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[These posts are lightly edited versions of the 2023-4 student projects from our undergraduate unit, Studying and Making Early Printed Books, in which students adopt a book from Bristol University’s Special Collections, and work in groups to produce a creative response to it using our historic letterpress equipment. The group blog post is one of the two assessments for the unit]

Platonic and Ironic Love in Marsilio Ficino’s Epistolae

By Sophie Aydin, Margaret Duhon, Filippo Fabrizi, Pauline Renancio

What was your early modern book?

The book we selected, entitled Epistolae, is a collection of the philosopher Marsilio Ficino’s correspondence, published in Venice in 1495 (University of Bristol Special Collections, Shelfmark HMa).

Ficino was a protagonist in the intellectual revolution of the Renaissance, single-handedly translating many of Plato’s works for the first time, cementing them in the role they have since come to play in the history of western philosophy, all while adding an expansive commentary through his own personal critiques. A prolific writer of letters, Marsilio Ficino likely planned to self-publish his correspondence from the outset, valuing it as an important feature of his work. Epistolae therefore takes on a unique aspect, revealing not only a personal side of an author with a tenured position in history, but also that he did not even draw much of a line between his academic work and private life, so deeply had he interiorised his philosophical approach.

What were you inspired to make?

Wanting our project to orient thematically around this insight into the author, some deeper digging revealed that Ficino is commonly credited with coining the phrase ‘Platonic love.’ If the ambiguous professionalism of Epistolae is any indication, we thought, this warranted some further research into the extent that Ficino supported the idea.

We weren’t disappointed to find extensive evidence of this in his correspondence with his student Giovanni Cavalcanti.

Faced as we were with perhaps the first recorded evidence of a relationship described as ‘Platonic’, we had to know more. Predictably, even the first ever self-acknowledged Platonic relationship was worthy of the tongue-in-cheek connotations that have dogged the expression to this day. While Ficino, one of the most accomplished Platonists of all time, was patently immersed in his self-sublimating reflections, Cavalcanti found himself deputised, relegated to an object of academic analysis, a footnote, rather than an object of adoration. His vexations surface in a couple of biting letters launched at the relationship’s imbalances as he saw them. Our book conveys this vibrant juxtaposition of personalities by including one of Ficino’s most highfalutin meditations on Plato, love and friendship alongside a rebarbative and logistical letter from Cavalcanti asking Ficino…why haven’t you been answering my letters? However, we animated the theme of Platonic love with this specific repartee only midway through the drafting process. We began by finding a text of Ficino’s representative of his general opinion on the subject, that we felt captured the tone of his correspondence well:

“Indeed, in expounding our recent commentaries on Plato’s poem on love, we have begun to love ourselves in the same way that Plato there shapes the idea of true love: we can see that they have already been instilled in us and completed. From the goat itself onwards, a kind of platonic friendship is born from Platonic love: that which is conceived in the bosom of the Uranian muse is nourished: it grows. Since it derives its origin from the muses, it smells of nothing and tastes nothing but music, consonance, and harmony.” (Ficino, Marsilio. Epistolae. 1495.)

Having consolidated our engagement with the theme of Platonic love thusly, we began curating our illustrations and editorial decisions with this aesthetic in mind. We knew that the more visual elements we had, the easier it would be to see how our final main texts would fit on the page. We began by drawing up a blueprint of our pamphlet with pen and paper. On the cover we hoped for a large central image of a harpist and a title framed by two winged cherubs, and on the two inner pages we decided to set the above excerpt from Epistolae in the original Latin opposite our own translation. We toyed with the idea to put an excerpt from Plato’s main title on love, Phaedrus, on the back, to point back to Ficino’s main inspirations, if we found any time for it.

What were some of the processes and challenges involved in making your book?

