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GIAMBATTISTA BODONI 
 OF PARMA 
 
Ihis biographical sketch of the Hfe of the 
 ItaUan printer, Giambattista Bodoni, was 
 delivered by Thomas iMaitland Cleland of 
 New York, at a meeting of The Society 
 of Printers in Boston, April 23, iQiS. 
 
 Two hundred and fifty copies have been 
 printed by The University Press, Cam- 
 bridge, Massachusetts, for The Society of 
 Printers, of which this is 
 
 No 
 
 .. I'll 
 
Mo.>LMli.M lO HoDUM, KIlKCTEl) AT SaLIZZO, Oc r . 30, 187 a 
 
GIAMBATTISTA BODONI 
 OF PARMA 
 
 T. M. GLELAND 
 
 BOSTON 
 THE SOCIETY OF PRINTERS 
 
 M C M X V I 
 

 Copyright, 1016, 
 3t T. M. Cleland 
 
GIAMBATTISTA 
 
 BODONI 
 
 OF PARMA 
 
 Mr. President and Members of The Society 
 of Printers : 
 
 In selecting, as the subject of your meeting 
 tonight, Bodoni, the printer of Parma, on 
 this centennial anniversary of his death, you 
 have done a very wise and just thing. For 
 though he may have been over-praised and 
 honoured in his own day, he has certainly 
 received rather more than a fair share of 
 neglect in ours. While I am very sensible 
 of the honour, I am not so sure of the wis- 
 dom of your having asked me to talk to you 
 
 357086 
 
on this subject, and as you have made this 
 bed, you may be compelled to fall asleep in 
 it before the evening is over; but we have, 
 fortunately, what appears to be a very repre- 
 sentative collection of specimens of Bodoni's 
 work here tonight for inspection and study. 
 These shall be the real speakers of the even- 
 ing, and from them I hope you will gather 
 much interest and even inspiration. My part 
 shall be no more than to introduce them to 
 you — a sufficiently difficult one within such 
 a limited time. To do this we must know 
 something of the history of the printer him- 
 self; we must analyze, as far as we are able, 
 the elements of his style, consider the sources 
 from which it grew, and note wherein it is 
 distinctive or original. 
 
 The principal source of biographical data 
 which we have relative to Bodoni is the 
 "Life" written by his friend, Joseph De 
 Lama, and published at Parma in 1816 — 
 a work rich in the banalities and bombast 
 common to the biographies of that epoch, 
 and which does not, I regret to say. present 
 quite the vivid impression of its hero which 
 
we should like to have. Another book, com- 
 piled at an earlier date and entitled "Anec- 
 dotes to Serve for a Life of G. B. Bodoni," 
 is certainly more interesting because of its 
 more personal note; but since it is not so 
 much the history as the work of Bodoni as 
 a printer which is important to us as printers, 
 1 shall offer you only the briefest and barest 
 outline of his early life, with a view to arriving 
 the sooner at a more careful consideration of 
 his types and the books and other things he 
 printed from them at the Royal Press of Parma . 
 
 Giambattista Bodoni was born at Saluzzo, 
 in the Province of Piedmont, on the i6th of 
 February, 17/io. His father was a printer 
 before him, and we are told by his biographer 
 that he applied himself diligently in his early 
 youth to the learning of that trade, and that 
 when he was but twelve years of age he 
 showed a decided artistic instinct by devising 
 some nocturnal illuminations on the front 
 of his father's house, during a local festival, 
 which excited the wonder and admiration of 
 the inhabitants of Saluzzo. 
 
 It is of more interest to us, however, to 
 
know that when still quite a boy he cut a 
 number of wood blocks with such success 
 that the prints from them obtained some sale 
 in Turin. The approbation which these early 
 attempts received appears to have aroused in 
 young Bodoni a lively ambition to go to Rome 
 and there perfect himself in this art. He had 
 a great curiosity, we are told, to see the famous 
 press of the Propaganda Fides, the missionary 
 institution of the Roman Church w Inch issues 
 ecclesiastical works in all languages for dis- 
 tribution all over the world. 
 
 He was eighteen years of age when he set 
 out on this journey, with one of his fellow 
 townsmen for companion, and when he finally 
 succeeded in visiting the press of the Propa- 
 ganda his enthusiasm and interest so impressed 
 the head of that institution that he immedi- 
 ately engaged Bodoni as a compositor. During 
 his stay here he took up the study of Oriental 
 languages with such success that he was able 
 to redistribute and put into useful order the 
 series of exotic characters which had been 
 cut in Sixtus Fifth's time by the I'ronch typo- 
 cutters Garamond and Le Be, and which had 
 
become hopelessly pied, and had been for a 
 long time useless. He had to clean the rust 
 from the punches and matrices and put them 
 in good order for casting, and it is painful 
 for the less scholarly among us to dwell upon 
 a task like this, and difficult to conceive of 
 the interest and enthusiasm which alone could 
 have supported him in it. And yet this in- 
 terest in these strange outlandish characters 
 never seems to have deserted him from that 
 time on, as we shall see later, by examining 
 his "Manuale," or specimen book of types. 
 It is apparently through his labours with these 
 matrices and punches that he was inspired 
 to undertake the cutting of type punches on 
 his own account. 
 
