Operating a Renaissance Printing Press

Renaissance era printing presses required a team of skilled workers for operation. Each press was manned by two journeymen, aided by an apprentice. One journeyman would fit a forme of type set by the compositor into the press bed and ink the forme with sheepskin dabbers. A second journeyman would attach a sheet of damp paper to a frame that folded over the inked forme, slide the tray under the screw, and yank the bar to lower a heavy plate onto the paper, pressing it against the inked type. Once the puller raised the plate, the apprentice would remove the wet page and hang it to dry, allowing the journeymen to begin the process anew. A seasoned team could pull upwards of three thousand pages a day. An average sized printing shop had three presses in operation; a large enterprise, five to six.

Compositors, or typesetters, sat before staggered bins of type filling the formes for each press. As soon as the initial page was drawn from a new forme, a proofreader would read and correct it. Following the proofreader's marks, the compositors would remove and replace erroneous letters before the final draw. The duties of both compositor and proofreader demanded a thorough familiarity with classical languages and literatures. Noted scholars often served a "guest stint" as corrector at a printing house. The contribution of their expertise to the production of texts elevated the shop's reputation.

Much of my novel takes place in a printing shop in Lyon, a center of the French book trade. Jollande Carlet, a spirited young widow who dreams of publishing her own poems, proofreads at the Sign of the Fountain, the small but esteemed establishment owned by her godfather. When Gabriel Orland, a court poet commissioned by the queen to investigate the Fountain's rumored role in the distribution of banned books, arrives to assume Jollande's position, sparks fly. Good thing the paper's damp, because these two spar over far more than spelling.

A King and his Books: The Libraries of François I

"Roi chevalier" (warrior-king) though he was, François I might just as readily--and appropriately--have claimed the title "Roi lecteur" (reader-king). François's love of books contributed not only to the blossoming of the literary arts in sixteenth century France but to the foundation of the crown jewel of French letters, the Bibliothèque nationale (National Library).

Engraving of an anonymous miniature showing 

Antoine Macault reading his translation of Diodorus Siculus 

to François I and his sons

Educated according to humanist principles, François spent his youth reading the works of the ancients in Latin, as well as poetry and chronicles composed in French. Determined to see his kingdom achieve the intellectual and artistic renown Italy enjoyed, he supported the literary arts once he ascended to the throne, patronizing, among others, the poet Clément Marot and composing some two hundred poems of his own (Knecht, Francis I, 84). So great was François's love of letters that he created the post of lecteur du roi, an attendant whose chief duty was to read aloud to the king, particularly at mealtimes. Whenever François traveled, two chests filled with works of Roman history and French romances accompanied him.

François loved to collect books and manuscripts as much as to read them. Initially, he housed his books in a library at the château de Blois. Antonio De Beatis described this library in 1517:

[I]n the castle, or rather palace, we saw a library consisting of a sizeable room not only furnished with shelves from end to end but also lined with book-cases from floor to ceiling, and literally packed with books--to say nothing of those put away in chests in an inner room. These books are all of parchment, handwritten in beautiful lettering and bound in silk of various colours, with elaborate locks and clasps of gilt [quoted in Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron, 471-72].

In 1518, the Blois collection included 1,626 volumes, of which forty-one were in Greek, four in Hebrew and two in Arabic. Throughout his reign, François expanded these holdings, commissioning agents to travel to Italy and the Near East to seek out and purchase rare books and instructing his diplomats to buy or copy all the Greek manuscripts they could find.

After the death of his wife Queen Claude in 1524, François began to assemble a second library at the château de Fontainebleau. He dedicated the third floor of his private wing, directly above the famed gallery decorated by the Italian artist Rosso Fiorentino and the bathing suite, to this library. In 1544, François moved the entire Blois collection, now numbering 1,890 items, to Fontainebleau, combining them with the few hundred books and manuscripts already there.

Library at Fontainebleau. 