All of our plans were soon disrupted. First, after some solid typesetting, we discovered that the typecase we had chosen for the main texts was in short supply of a few essential letters. We took this as an indication of an overly ambitious word count, especially when paired with the sheer amount of time it had taken us to write just a couple of lines (which now had to be redone). Our advisor, Jenny Batt, suggested that we might make reductions: so we reassessed the content of the pamphlet, and asked ourselves: What is essential? Margaret initially felt that our top priority should be the original text, since the translation was imperfect and largely informed by Google Translate, but we eventually prioritised the legibility of the translated version. We agreed that our pamphlet should be created with a wider readership in mind—most of whom, we supposed, would not be proficient in Latin—and that, while the integrity of Ficino’s version may have been compromised by our amateur translation, the English text alone allowed for much more malleability. Our pamphlet thus becomes less of a reproduction and more of a reinterpretation. At this point, the added perspective prompted Filippo to recall the Cavalcanti response from his research, which gave the pamphlet a humorous inflection (with no presumed knowledge of Latin, like most good jokes) and aided our effort of personalisation:

“Marsilio, on other occasions it has been Your custom to greet Your Giovanni with a letter during the first few days of Your stay in the country, but this time You have withheld Your customary greeting too long. Do You not see, sacrilegious man, how You are harming our sacred friendship by Your silence?” (Cavalcanti, Giovanni. Epistolae. 1495.)

The pamphlet became a cheeky jab at Ficino’s hubris, more universally accessible and enjoyable. Thus a great disappointment turned out to be a blessing in disguise!

We suffered next over the title page. The Ficino excerpt ends with the words “music, consonance, and harmony,” and we wanted a large image to exemplify these themes. Unfortunately, nothing quite fit the bill, so we decided on a central vase in an antique, neoclassical style loosely indicative of the period, with roses and a floral border to representlove. Pauline and Jenny laboured to align eight small decorative details in a symmetrical pattern at the bottom of the page. The furnishing was extremely complicated, but they proved every bit as fastidious themselves. Two large flower stamps framed the title. In between the three titular lines, we centred two small birds to represent the “flight” of each letter from Ficino to Cavalcanti and vice versa. There were other small hiccups before we made it to the printing stage, but time and time again, the derailment of our plans opened doors for us to exercise our creativity and personalise our project. For example, Margaret and Filippo confronted the horrors of justification while typesetting their respective texts, and some accidental indentation in the Cavalcanti excerpt turned into an artistic choice. We have no regrets!

Luckily, we finished preparations for the front and back of our pamphlet (pages one and four being the front, and pages two and three being the back, so that folded in half the pages are properly ordered) around the same time, and were able to print double-sided proofing copies. It was a delight to see our typesetting in real print, but areas in need of improvement were immediately obvious. We ordered our priorities and then tackled them, all the while aware of the tragic reality that we only had two classes left and not nearly enough time to check off every item on our list.

Two errors in particular were mandatory fixes. The first was the typos in our two texts, especially prominent in the Ficino excerpt which made use of a tiny, error-prone font. We had occasionally repeated or misspelt some words, and spaces were missing in places. Pauline and Sophie used tweezers to pry the small type out of its secure furniture to replace or rearrange it where necessary. The second error, the poor centering of the words “Excerpt from,” glared at us from the top of the title page. Margaret had an easy time moving spacing around until it satisfied the eye.

Once it had passed Margaret’s eye-test, which did a lot of heavy lifting throughout,we could take the decisive step towards our pamphlet’s realisation: the printing. Making our frisket proved somewhat tricky, until Margaret and Sophie had the luminous idea of creating a light box from a plastic tub and a torch. This allowed them to trace the page’s outlines and cut without any problems, and Margaret rose to the challenge, albeit with equal parts distress and dedication, but ending up on top. Once again, the problems we faced were resolved by our supreme intelligence, resourcefulness and lack of self-preservation instincts!

Having printed the outer forme, we then set about printing the inner, with the goal of getting at least five copies in which the outside was as good as the inside. We resolved to start out with the worst print first, to see how it would look, and then to work towards the better ones.

This proved prudent as the first prints were not particularly good, and we had some problem with uneven inking. We tried adding extra ink, extra packing, pulling harder on the press, and scratching our heads in bemusement, wondering why it wouldn’t just fix itself on its own. Part of the issue lay in the fact that the damp paper we were printing on had started to dry, so our teacher Jenny set about re-dampening the papers to resuscitate them with great success. Our factory-like printing resumed and, before we knew it, we had our 16 prints pegged on the washing linen ready for drying!