 His first attempts at this were decided 
 failures, but he kept at it until he succeeded 
 in getting a fairly good ornament, and finally 
 a series of capital letters, which were admired 
 by his associates at Rome. 
 
 He made an important friend at this time 
 — the Father Maria Paciaudi, then Librarian 
 to Cardinal Spinelli, the head of the Propa- 
 ganda; and it was this same priest who after- 
 
wara Decame ijioranan loine uuKe rcruinana 
 I of Parma on his succession to that state in 
 1765. The Duke of Parma, inspired by the 
 counsels of his minister, Du Tillot, established 
 an Academy of Fine Arts, founded the remark- 
 able library which still exists in that city, and 
 was ambitious to have a royal press like those 
 at Paris , Madrid , Turin , and other capitols , and 
 it was Father Paciaudi who suggested Bodon 
 as the director of such an establishment. 
 
 Bodoni, in the meantime, had decided or 
 a trip to England, where he had been tolc 
 greater opportunities would be open to hinr 
 than at Bome. He had stopped to visit hij 
 parents at Saluzzo, when he was taken witl 
 a fever which kept him there for some time 
 It was this fortunate, if not agreeable, cir- 
 cumstance which put an end to the projeclec 
 visit to England and kept him in Italy at the 
 moment when the Parma Government wa; 
 seeking a director for its press. The offei 
 reached him at Saluzzo, and on the 2/|th o 
 February, 1 768, we find him arrived at Parmj 
 and preparing to build presses and collect th( 
 various materials whicli were to form th( 
 
i already existed in the Ducal Palace of 
 rma, and a document has been found which 
 s printed in the seventeenth century, en- 
 ed "A Note on the Printing Types in the 
 ess of the Duke of Parma," etc. But this 
 ist have been a poor affair and fallen into 
 luse, for I can find no mention of Bodoni's 
 ving made use of anything he found there. 
 Bodoni was now twenty-eight years of age, 
 d it is at this point that his career as a 
 inter begins; and the story of his life is in 
 dity the story of his work. Thus, before 
 rsuing any further his biography, it would 
 well to consider the nature of this work 
 d some of the influences and conditions 
 t of which it developed. 
 Like most successful men he arrived upon 
 I scene at a very happy moment, when the 
 ; of printing was in as low a state of decline 
 it had ever been. The lamp of the great 
 naissance was spluttering dismally, and the 
 lendid mastery which we are familiar with 
 the works of the great printers of the fif- 
 snth and sixteenth centuries began to fade 
 
 i3 
 
in the seventeenth, and by the eighteenth 
 century had almost ceased to exist. It is quite 
 true that much of the best work of the eight- 
 eenth century continued to show some taste 
 and style in composition; but this was little 
 more than a protraction of the good traditions 
 which died hard in those days. At any rate, 
 interest in the beauty and workmanship of 
 typography and presswork for its own sake 
 was very dead. Books were thought to be 
 beautiful because of their engraved illus- 
 trations and ornament, and typography was 
 regarded as a mere utilitarian adjunct, and in 
 some cases was abandoned altogether, as in 
 the editions of Horace, made by John Pine 
 in London in 1787, in which all the text was 
 engraved on copper with the plates, and which 
 was considered the apotheosis of fine book- 
 making at that time. But if typography 
 and types became poor and clumsy, press- 
 work had grown slovenly beyond belief, and 
 we find some of those books in which the 
 exquisitely designed and engraved plates of 
 the most celebrated of the French draughts- 
 men and engravers were lavished with the 
 
loosest prodigality so badly printed in the text 
 as to be almost illegible. 
 
 To John Baskerville, of Birmingham, credit 
 is no doubt due for the first attempt to revive 
 the art of typography itself, and for the first 
 publications in the eighteenth century which 
 threw^ their entire dependence for recognition 
 upon their typography alone, without any 
 extraneous adornment. But Baskerville was 
 not altogether successful, and he certainly did 
 not get very much encouragement. His types 
 were fine in certain respects, but they were not 
 a sufficiently radical improvement over those 
 which had already existed to make a very great 
 stir. A number of others followed, like the 
 brothers Foulis in Glasgow, theDidots in Paris, 
 and the Spaniard Ibarra. But it remained for 
 the robust Italian, with his limitless energy and 
 exalted ideals, to grasp anew the idea of the 
 organic beauty of printing, and to infuse into it 
 the definite style and expression of his epoch. 
 