Photo credit: Sébastien Bouthillette

Contemporaries marveled at the magnificence of the library's decoration, the quality and rarity of its holdings, and the hospitality with which visiting scholars were welcomed to consult them.

Even as François acquired Latin and Greek manuscripts, the printing industry flourished in France. In order to keep up with the flow of books spilling off presses at home and abroad, the king issued the Ordinance of Montpellier in December 1537. This royal decree ordered all printers and booksellers to deposit with the royal library a copy of any printed book put on sale in the kingdom. Although it does not appear to have been strictly enforced, the Montpellier ordinance is considered to be the first law of legal deposit enacted anywhere.

In 1567, some twenty years after François's death, the royal library, now consisting of 3,650 titles, was brought to Paris, where it became the nucleus of the Bibliothèque nationale. Ultimately, the books François loved and collected nourished the intellectual curiosity of an entire nation, for generations.

Sources:
A. Franklin, Précis de l'histoire de la Bibliothèque du roi, aujourd'hui Bibliothèque nationale (Paris, 1875).
    http://www.archive.org/stream/prcisdelhistoir00frangoog#page/n11/mode/2up
R. J. Knecht, Francis I (Cambridge UP, 1984)
----,  Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge UP, 1994)

Sixteenth Century Quote of the Week

"This is what the printing presses do: they corrupt susceptible hearts. The silly asses do not see this, and brutes rejoice in the fraudulent title of teachers, exalting themselves with a song like this (be so good as to listen): 'O good citizen, rejoice: your city is well stuffed with books. For a small sum, men turn themselves into doctors in three years. Let thanks be rendered to the printers!' Any uncultured person without Latin bawls these things."

Filippo de Strata (c. 1473), Italian Benedictine

Polemic against Printing

translated by Shelagh Grier, 1986

Quoted in The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree (2010)

G is for Griffarins

The first press in Lyon printed pages in 1473, establishing an industry that by the mid-1500's was critical to the city's economy. Over sixty printing shops were in operation around 1550; many of them--including those of Sébastien Gryphe, Jean de Tournes, and Barthélemy Honorat--were famous throughout France and all of Europe for the quality of the scholarship and craftsmanship that went into their editions. As Natalie Zemon Davis explains in her essay "Strikes and Salvation at Lyon" (see reference below; the factual content of this post is drawn heavily from Davis), the printing industry employed over 600 men of all social classes, from the great merchant-publishers, to the independent publisher-printers, to master craftsmen and printers' journeymen. All of these men were doing something different from their fathers, in a trade that was relatively new and without traditions.

The journeymen were those men who worked for wages as press operators, typesetters (compositors) and proofreaders. They came from all over France and even foreign countries, often traveling a circuit that allowed them to gain experience by working for several months or years in different cities. Pressmen on the whole were a cocky lot, proud their skills--two-thirds of them could read and write--and convinced that they labored in a trade that held great value for Christian society. Though they might be laborers, they considered themselves far above the city's tanners and masons and dockhands.

Life in a printing shop was a communal one. Three to four men worked a press, in conjunction with a typesetter and proofreader. The master was required by law to provide meals which they all ate together. Unmarried workers usually shared living quarters and often spent their scant free time together, drinking at taverns and roaming the streets. But this new industry had no guild to provide a cultural and monetary support structure for its workers. To compensate for this, and to strengthen their position vis-à-vis the publishers and master printers, who, in their eyes, conspired to ruin and destroy them with long hours, meager wages and inadequate food, the printers' journeymen formed a secular brotherhood called the Company of Griffarins.

The Griffarins was a secretive society with its own initiation rites and ceremonies. The name derives from the old French term for "glutton," an insult the master printers often threw at them, modified to include the word "griffe," or "claw," in order to emphasize the group's economic power. Though they were among the highest paid workers in Lyon, the pressmen banded together to pressure the publishers and master printers for better working conditions and higher pay. They organized strikes, work stoppages, and demonstrations, beat up apprentices whom masters put on their jobs, and made life miserable for pressmen who refused to join the company. Since they were valuable to the publishers for their skills and successful in intimidating the competition, the Griffarins were usually able to force their superiors to meet their demands.