How would you approach this project differently a second time?

Typesetting is a technical skill, and the bread and butter of this kind of project; we needed a bit of time to acquire the skill and develop our competences. Without that crucial experience, it is very difficult to estimate how much time any given idea might take to realise. Now, having seen a project through to the end, and what amount of effort each step requires, it is much easier to tell what is overly ambitious.

If we were to do this project again, and had more time, we would want to go for something bigger and more experimental, focusing less on the little details and more on the visual impression the pamphlet gives at first glance. This might involve playing more with colours, or with bigger illustrations. We found that there was something very impressionistic about the early presses; something about using real ink and woodblocks makes for a compositional challenge and a result almost like tattooing, yielding an aesthetic product so much more raw and vibrant than printing today. We want to experiment with this more.

We also thought that 3D printing may be an interesting technology to incorporate. We saw some groups use linocuts, and we like the notion of handcrafted illustrations, rather than trying to puzzle haphazard blocks together into the ideas we had. And while the 3D print could allow us to have more images more in harmony with the general idea of the text, there is also something unholy and tempting about combining the oldest and most rudimentary printing techniques with the newest and most sci-fi-esque. Something tells us that the unlikely matrimony would end up successful, and that the early presses would prove themselves not made obsolete, against all the odds.

[These posts are lightly edited versions of the 2023-4 student projects from our undergraduate unit, Studying and Making Early Printed Books, in which students adopt a book from Bristol University’s Special Collections, and work in groups to produce a creative response to it using our historic letterpress equipment. The group blog post is one of the two assessments for the unit]

Dissecting Chirurgia

by Imogen Lock, Hels Borlase and Francesca Papp

 

Which early modern book did you select?

Our adopted book was an anthology of surgical treatises published by Gregorio de Gregori in Venice in 1513 (Special Collections HMg).The anthology consists of four volumes by five different authors bound together. The texts include De Materia Chirurgica by French doctor Iacobi Hollerii (Jaques Houllier); two medical treatises  originally written in the eleventh century by Arabic physician Abulcasis and fourth-century Greek physician Theodorus Priscianus under the pseudonym ‘Octavius Horatianus’; a treatise by the seventh-century Byzantine Greek physician Paul of Aegina; and Cirurgia magistri by the Italian doctor and philosopher Pietro d’Argillata. This copy was owned  by sixteenth-century surgeon Joseph Fenton, whose comprehensive library included works by surgical writers of all periods, from Hippocrates to his own contemporaries.

What did you find interesting about this book?

We initially thought that the different parts of our adopted anthology were incongruous with one another, so deduced that the only common thread was the study of surgery. There was a striking variety of aesthetic elements across the four volumes: the typefaces, use of italics, justification, paratexts (marginalia and annotations), pictorial elements (xylographic images, illustrated letters), and at times, the languages.

This made the research challenging but the book even more fascinating to pull apart. This is what led us to our concept of ‘Dissecting Chirurgia’ [Dissecting Surgery], the title of our project.

Since the book is composed of four separate volumes bound into one (known as a ‘Sammelband’) there are four different linguistic influences, all masked by a seemingly standardised Latin. This tells us that these texts had to be translated from their original language. The third book authored by the Byzantine Greek physician Paul of Aegina, and the second, comprised of medical works by esteemed Arabic authors, Galen and Abulcasis, would have been originally handwritten. To add another layer to this Sammelband-sandwich, the author’s names were all Latinized.

Many scientific and philosophical Roman and Greek codices were adapted with the advent of Gutenberg’s printing press and moveable type, all of which accelerated developments in the Renaissance period. Following the Fall of Constantinople and the former Byzantine Empire in the mid-fifteenth century, there was an exodus of Byzantine Greek scholars to Italy. When they fled, they took important handwritten documents, new and old, with them. Historians dispute the extent to which this mass migration and influx of foreign thought helped catalyse the Renaissance in ‘Italy’ but it is important to consider these events alongside the Gutenberg revolution, which helped bring such ancient texts to a wider audience. People were increasingly gaining access to Latin translations of medical and scientific works, written by ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic scholars. A similar tale, therefore, presumably applies to the origins of our ‘book’, providing some historical context for how it came into being as an anthology.