 Whatever may be our judgment now of 
 that style and the taste which produced it, it 
 is apparent that it contained a more vital germ 
 than did any of the tentatives of his contem- 
 
porarles, since the best of them came to follow 
 it, and its influence is still discernible in the 
 common current of our printed matter today. 
 I say that his style in typography was a per- 
 fect expression of his own epoch, like any 
 art of consequence; but like all artists of any 
 consequence, he was inspired by the beautiful 
 traditions of the past, and his art was an 
 orderly development out of these. He did not 
 seek consciously to express his own individu- 
 ality; happily, it was ample to express itself. 
 But it is certain that he introduced into the 
 forms of printing types a decidedly new and 
 characteristic style, which our eyes are so 
 familiar with at the present time, in all of 
 those types which we know as ' ' modern face , " 
 that it is at first a little dilTicult to see that it 
 was so. And now, for the reason that his 
 style, or whatever you prefer to call it, was 
 so closely related to the thought and feeling 
 of his time and sprang out of it, it seems to 
 me indispensable that we consider, at least 
 briefly, what was the artistic constitution of 
 this period at the end of the eighteenth and 
 the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
 
The art of the middle of the eighteenth 
 century, which but a few years ago was always 
 referred to as wholly frivolous (though I can't 
 think of any more serious task than to do it 
 as beautifully as most of it was done), had 
 certainly indulged in excesses of brilliance 
 which left something in the state of the public 
 mind akin to the purely private feeling of 
 having eaten too much cake, with a consequent 
 revival of interest in humbler and simpler 
 nourishment. What followed in the history 
 of art was certainly dry and unpalatable in 
 some of its chief characteristics. 
 
 The discovery of the buried cities of Her- 
 culaneum and Pompeii had helped to fire 
 throughout Europe an immense enthusiasm 
 for classical antiquity and art. But with all 
 the inspiration that was liberated by the open- 
 ing of these sepulchres there was mingled 
 something like a wave of cold, dead air, which 
 had the effect of nearly asphyxiating artistic 
 progress altogether . There was Winckelmann , 
 who wrote volumes on classical sculpture and 
 tried to establish a system upon which the 
 Greeks had arrived at perfection of form ; and 
 
 17 
 
there was Raphael Mengs, the painter and 
 writer on art, who had worked out a theory 
 to combine the form of Greek sculpture, the 
 expression of Raphael, the colour of Titian, 
 and the light and shade of Correggio. Mengs 
 was a pretty poor painter himself, despite the 
 fact that Bodoni, in a letter, calls him the 
 "Apelles of Our Time," and says thatTiepolo 
 (one of the best painters that ever lived) 
 wasn't fit to serve him at table. 
 
 All this produced a return to classical forms , 
 if not to classical feeling. Everyone affected 
 to talk in high-flown terms of purity of form, 
 divine harmony, etc., and quoted on all oc- 
 casions from the Greek and Latin authors. 
 
 Bodoni never writes to a friend in Rome 
 and calls it Rome. He always says, "I hope 
 soon to join you on the banks of the Tiber," 
 and he always calls Madrid ' ' the banks of the 
 Tagus." Many of his books bear the imprint 
 "Grisopoli" instead of Parma, which is some- 
 what confusing until one learns that this was 
 the legendary name given to Parma during 
 the brief domination of the Greeks in the 
 sixth century. This was the taste of the time 
 
which produced the sculptures of Canova, and 
 the paintings of the school of David, which 
 have been aptly styled "tinted bas-reliefs," 
 and also the types of Bodoni. It was a period 
 of rather pompous affectations, which amuse 
 us a little today and give scope to that facile 
 faculty of negative criticism which is one of 
 the best developed and least effective accom- 
 plishments of which our time can boast. 
 
 If this pseudo-classical school of art has a 
 faded and artificial air in our sophisticated 
 eyes, it is not safe to assume, on the other 
 hand, that any of those men who attained 
 eminence in it were not sincere, and least of 
 all that our friend Bodoni was not. One can- 
 not read the record of his activities and see 
 listed the great volume of his productions in 
 the " Life" written by De Lama, one cannot 
 contemplate the almost superhuman labour 
 of cutting all those types in the "Manuale," 
 or read what he has to say in the preface of 
 that book, or in his letters, on the subject 
 of his work, and fail to realize that he was 
 a man profoundly and passionately devoted 
 to his art. 
 
 19 
 
We have considered, in a very rough 
 fashion, what was the intellectual basis of 
 his peculiar type designs and style of compo- 
 sition; but we must remember that he did 
 not start out with this characteristic style 
 full blown; and though it was, as I have 
 said, the expression of his epoch and grew 
 out of it, Bodoni, of course, was no more 
 conscious of the special flavour of that epoch 
 than we are of ours. We must look to the 
 practical basis of his work as it appeared to 
 him in order to arrive at any understanding 
 of it. 
 
