Volume 12–4 (Low Res).pdf - U&lc

14
It's an old problem: who owns the final
product of a joint creative project?_Is it
the person responsible for the initial
creative idea? The one who transformed
that idea into a reality? Or the person
who marketed the product and established
its value?
Aldus Manutius faced this problem
with Francesco Griffo da Bologna.
They were a creative team who together
produced some of the communications
industry's most important and influential
typeface designs. Like too many close
and intensely creative relationships,
however, they also quarreled—and eventually
parted company over the issue of
product ownership.
The breaking of the affiliation
between Griffo and Manutius was not a
casualty of a clash of personalities, but of
a rapidly changing commercial environment.
At the time they worked, the typographic
industry was evolving from the
pioneer age of Gutenberg and Jenson
(when one person normally directed
every stage of the type design and production
process, from initial idea to
printed piece) to a more regulated and
structured environment. The organized
and somewhat reliable industry of Garamond
and Plantin, when a number of
recognized and skilled punch cutters
supplied the needs of established clientele,
still lay in the future. Aldus and Griffo
fell between these two extremes, and the
lack of an established work pattern eventually
caused their split.
Aldus was an entrepreneur; and
his break with Griffo came as a result of
his trying to insure the future of his
company and its assets. The clumsy
system of press-privileges popular in
15th century Italy sought only to protect
the interests of the investor, and that
always meant the printer or publisher.
Aldus was both; so when he tried to
protect his company's substantial invest-
ILESTONE
TYPOGRAPHIC
ment with a privilege that outlawed all
imitation of his type, he effectively,
though perhaps unintentionally, prevented
Griffo from selling his best and most
popular designs to other printers. It is no
wonder that they quarreled. While there
is no doubt about Griffo's creative genius,
and that without his type designs Aldus'
accomplishments would not have been
nearly so important, Aldus created the
environment that made Griffo's work
possible, and the conditions that made
his typeface designs necessary.
Next to Gutenberg, Aldus was
perhaps the most important printer of
the Renaissance and the first of many
great scholar-printers. A successful publisher
and businessman, Aldus produced
some of the most beautiful and technically
accurate books of the 15th century.
The Aldine roman, the most popular
typestyle of its time, and the model for
hundreds of other designs, was but one
of his contributions to typography. The
portable book and italic typefaces are
both Aldus innovations. Before Aldus all
books had been the much larger, oral-
reading, size in the tradition of the scribes
and illuminated manuscripts, and italics
were used only as a writing style. Few
have contributed as much or as widely
to enrich our typographic heritage as did
Aldus Manutius.
To accomplish his many goals,
Aldus gathered some of the most creative
and talented members of the European
printing and publishing community.
People like Erasmus, the famous Dutch
philosopher, were commonly drawn to
his shop. Technicians and laborers were
recruited with offers of high pay and
exciting projects. Aldus went to extreme
lengths to surround himself with the
brightest and the best. It is therefore a
little odd that he showed very little understanding
of, or goodwill toward,
those who worked so hard for him.
Aldus rarely mentioned his co-workers
or staff in any of his writing, even
though they worked and lived on his
premises. What little is written is certainly
not laudatory. Once he referred to his
workers, in the preface to one of his
books, as his "damned runaway slaves,"
and in another piece he complained
that, "my hired men and workers have
conspired against me in my own house
...but with the help of God I smashed
them that they all thoroughly regret their
treachery" Whether it was with the help
of "God," or that of his principal partner,
the doge's nephew, it is well recorded
that Aldus dealt harshly (and with little
remorse) with those who stood in his
way. On matters of personal or business
ALDUS mANunus
BYALLAN HALEY