What were you inspired to make?

We sought to channel our anthology’s wide range of linguistic and geographical influences by paying homage to their distinctive aesthetic elements and using English, Latin, Italian, and French. We wanted our book to reflect the interactive, personalised elements seen in the anthology’s use of printed marginalia and annotations. Hence, the second contents page of our book features a small dialogue between French and Italian in 6 pt Garamond. The second book in the anthology included many intricate xylographic images of lobotomies and surgical instruments. Thus Hels attempted to replicate some of these as they had some former experience with lino cutting. The colophon of our response, printed in 24 pt Garamond, is justified in a triangular shape, inspired by the third book.

Unfortunately, the intricate index pages and tables of Argillata’s book didn’t make the cut, nor the neat two-columned page formatting; though we were struck by the significance of these features, we lacked the skill and time to replicate them in our own printing. Therefore, we opted for the less ambitious use of illustrated letters. The final touch was adapting our title page, which consisted of wooden capital letters, our project name in an Old English typeface, and ornaments for the border printed in gold. We also felt it very necessary to credit our team leader, John, so we got him to ‘sign’ the book, as a little call-back to Joseph Fenton’s signature of custody visible on the first page of the anthology.

What were the processes and challenges involved in making your book?

The design process was shaped by both our creative responses to the book and the limitations of the print shop. The first step was to ascertain what kind of typefaces were available to us, as well as measuring the paper. The next was to conduct research into surgical literature of the Cinquecento through exploring digital library collections such as the Wellcome Collection and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, which served as a source of inspiration and a way to collate design ideas. A series of group discussions helped us to understand each other’s creative processes and priorities, and ultimately make compromises.

Our earliest drafts were hand-drawn, rough sketches, and served as a way for us to begin to visualise our ideas. This was useful initially when the ideas were flowing, but ultimately needed to be upgraded due to the lack of precision. We therefore started to use Microsoft Publisher, which gave us an idea of proportions and made it easy to experiment with the arrangement of various elements on the page.

Rather than lifting text straight out of Chirurgia, which was very dense and technical, we found a section of Celsus’s De medica which discussed eye surgery. Once we started setting the text, however, we discovered that the Old English typeface we were using had virtually run out! This forced us to find a creative solution by setting ‘CORPORIS’ entirely in capitals, placing unintended emphasis on the role of the body in the healing described, which ended up being quite a welcome and interesting compromise. We also found that it was necessary to go back and correct some mistakes, as letters such as u’s and n’s have a habit of getting mixed up…

How would you approach the task a second time?

As with any creative process, not all our original ideas came to fruition. Ultimately, we had to ensure our creativity worked within the limits of our resources. Our original ideas included using a wider variety of languages to reflect the multicultural diversity of the different components involved in making our book. This would also have nicely tied into the breadth of our experience as linguists. We would also have used English to render the text more accessible, an updated version of the ‘standardised’ Latin used at the time of the book’s publication. Unfortunately, constraints pertaining to the available typefaces thwarted this plan, a fact only realised in the process of composing! We lacked the necessary accented letters to accurately print in other languages, for example circumflexes, and cedillas in French, leading us to compromise and ‘downgrade’ the foreign text to minor marginalia features. This forced a more creative and exciting idea, as it now appears that the French and Italian owners of the book have been communicating with each other through the marginalia.

Another challenge lay in understanding and interpreting the book. A mysterious feature was the ambiguous printing location, revealed by the presumed ‘imprint’ on the title page. Bristol Special Collections and our own research suggested it was Venice, however Parigi has also been printed on the title page. We wanted to convey this ambiguity in an experimental fashion by handwriting Venice, then crossing it out and writing ‘Paris’. We would then have covered this with a paper flap attached by thread and handwriting ‘Bristol’ or ‘Bristolium’ on top, adding an interactive element to the title page and rendering each copy of our ‘print run’ unique, to reflect the individualised nature of the treatise seen in the handwritten paratexts. This would also have channelled the theme of dissection (stitching/sewing body parts). Flaps were commonly used in sixteenth-century anatomy books, so this would have been an interesting and pertinent feature to add. In practice we decided to prioritise finishing each copy rather than elongating the process.