 When he established himself in the Parma 
 Press he had to have an outfit of types ; for 
 up to that time his own efforts at type cutting 
 were hardly successful enough for so impor- 
 tant an undertaking. After due consideration 
 of the types of the principal founders of the 
 time, he judged those of the French founder, 
 Fournier, to be the best, and accordingly he 
 ordered six different sizes of Fournier' s types 
 from Paris. With these he printed the first 
 six items issued from the Ducal Press under 
 his direction. But he was not content to 
 
rest upon the sufficiently honourable title of 
 printer to the Duke of Parma, and his genius 
 asserts itself here in his desire for perfection. 
 He must improve on Fournier's types, much 
 as he evidently admired them ; and very soon 
 after his settlement at Parma he established 
 a foundry of his own and took his brother 
 Joseph in to manage it. He set to work cut- 
 ting his punches, and in 1771 he brought 
 out his first specimen book of borders and 
 capitals, which was distributed gratis, as a 
 sort of advertisement for the press. There 
 are only a few types in this, but an extrava- 
 gant profusion of ornaments. It is interesting 
 to see in this first specimen how completely 
 he was under the French influence ; for in 
 this book he copies outright the elaborately 
 framed title-pages of Fournier's "Manuel," 
 constructed entirely from moveable type or- 
 naments and borders. It is difficult to dis- 
 cover the very minute differences which exist 
 between these first types of Bodoni and those 
 by which they were inspired. For a con- 
 siderable time after this he continues to show 
 a fondness for the baroque character of the 
 
French work, and uses ornaments in great 
 number and with great ingenuity, if not 
 always with the best taste. 
 
 There is little in this early work which is 
 above the average of the time, and certainly 
 nothing to foretell the severity and elegance 
 of his full-fledged style. He went on relining 
 and improving on Fournier's designs, which 
 were good sound models in their way, working 
 step by step in his own peculiar direction 
 toward what amounted finally to a complete 
 innovation in the forms of Roman characters, 
 and brought about a radical change in the 
 style and arrangement of printed matter 
 generally. 
 
 Now by way of explanation of just what 
 that innovation was and what w ere the pecul- 
 iarities of his design, we cannot do better 
 than quote from the preface of his ' ' Manuale " 
 where he states some of his theories on the 
 subject. He says : " It is proper here to ofi'er 
 the four diff'erent heads under which it seems 
 to me are derived the beauties of type, and 
 the first of these is regularity — conformity 
 without ambiguity, variety without disso- 
 
nance, and equality and symmetry without 
 confusion. A second and not minor value is 
 to be gained from sharpness of definition, 
 neatness, and finish. From the perfection of 
 the punches in the beginning comes the polish 
 of the well-cast letter which should shine like 
 a mirror on its face." His next point is that 
 of taste, and here he speaks of ' ' The beautiful 
 contrast as between light and shade which 
 comes naturally from any writing done with 
 a well-cut pen held properly in the hand." 
 It must be admitted that most of this state- 
 ment is fuller of redundancy than of meaning; 
 but this latter sentence about ' ' light and 
 shade " and the natural effect of writing with 
 a pen is illuminating in the highest degree 
 and. explains more clearly than anything else 
 he has to say the aim and tendency of his 
 type design. In order to achieve this "light 
 and shade" he made his thin strokes thinner 
 and the thick ones thicker than they had ever 
 been made in Roman types before, and he 
 cut them with a sharpness and regularity 
 which had never up to that time been equalled. 
 He speaks of the natural effect of their being 
 
written with a well-cut pen, and I presume 
 you are all more or less familiar with the 
 kind of pen he refers to here — the quill or 
 reed, cut something in the form of a little 
 chisel, its mechanical action rendering a broad 
 line when it is drawn down or up in the direc- 
 tion of the broad face of the nib, and a thin 
 line when it is drawn crossways on the thin 
 edge. The design of all good types was, of 
 course, based on this action of the pen in 
 WTiting, and the very forms of the letters 
 themselves, as well as the living quality of 
 their design, have their origin in it. It seems 
 hardly necessary to state this principle since, 
 with the exception of our typefounders, almost 
 everyone is familiar w ith it. But what Bodoni 
 did w\is to consider his designs as being made 
 with a broader and sharper-edged pen than 
 anyone had thoughtofbefore, or than, I doubt, 
 anyone would be able to make. If we have 
 any fault to find with him, it is here, for in 
 striving for neatness and sharpness and greater 
 contrast he overstepped the mark a little and 
 gave to his letters something more of the char- 
 acter of copperplate engraving than of penman- 
 
