Abstract
This slim volume (a mere 110 pages of text, divided into 14 very short chapters and an epilogue) revisits the life and career of one of the prominent figures in the earliest history of printing in Florence. Just over forty titles have been attributed to Niccolò di Lorenzo della Magna and his presses between 1476 and 1486. Niccolò was one of the numerous Germans who relocated to Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century to seed the printing industry in the peninsula. Böninger’s book painstakingly fleshes out the financing, deal-making and material concerns behind the books that appeared with the colophon of Nicholò di Lorenzo d’Allamagna.
Böninger is able to provide a picture of the work done by Niccolò largely by virtue of the fact that Niccolò seems to have been embroiled in almost non-stop legal trouble. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the life and work of one of the leading figures of Florence’s literary scene in the second half of the fifteenth century are reconstructed here not primarily through an examination of the books he produced but through the evidence furnished by a string of unpaid debts, contractual disputes and financial entanglements. These squabbles found their way to the Mercanzia, the judicial court in Florence tasked with the resolution of financial and economic disputes (and, incidentally, the body in which Niccolò served as a domicellus (roughly, a clerk) in the decade before he began his career in printing). Böninger’s shrewd exploitation of the records of this body augments what was previously known about Niccolò from notarial accounts. That the records of the Mercanzia proved such happy hunting grounds for Böninger is an indication of the extent to which the early history of print was an economic story, replete with countless episodes of financial success and failure. As with many early printers across Europe, Niccolò’s typographical career was short and tempestuous, indicative of the turbulent impact of print as a disruptive new information technology. It ended, predictably enough, with a bankruptcy in 1486/7, as Niccolò’s venture entered the ranks of countless other start-ups seeking to capitalise on the novel markets created by print and in so doing coming face to face with stark financial realities.
In the first several years of his career as a printer, Niccolò entered into a number of commercial partnerships. Most of the books he produced in this period were religious texts, some as commissions for the Augustinian and Jesuate orders. But Niccolò was not a specialist printer, as he took on contracts for a wide array of items, including pamphlets by Gentile Becchi and Angelo Poliziano defending the Medici party in the wake of the Pazzi Conspiracy and Sixtus IV’s subsequent bulls of excommunication. He also published works as diverse as Celsus’ medical writings, Pulci’s poetry and Rabbi Samuel’s Epistola. These years afforded Niccolò connections with a wide swath of Florentine society, connections he was able to translate into several ensuing years as an independent contractor, which began with an agreement to print Cristoforo Landino’s celebrated commented edition of Dante’s Commedia and proceeded to encompass a broad range of Latin and vernacular texts. It ended with a rather disastrous commission to publish Gregory the Great’s Morali, a highly popular text for theological and homiletical instruction. For this, he engaged with a pair of apothecaries and undertook a complicated mechanism of financing, which Böninger painstakingly reconstructs. At one point, Niccolò was thrown in jail for non-payment of a debt he incurred in the process of printing this work. Several years after his presses had stopped, recriminations regarding outstanding debts over a book that had not sold at all well continued. This ill-starred project appears to have put paid to Niccolò’s career as a printer.
One of Böninger’s more interesting insights is the close relationship between printing and the wool trade in Florence. The woollen cloth known as panni di garbo was frequently used in lieu of specie as currency and as collateral in the Florence of the day. Often contracts that stipulated payment in such cloth had a built-in delay, sometimes as long as a year, before settlement was required. This lag permitted printers to take on debt to meet their operating costs. In fact, payment in kind was normative in print shops of the age, and merchants involved in the wool trade themselves regularly hawked printed books as well. These mechanisms are illustrative of the degree to which the printing industry depended on the debt economy; in Florence, this meant tapping into a multilayered network of credit. That these credit and debt flows were so often the source of contention accounts for the frequency with which Niccolò’s name appears in the records upon which Böninger relies.
These manifold legal squabbles and financial disputes are typical of the nascent stage of a new industry, one that was as yet unbounded by established protocols and practical guy wires. This picture of the embryonic business of print in Florence tracks with what we see elsewhere in Europe—the world of early print was something of an economic Wild West, with a great many practitioners trying their hand at printing and the majority failing to make a go of it.
As a careful, granular look at what the many layers of written records of fifteenth-century Florentine society can tell us about an individual who was hitherto known chiefly from the appearance of his name on colophons, this book is commendable. Böninger has gone through the potentially useful sources with a fine-toothed comb, following the trails of crumbs to every conceivable morsel about Niccolò. Any general conclusions that one can draw from the work remain elusive. Böninger describes his career as ‘in many aspects exceptional’ (p. 109), but without systematic comparison it is difficult to establish exactly how. Perhaps what is most valuable about this book is that it reminds us that book history is necessarily business history and that a full picture of the early world of print requires more than just close study of texts and typography, but also an understanding of the financial and economic risks and realities that shaped the experience of entrepreneurs like Niccolò di Lorenzo della Magna.
The book includes two appendices—one a list of the books printed by Niccolò and a second that includes transcriptions of records from the Mercanzia and podestà of Florence.