We wanted to replicate the intricate xylographic illustrations, for example of the man with swords piercing his skin, but it wasn’t possible due to the small size of our page and time constraints. Instead, we experimented with lino. Due to the size of our folio, we also had to reduce the scale of the linocut. The solution was therefore to use simpler images, for example, of the surgical instruments in the second book, which weren’t too detailed to replicate.

Our finished book combines the elements of Chirguria which we originally found so fascinating when we first visited the book. Combining this inspiration and the skills we acquired in the print shop, we were able to create a printed response which is a true reflection of the journey that the book took us on, through history and the various resources of the print shop!

 

[These posts are lightly edited versions of the 2023-4 student projects from our undergraduate unit, Studying and Making Early Printed Books, in which students adopt a book from Bristol University’s Special Collections, and work in groups to produce a creative response to it using our historic letterpress equipment. The group blog post is one of the two assessments for the unit]

De Architectura Paginae

By Liv Lockowandt, Serina Pandhare and Tass Pett.

Which book did you choose?

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, De Architectura (Books I-V), translated by Giovan Batista Caporali (1476-1560), (Perugia: Giano Bigazzini, 1536), Special Collections, Restricted Oversize NA2515 VIT. This a folio format book with the text in Latin and translation and commentary in Italian, containing  80 woodcut illustrations. Roman architect Vitruvius wrote this work for Emperor Caesar Augustus. It contains a guide to Greek and Roman buildings, plans and designs for military camps, structures including aqueducts, baths, harbours, and small machines and measuring devices.

Title-page [photograph by Jamie Carstairs]

What interested you about this book?

The most interesting aspect was its variability and contradiction, and its individualistic approach to printing. As none of us read Latin or Italian we were primarily drawn to the aesthetic quality of the book. Some pages follow a standard dual-text layout: a page filled with text, either in parallel columns or with commentary around a section of original Latin. Other pages seem to deny order and convention, with formations so complicated they resemble the architectural designs in their diagrams. We loved this idea of page structure as a form of architecture in itself, especially when played off the topic of the book. The irony of this publication excited us: Vitruvius’ work was the first to set out the significance of balance and symmetry in architecture, a contrast to the relationship between text and image in this book. On reflection, these page layouts almost become an anti-demonstration of what Vitruvius says in the text itself.

Changing layouts make the book visually unpredictable. The woodcut diagrams are spatially privileged, often to the detriment of the text’s readability, which is sometimes squashed to the side in a column only two words wide.

The text is arranged differently depending on language and font size: Vitruvious’s text is a larger Latin font, and the Italian translation and commentary is in a smaller size. Additional comments in the margins complicate the layout. With so many distinct aspects brought together rather chaotically, it is not easy to find a linear path to follow across each page. This is a second contradiction that we enjoyed: the tension between a book’s purpose of being read, and how this one seems to playfully border illegibility. This all-round air of confusion, intrigue and contradiction was the effect we wanted to create in our own book, inspired by the illogicality of this volume.

 

What did the early modern book inspire you to design and make?

We had two main points of inspiration. Firstly, we extrapolated the idea of page layout as a form of architecture. This is where the play on words in our title comes from: our adopted book is De Architectura: ‘On Architecture’, and so our project is De Architectura Paginae: ‘On the Architecture of the Page’. We really enjoyed this parallel and drew on the prominence of the many intricate diagrams in the original to play with the idea of the supporting structures of typesetting and printing. We hoped to draw attention to these processes and make them visible in subtle ways, such as having our diagrams run off the edge of the page. We specifically chose existing woodblocks that gesture directly at this architectural link, including an aerial map and church tower. Our initial design was far too ambitious, as we set the map diagram at a 45° angle to create a triangular shape stabbing into the page. We thus created a second design where this diagram runs off the page but remains parallel with the margins, and ultimately, this is what we created. This was also a nod to the printed comments in the margins of the original book, which created the impression of a text breaking free from the borders imposed upon it.