ship. Another change which he introduced 
 into the forms of his Roman letters was in 
 the serifs. In the old-style types, and in the 
 classical Roman forms generally, the serifs did 
 not form a sharp angle with the upright strokes 
 of the letters, but flowed into them on more 
 or less of a curve. The serifs of the lowercase 
 letters you will remember, in the earlier types, 
 do not form a right angle with the upright 
 strokes, but rather an acute one. Bodoni re- 
 duced the serifs of his capitals to single sharp 
 lines of the same weight as the thin strokes of 
 the letters, and the serifs of his lowercase are 
 raised to a nearly, if not quite, horizontal posi- 
 tion at right angles with the upright strokes. 
 This plays an important part in that sharpness 
 and brilliance which he tells us he sought, 
 and tends to produce an efiTect of rigidity in 
 keeping with the coldly classical ideal by which 
 he was governed. While his own types were 
 never really mechanical and lifeless, they often 
 had sufficient appearance of being so to lend 
 encouragement to a tendency which ended in 
 the complete destruction of this vital principle 
 of the pen and produced the worst and most 
 
 -o-<^ 25 ^0- 
 
artiGcial types which have ever been known. 
 It is the well-merited repugnance for these 
 which has brought, unjustly, I think, disfavour 
 upon Bodoni. He should hardly be held re- 
 sponsible for the exaggerations and miscon- 
 ceptions of his aims. The Didots in France 
 carried the idea a step further, but they printed 
 with such perfect taste and style that one is 
 inclined to excuse them on these grounds. He 
 offers, farther on in his preface, his system 
 of measurement for the proportions of his 
 lowercase letters, "Divide the body of the 
 type into seven parts," he says, "and let two 
 at the top and two at the bottom be for the 
 ascenders and descenders and the three in the 
 middle for the other letters." Any such at- 
 tempt to regulate design by mathematical rule 
 is bad, of course, and Bodoni himself admits 
 that ' ' these proportions should receive no law 
 but from what pleases the vision." I am not 
 sure, however, that such a rule would not do 
 much for type design ; it might at least put 
 an end to the practice of typefounders who 
 try to crowd their faces on bodies too small 
 for them, ruthlessly chopping off the de- 
 
scenders of the letters wherever they interfere 
 with this procedure. 
 
 Bodoni's Italic letters, while thej have in 
 some instances a good deal of distinction, are 
 generally less successful than the Romans, and 
 nearly always have the weakening effect of too 
 much slant. 
 
 The equipment of type faces which are 
 shown in the "Manuale" as representing the 
 sum of his achievements is bewildering in the 
 range of sizes and in the variety of foreign 
 and exotic characters. Arthur Young, the cel- 
 ebrated English economist, gives an account 
 in one of the journals of his "Travels" of a 
 visit to Bodoniin 1789 in which he says that 
 he had 3o,ooo matrices at that time. In her 
 introduction to the ' ' Manuale," the widow of 
 Bodoni tells us that he believed a thoroughly 
 equipped establishment should be furnished 
 with such a gradation of characters that the 
 eye in passing from one to the other might 
 hardly be able to perceive the difference. The 
 sizes of the Romans run from what he calls 
 " Parmigianina," which would correspond 
 about to our 3}/2 or ^ point, up to " Papale," 
 
which would certainly require a body of at 
 least eighty points of our measurement, and 
 it is very hard to distinguish any size from 
 that immediately preceding or following it. 
 Not only were there all these sizes, but there 
 were two kinds of faces of every size; one 
 fully rounded and of strongly contrasted lines 
 and one a little condensed and of less bold 
 character, the former being generally intended 
 for prose and the latter for poetry where it 
 was desired to avoid breaking the hues. 
 
 "1 have devised up to the present," he 
 says, "one hundred and forty-two Roman 
 characters, each with Italics and capitals, and 
 seventeen scripts of which thirteen have their 
 respective Finanziere,'' which was the name 
 given to a more elaborate and florid form of 
 the same letter, "and seven English com- 
 prising two round characters, and further 
 several Russian, Greek, German, Hebrew, 
 and other exotics; also a quantity of capitals 
 for titles in Latin, Greek, and Russian. All 
 of these I have had cast in matrices struck 
 from punches entirely perfected with great 
 love by my own hand." He goes on to tell 
 
us that a single font, complete with Roman 
 and Italics, required some three hundred and 
 eighty punches. 
 
 The question of his having cut all the 
 punches with his own hand gave rise to some 
 bitter disputes in the years when he was at 
 the height of his fame, and certainly the 
 number of them seems a little incredible. 
 Fournier's "Treatise on Printing," published 
 in 1758, says that it took at that time three 
 or four hours to cut a punch, and that not 
 more than three or four could be cut in a day. 
 We know, however, that he had assistants 
 to whom he taught punch-cutting and type- 
 founding, the brothers Amoretti (who after- 
 ward established a foundry of their own), 
 and two other men; and it was claimed by 
 certain persons who wished to detract from 
 his fame that he owed the beauty of his types 
 to these workmen. We know, nevertheless, 
 that the style and manner is his own invention, 
 and the probabilities are that the assistants 
 merely helped him in the manual labour of 
 finishing the punches and matrices. I have 
 examined a specimen book of types and bor- 
 
ders issued in 1 8 1 1 from the foundry of these 
 brothers Amoretti at San Pancrazio, a small 
 town near Parma, and while they are me- 
 chanically very well cut, there can be little 
 question that they lack the grace of design of 
 the Bodoni characters. 
 