By and large, the pressmen at mid-century were strong supporters of the reformed faith rapidly spreading throughout the city. There were, however, publishers and pressmen who remained faithful Catholics; for reasons Natalie Davis enumerates and which I will relate in a later post, the Griffarins eventually shied away from the strictures and oversight of the Protestant Consistories and returned to the Catholic fold. In my novel, I strive to depict the close companionship between the pressmen at the Sign of the Fountain and their distrust of the new compositor who suddenly appears in their midst. The Fountain's pressmen have no complaints against the shop's master, a devout Catholic, but they are readily suspected of supporting heresy by the city guard.

(Natalie Zemon Davis, "Strikes and Salvation at Lyon," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford UP 1975), 1-16.)

Browsing for Books in the Sixteenth Century

If you were browsing through a bookshop in sixteenth century Lyon, what would you find? According to Louis Bourgeois in Quand la cour de France vivait à Lyon (Fayard 1980), book production in the city at mid-century fell into roughly these categories:

28% of books treated religious subjects;

12% were dedicated to science and the arts (medicine and philosophy being most the popular);

33% could be considered belles-lettres  (grammar, Latin and neo-Latin literature, French poetry and prose);

6% discussed history;

the remaining 21% were mostly texts of Roman, canon and French law.

Good thing Lyon was far from the beach--not a lot of light reading to choose from!

Lyon: City of Commerce and Culture

Located at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône rivers, the city of Lyon was second only to Paris in commercial and cultural importance during the sixteenth century. The third largest city in the realm with a population of close to 60,000 in 1550 (Paris boasted 300,000 inhabitants, Rouen 75,000), Lyon was the home to three industries that linked France with the rest of Europe: banking, silk work, and printing. The city became a major point of entry for goods coming into France over the Alps from Italy; linked to the Mediterranean by the Rhône and to Flanders and Germany by overland trade routes, it became staging center for exports as well. Lyon was home to large populations of foreigners, primarily Italians and Germans, deeply involved in this international trade. The city hosted four trade fairs each year, at Epiphany, Easter, August, and All Saints', each of which attracted 5-6000 foreigners. These fairs helped establish one of banking's first credit systems, the lettres d'échange. Although Lyon had no university in the sixteenth century, the prevalence of the printing trade fostered a healthy intellectual life and led to the establishment of poetic circles and philosophical academies based on Italian models. Lyon was a vibrant and exciting place to be in the years leading up to the Wars of Religion.

This vibrancy and the interplay of commerce, culture and religion led me to choose Lyon as the setting for The Measure of Silence. In coming posts, I will examine each of these aspects in greater detail and share how each contributed to the development of the narrative.

(The drawing above dates from the 1800's but shows the high hills that dominate the city and its bustling river trade.)

Renaissance Printing Press

Here is a photo of a Renaissance era printing press. Each press is manned by a team of at least two journeymen, aided by an apprentice. One journeyman would fit the frame, or forme, filled with type set by the compositor into the tray and ink the forme with large, handled balls. The other would lay dampened paper over the inked forme, slide the tray under the screw, and turn the screw to lower the plate onto the paper and make an impression. The wet page would be hung to dry and the process begun again. An average size printing shop would have three presses in operation, a large operation five to six. One to two compositors, or typesetters, would fill the formes for each press; a proof reader would check the initial pages drawn from each forme. The compositor, and especially the proofreader, were often highly educated men, familiar with classical languages and literature.

The printing shop at the Sign of the Fountain in my novel is a small shop with two presses and one compositor. Since her godfather owns the shop, Jollande is permitted to work as a proofreader; Nicolas Vernier, a court poet working undercover to spy on the shop's activities for the Queen, assumes the role of compositor. Good thing the paper's damp, because sparks fly as these two spar over spelling.