Our third page mirrors the Vitruvius’ title page, using an image of a church tower and a column of text as a frame. We wanted to convey the idea of the printed word as an architectural medium, thus the word ‘ARCHITECTURA’ arranged vertically becomes a second tower.

Our second main point of inspiration is the idea of in/accessibility and contradiction. This is reflected in the text we wrote for our inner pages. The printing press revolutionised the written word, enabling access to and mass-production of texts to an extent never imagined before. We therefore found it very ironic that the illogical layout of this book makes it almost impossible to follow the text across the page. This was, for us, compounded by the language barrier, which prevented us from accessing the text at all. Everything we know about Vitruvius and his work comes from other sources, so while we spent significant amounts of time studying and contemplating this book, it remains entirely unsuccessful in its primary objective: to impart upon readers the information it contains. We wondered then what it may look like for a book to refuse this objective, and become actively hostile against attempts to read it, as well as the reading of other books. This is the visual and thematic core of our printed text: ‘we haven’t read it either’.

We decided to play on the different sizes of type in the Vitruvius and take this to the extreme as far as possible. This was a far simpler way of communicating our intent and playfulness than the triangular diagram we had hoped for. Similarly, we designed our title and back pages to be comparatively simple, to juxtapose the chaos we hoped would be inside and replicate the unpredictability of our inspiration.

 

What were some of the processes and challenges involved in making your book?

We realised very quickly that our ideas were ambitious and would be difficult to execute, so our process of creation needed to be as adaptable as possible. Since we were only able to learn these processes by doing them, we had to continually rethink to make our ideas more achievable. Historically, the printing process was a collaborative practice, and this is something our creative project made really clear. We were continually bouncing ideas off each other, making collaborative decisions, and this co-operation especially paid off during the actual printing step, which indisputably went the smoothest.

Our first step was to measure precisely all the components of our design once we had factored in available type and diagram sizes. Though we took great care in this, we had not yet realised how simultaneously exact and malleable these measurements needed to be, or how many obstacles we would encounter throughout this process.

We concentrated on the outer pages at first, as these seemed the simplest through which to learn the type-setting and locking up processes – though they were far from ‘simple’. As we had initially planned and measured our title page design to use different, larger decorative blocks, we faced issues with line length discrepancies when we then changed these, meaning the locking-up procedure was far more complicated than we had anticipated or planned for. This left us less time to work on our internal pages and is the primary reason our church tower page is so simple.

Once we had our text, we set the internal text blocks for the left hand page. It is difficult to spell-check when each letter is flipped, and this resulted in several misspellings we had to rectify after proofing – including letters of the wrong size or typeface, which had been replaced into the wrong typecases. Secondly, we quickly began to run out of the letter ‘t’ in our chosen type, 14 pt Perpetua Italic, and so had to rewrite our planned text to omit as many instances of this as possible. Thus we used the phrase ‘ye olde printing press’, as it seemed more important to use our final remaining ‘t’ in ‘printing’ than ‘the’! This was honestly a very amusing problem to have, and this is reflected in the playfulness of our solutions.

There were two further points of complication during the setting and locking up of our second page. To allow the diagram to run off the side of the page, we needed to include the rest of the over-running block in the chase, resulting in two separate chases for the two internal pages – one portrait and the other landscape. We had to be especially careful when lining these up exactly for printing.

                                                         

How would you approach this project differently a second time?

We could have struck a better balance between planning in advance and thinking on our feet. Because we had new challenges to troubleshoot each week, our goals changed session to session, and as a result the timing plans we had initially made quickly had to be abandoned.

We were aware from the outset that there would be practical limitations to our theoretical designs, and we became much quicker at adapting to these throughout the project. However, this was an adjustment: we spent significant time at the start trying to make our diagonal illustration work, despite knowing it was ambitious.