 Besides all these types, Bodoni cut an as- 
 tonishing number of borders and ornaments 
 which, in the best work of his later years, he 
 seldom used. "It is not," he says, "a wise 
 way in which to lend pomp or dignity to a 
 book except, perhaps, to those books less 
 valued by men of letters, and which are printed 
 for the pleasure of persons of an elegance less 
 disdainful." Yet in some of the inscriptions 
 and smaller work where he made use of the 
 ornaments the effect is altogether charming. 
 It is interesting to note how these ornaments 
 developed from the rococo French manner 
 into a dryer and more classical form, much 
 as did the types themselves. 
 
 The striking characteristic of his com[)o- 
 sltion is the luxurious and sometimes prodigal 
 use which he made of space. His titles were 
 generally narrow in measure and were ar- 
 
rangements of short, centered lines in various 
 sizes, and nearly always of capitals. His text 
 pages present a striking contrast to those of 
 the masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
 turies. In place of the compactness in the 
 solid matter without leading, and the large 
 pages of small type which prevailed in the 
 earlier books, Bodoni endeavoured to set off 
 his brilliant characters on great fields of white 
 paper, and not only to have space in the 
 margins, but also between the lines, showing 
 a decided predilection for setting large types 
 in narrow measures. This love of space pro- 
 duced a striking elegance of effect — not the 
 elegance of the earlier printers certainly, but 
 in its own way very splendid. When space 
 got in between the lowercase letters them- 
 selves it did more harm than good, and some 
 of the small sizes of the Roman types are so 
 widely fitted on their bodies that the pages 
 printed with them have a distressing appear- 
 ance of having been sprayed with type. In 
 the arrangement of the capitals in titles and 
 headings, and in the innumerable inscriptions 
 which were issued from the press, he showed 
 
 3i 
 
a remarkable nicety of taste and fine sense of 
 balance. And the exercise of this faculty was 
 no mere matter of blind instinct or special 
 gift, but required on Bodoni's part the same 
 study that it requires of us today in the 
 lamentably few instances where we find it 
 employed. There is an amusing anecdote 
 which bears out this fact in one of Sten- 
 dahl's journals of his Italian travels which I 
 think is worth giving entire: "To do my 
 duty as a traveler," he says, "I presented 
 myself at Monsieur Bodoni's, the celebrated 
 printer. I was agreeably surprised. This 
 Piedmontais is not at all ostentatious, but in 
 love with his art. After having shown me 
 all his French authors he demanded of me 
 which I preferred, the "Tclemaque" of Fene- 
 lon, the Racine, or the Boilcau. I vowed they 
 all seemed equally beautiful. 'Ah, Monsieur! ' 
 cried Bodoni, 'you don't see the title of the 
 Boileau?' I looked at it for a long time and 
 was forced to admit that I could not see any- 
 thing more perfect in that title than in the 
 others. 'Ah, Monsieur 1 ' cried Bodoni again, 
 'Boileau Despreux in one single line of capitals! 
 
I spent six months before I could decide upon 
 exactly that type.' " 
 
 But if we have any ground for complaint 
 against the mannerisms of his types or can 
 find his composition questionable at any point, 
 there is little to be said but praise for his 
 presswork at its best. Good presswork, it 
 must be remembered, was not easy in those 
 days as the presses were comparatively crude 
 affairs and the inking had to be done with 
 the old hand balls of leather stuffed with wool 
 (rollers not coming into use until about 1820), 
 but the sharpness and brilliance of Bodoni's 
 best work have never been surpassed. 
 
 Its success in a great measure was due to 
 his selection of papers for the different sizes 
 of type. He preferred vellum to anything 
 else, and of his more important editions a 
 few copies were always made on it, generally 
 for presentation to distinguished patrons. 
 When it came to paper, he preferred what 
 was then called vellum paper, and which 
 was made on a woven wire screen invented 
 in England. The paper thus obtained re- 
 sembled vellum a good deal more than did 
 
the papers made on the laid screens which 
 were commonly in use at that time. He had 
 a way, too, of rolling his sheets after they 
 were printed to smooth out the excess of im- 
 pression left by the forms, though he himself 
 expressly warns against the abuse of this 
 process, which may easily be made to destroy 
 entirely the impression which is the life and 
 soul of all really fine typographic printing. 
 Another trick was to paint in with the brush 
 the spots on the large letters which did not 
 come off from the impression entirely black. 
 He must have given considerable attention to 
 the making of good black ink, because pre- 
 vious to his time it had grown very bad, and 
 he set a new standard for his contemporaries 
 to follow in this. 
 
