to light the actual work by humanists especially. Why he regularly neglects to provide biographical dates remains a mystery to me. Chapter two deals with the role of divination within the magical arts, a topic that does not seem to fit into this book at all, although the author discusses it also as part of the topics of printed books. Much more interesting proves to be the first major effort to develop paleography by Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) who worked with the entire history of books and the various types of scripts or fonts. Th
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