We would take higher-quality proofs earlier in the process. Blurry and imprecise prints meant that we only noticed some mistakes after proofing the entire locked-up page. Correcting these required a second, time-consuming locking-up procedure. Underestimating the meticulous and frustrating work that goes into locking-up a chase was a fatal error!

Something else we failed to consider was the difference between the metal and wooden printing presses. The variation between impressions on the wooden press was immense, depending on pressure, packing and whether we took one pull with the platen positioned in the centre of the forme, or two pulls. This was an added element we hadn’t anticipated, with some impressions looking rather faded, and others indented heavily into the page.

Despite the various issues we faced, we whole-heartedly believe our project to have been a success. Our final product conveys exactly what we wanted it to, though not in the ways we had initially planned, and the process of adapting to obstacles enhanced the playfulness and irregularity of our work. The unfinished or altered aspects of our work could be argued to in fact bring it closer to our inspiration source: the Vitruvius was sold and bound despite being far from complete, and our project was also not entirely what we had originally set out to create, yet both are incredibly valuable and worthwhile in spite of this.

 

 

[These posts are lightly edited versions of the 2023-4 student projects from our undergraduate unit, Studying and Making Early Printed Books, in which students adopt a book from Bristol University’s Special Collections, and work in groups to produce a creative response to it using our historic letterpress equipment. The group blog post is one of the two assessments for the unit]

Printing Purgatory: Capturing Canto Nono

By Archie Powell, Danny Jones, Emily Coates & Marco Lautier

What was your book?

Dante Aligieri, Divine Comedy, (Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1544) (University of Bristol: Special Collections, PQ4302).

La Comedia Di Dante recounts Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, divided into three books (cantiche), each containing thirty-three shorter sections (canti), as well as an additional one in Inferno. This edition also included commentary throughout the text, as well as a great many illustrations, both of which provided by Alessandro Vellutello.

What interested you about it?

Upon our first examination of the book, there were a number of details that stuck out to us, both from a visually aesthetic perspective, as well as a reader-friendly perspective. As strange as it might be, the choice for our particular extract came from an intriguing element that revealed itself a few canti into Dante’s Inferno. Unlike the prior sections of Dante’s first cantiche, all of which written in roman numerals, his ninth was spelt out it in its full Italian: Canto Nono. Only a small detail, but one that we felt leapt out at the reader and begged the question of why.

We were intrigued by the arrangement of Vellutello’s commentary around Dante’s verse, surrounding it so completely that it made for a challenging reading experience. And we were also interested by the intricate, hand-drawn illustrations are throughout the volume, including with angelic figures, animals with religious connotations, and in an intriguing instance, a face-baring sun.

What were you inspired to make?

First and foremost, we were drawn to the unusual, and slightly humorous presentation of the verse title ‘Canto Nono’, as well as the verse itself, and the commentary which ran alongside. We also wanted to convey the rich symbolism and allegory in Dante’s Inferno, particularly the themes of journeying, deceit, doubt, hell, hope, and storytelling.

We chose Canto Nono as our main title, with The Divine Comedy and Inferno as subheadings beneath it. Our design echoed that of our adopted book, which, despite being in excellent condition considering its age, showed signs of deterioration and mishandling, with a dark smudge tainting the centre of the page which was hard to ignore. Rather than detracting from its appeal, this imperfection gives this particular copy a stamp of individuality and demonstrates the book’s journey over time. To honour this life cycle, the ‘smudge’ became the hallmark of our title page, depicted as a solitary fish, as close to the sizing and shape of the smudge, allowing this particularity to show through.

Inside our pamphlet, our design was inspired by the canto-commentary layout. In our adopted book, this was printed in two adjacent columns, and to recreate this, we opted to print the poem on page 2, parallel to the commentary printed on page 3. Upon examination, the texts appeared disappointingly ordinary, lacking the intrigue it possessed in the original book where the formatting had made it stand out. We therefore made the decision to vary the placement of the text, prioritising the preservation of the book’s eccentric traits.

We resolved to reproduce the verse as close to the original text as possible, including the italicised font, punctuation (which was plentiful and varied) and line count. This allowed us to have more freedom when designing the commentary whilst using canto 9 as a guidance. The commentary was translated from Italian to English, then de-italicised and tailored to fit the same 16-line structure as the canto, now sharing a similar format as the poem.