 In the form and size of his books he showed 
 a decided liking for grandeur and pomp. In 
 his preface he discourses somewhat ingenu- 
 ously on this subject, and advances the curious 
 theory that large books are better for the eyes 
 of far-sighted people and little ones for the 
 near-sighted. He must have thought Napoleon 
 very far-sighted indeed, for he printed a three- 
 
volume edition of Homer's Iliad, especially 
 dedicated to him, in a folio so large that only 
 half a page could be printed at one time on 
 his largest press. He presented the Emperor 
 with a copy on selected Bavarian vellum which 
 miust certainly have been very fine. 
 
 Do Lama's catalogue, which forms the sec- 
 ond volume of ' ' The Life," cites and describes 
 about three hundred and forty-five books 
 printed by him at Parma, not counting second 
 editions of his works, and one hundred and 
 fifty-five inscriptions, pamphlets, and other 
 matter of less than eight pages. But in the 
 other catalogues of some of the collections 
 of his works appear numerous items which 
 are not cited by De Lama. The matter is 
 further complicated by the existence of other 
 volumes bearing plainly enough the imprint 
 of the Royal Press at Parma, but not cited 
 in any of the catalogues I have seen. They 
 are so badly printed and in such a different 
 manner from Bodoni's that it is difficult to 
 believe they are genuine. In i yyB he brought 
 out the first of his editions on a grand scale, 
 and one of the most sumptuous of any of the 
 
books he ever printed — an Epithalaniium in 
 several exotic languages. But its splendour 
 rests largely upon the number of beautiful 
 copperplate ornaments which it contains. In 
 1780 appeared the works of Raphael Mengs 
 who had died the year before, and who was, 
 as we have seen, one of the leading spirits in 
 the artistic thought of the time and a great 
 hero of Bodoni's. In 1782 Bodoni published 
 another series of specimens — this time of 
 Russian characters, on forty-four pages. It 
 contained inscriptions in Latin and Russian 
 of congratulations to be presented to the 
 Russian prince and princess on their passage 
 through Parma. De Lama sa} s : " He offered 
 them respectfully and was delighted to see 
 the pleasure shown in their faces on seeing 
 the characters of their native language so fa- 
 mously cut and printed in a strange country." 
 In 1783 a Roman Breviary was published 
 which is printed throughout in red and black 
 in four little 12 mo volumes. This is chiefly 
 interesting because of the number of copies 
 which were made and sold — two thousand 
 of them, undoubtedly a considerable tax on 
 
the pressroom of an establishment accustomed 
 to printing from five to five hundred copies. 
 In 1784 came another book which is remark- 
 able for its engraved decorations, ' ' The Prose 
 and Verse in Honour of Livia Doria GarafFa," 
 in which the typography and presswork are 
 up to the mark of his finest productions. A 
 still more sumptuous reprint of this was made 
 in 1793. In 1785 he published his letter to 
 the Marquis de Gubieres in French and Italian, 
 written in defence of his types that had been 
 criticised in France. He attacks his critics 
 with ill-disguised annoyance, particularly over 
 the criticism of his Greek types, which he here 
 says were exact copies of those of Etienne, 
 the famous French scholar printer of the six- 
 teenth century. When he comes to the doubts 
 which had been expressed in some quarters 
 of his having made all the foreign types him- 
 self, he quite loses his temper and offers to 
 deposit all the punches and matrices of the 
 types in question in any safe place, supposing 
 that the doubting Thomases had no occasion 
 to come to Parma and verify the fact on the 
 spot. It was this publication which brought 
 
him the following letter from America, which, 
 I think, is worth reading: 
 
 Sir : I have had the ver^- great pleasure of receiving your 
 excellent " Essai dcs Charact^res de L'Imprimerie." It is one of 
 the most beautiful that art has hitherto produced. I should be 
 glad to see a specimen of your other fonts besides this Italic and 
 Roman of the letter to the Marquis de Gubieres, and to be in- 
 formed of the price of each kind. I do not presume to criticise 
 your Italic capitals — they are generally perfect. I would only 
 beg leave to say that to me the form of the " t" in the word lettie 
 of the title-page seems preferable to that of (he "t" in the word 
 typograp}iie in the next page. As the dow u\\ ard stroke of T, P, 
 R, F, B, D, H, K, L, I, and some others, which in writing we 
 begin at the top, naturally swells as the pen descends, and it is 
 only in the "A" and the "M" and-"N" that those strokes are 
 fine because the pen begins them at the bottom. With great 
 esteem, I have the honour to be, etc. 
 