We noticed due to the similarity of their formatting, the commentary could easily be mistaken for a translation of the poem. Rather than making alterations to rectify this possible dilemma, we committed to the charade. By employing a play on words in the last line of the commentary – ‘No no Canto Nono’, this is not Canto Nono! The revelation becomes apparent once reaching the final line of the text, which now ends on line 17. This light-hearted deception pays homage to Dante’s storytelling of doubt and resolution, a journey to enlightenment, and that is only if one can see through it.

Of course, as Canto Nono is an extract from the Inferno section of The Divine Comedy, it was crucial that our project reflected an aspect of hell. Throughout, Dante uses images of demons and other hellish creatures, sinners, and celestial beings. For our pamphlet’s back page, we sought an array of animals, splayed stars, a flight of swallows and a horseman. We deliberated over the use of red ink to print, recognising its status not as a cliché but a classic technique appreciated by traditional and modern artists and audiences.

What were some of the processes and challenges involved in making your book?

Once we had decided on our line length, tpesetting was the next daunting task that lay ahead. Composing stick in hand and having set the appropriate number of Ems to ensure a line length of 36 points, we confronted this challenge head on and with haste. This proved to be problematic as during our first typesetting session we made countless errors. Initially we placed the lines in the wrong order on the composing stick, believing that it should read in the same direction as on a page. Our first mistake. Exacerbating the situation, we were also not on the same page regarding spaces before and after punctuation.

Rectifying these errors with a pair of tweezers and steady hands proved time consuming; in the first session we only managed to set a total of 6 lines between three people. In the next session we learnt from our missteps and operated at a slower place, yet with greater precision. We verified by our work by photographing the set lines and reversing the image. For example, in these photos that were taken during setting, you can see the ‘s’ is upside down:

In our second typesetting session we managed to set a total of 20 lines between four people. This was a significant improvement from the previous session, but this time our Achilles heel would prove to be not pre-checking the type cases for sufficient type before beginning typesetting. This meant we had to switch from Caslon italic to Caslon roman for the verse due to a shortage of certain letters.

Once the text was set and scrutinised, we transferred the set lines from the compositors stick to the galley tray. Immediately we realised the importance of sliding the lines onto the tray, taking great care not to lift it. Whilst it was necessary to lift the line slightly, we overlooked how easily the type would fall out. This misplaced confidence led to one group member attempting to pick up an entire section of set type and move it into the form which, as you can imagine, went disastrously. Hours of hard work crumbled away in front of our eyes, letter by letter, falling out onto the table. The recovery from this blunder required all hands-on deck for about half an hour.

Then we entered the most exciting phase of the project: bringing our book to life.

Using a beautiful single-pull printing press, it quickly became apparent that the whole process was an art form. We were perhaps, overly enthusiastic in our pursuit of producing the perfect print, and soon became aware that achieving perfection was harder than we had initially anticipated. In fact, it was simply impossible. During this part of the process, we struggled to correctly position the paper in the frisket, which, after several attempts, seemed to work best with two people.

We chose to use black ink for the textual elements and red for the decorative features. Inking the inner forme (pages 2 and 3) was easy because there were no decorative features, but the image-heavy outer forme  (pages 1 and 4) needed far greater caution, and a range of different size rollers.

Naively we had one member of the group both inking and positioning the paper which resulted in smudge marks on some copies. We also found that there was an art to how hard to pull on the lever as we had certain copies where the impression was too deep and others where the impression was too shallow.

Nevertheless, by the 4th printed copy, we had successfully found this middle ground. Fortunately, after months of continuous mistakes, heavily relying on course tutor Adrian to ease our collective states of panic, our beautiful prints have finished drying in the print shop and have been folded into books.

What are your overall reflections on the project?

Our experience, despite at times being frustrating, was incredibly rewarding. Learning the basics of the printing process, suffering setbacks, and watching our project take shape provided us with a new level of appreciation for the early modern book, and the skill that was involved in making it.