 B. FRANKLIN. 
 
 De Lama naively says that Bodoni was filled 
 with joy at receiving this honourahle letter 
 from the " President of the United States 
 of America"! 
 
 In 1788 appeared the first "Manuale," so 
 called, in 36o pages, which contained a range 
 of one hundred Roman characters, each size 
 printed on one side of the paper and forming 
 a description of a city. The names of the 
 cities, which are appended to each face of type 
 in the final "Manuale" of 1818, are intended 
 to identify it with this earlier work. 
 
 ^^_38_^.c 
 
Up to this time the books issued were prac- 
 tically all undertaken either at the instigation 
 of the Duke or on Bodoni's own initiative ; 
 that is to say, the press did not execute 
 outside orders. But his friend and patron, 
 Gavaliere d'Azare, who was then Spanish 
 minister to Rome, had obtained permission 
 to establish a press at the Embassy, and he 
 wanted Bodoni to come and take charge of 
 it and print some splendid editions of the 
 classics. Duke Ferdinand would not listen 
 for a moment to parting with his printer, but 
 suggested that the proposed classics could be 
 done just as well at Parma. Bodoni began 
 at once on this Jiasis, and every week sent 
 his proofs to Rome to be gone over by eminent 
 scholars. In order to facilitate the execution 
 of these orders from Rome he set up presses 
 of his own in the Ducal Palace, and in 1791 
 brought out the first fruits of this arrange- 
 ment in a large folio edition of Horace. This 
 year begins a new period in the aJBTairs of the 
 Parma Press and marks the transition from 
 his tentative and experimental stage to the 
 fully developed and severer taste on which 
 
his fame rests. He continued to receive orders 
 from patrons in all parts of Europe, and even 
 from England, where Edwards, the London 
 bookseller, commissioned him to print an 
 edition of Horace Walpole's "Castle of 
 Otranto." 
 
 In this year also, at the age of fifty-one, 
 he married a Parmesan lady to whom he had 
 long been devoted and who proved to be a 
 very happy choice. She showed not only 
 great devotion throughout the remainder of 
 his life, but a good deal of ability as well; 
 for it was she who finished the printing and 
 publication of his "Manuale" and carried 
 out the editions of the French classics which 
 he had planned and started before his death. 
 
 Bodoni had for some time held the title 
 of Printer to the King of Spain, though I do 
 not find that he ever printed anything for him; 
 but notwithstanding, in 1798 his Catholic 
 Majesty granted him a pension of 6,000 reals 
 a year with no obligations whatsoever. With 
 this impetus the year 1798 became a very 
 productive one, and among the editions which 
 we can find time to note here was the Gray's 
 
"Elegy" translated into Italian, and later 
 Graj's "Complete Poems" in English, and 
 the edition of \irgil in two volumes. This 
 latter work brought down the stinging criti- 
 cism of the French printer and publisher, 
 Firman Didot, on the score of its inaccuracy, 
 and it must have been no pleasant sensation 
 for poor old Bodoni to read Didot' s letter to 
 a friend in which he picks out the errors in 
 this and some of his Greek classics and says: 
 " It is time, citizen, that men of letters united 
 against negligent printers who think to have 
 done all when they have employed fine char- 
 acters and fine paper, and who regard the 
 correction of text as a mere bagatelle." But 
 he continues: "As a scholar I condemn him, 
 as a printer I admire him. ' Bodoni tried to 
 explain these errors by sapng that some im- 
 perfect copies had been stolen from his press 
 and sold and thus got into France. We are 
 forced to admit, however, that there must 
 have been some foundation for this charge of 
 inaccuracy since it was frequently repeated. 
 Horace Walpole wrote in the postscript of one 
 of his letters dated from Strawberry Hill, 
 
December 20, 1790: "Very late at night. 
 I am glad you did not get a Parmesan 
 Otranto — a copy is come so full of faults tliat 
 it is not fit to be sold here," But this Avas 
 written in 1790 and the Otranto was not 
 published until 1791, so it might be fair to 
 assume that what the elegant and gouty Lord 
 Orford saw was an advance copy which may 
 have been corrected afterward. 
 
 Time will not permit us to consider any 
 more of his editions, except, perhaps, to men- 
 tion a Lord's Prayer in no fewer than one 
 hundred and fifty-five languages done in 1 806 , 
 the title-page of which is in many respects 
 the finest flower of the Bodoni style and 
 seems to have been admired by himself since 
 he copied its general characteristics for the 
 title of his own "Manuale." The celebrated 
 "Homer" already mentioned came out in 
 1808, and in his last year the "Racine" in 
 three volumes — the first of a series of French 
 classics which he had long had under way. 
 
 In his later years Bodoni was very deaf and 
 suffered a good deal from other physical in- 
 firmities, as well as from the assaults of critics 
 
 4a 
 
and persons jealous of his fame. But to offset 
 these he was more overwhelmed with praise 
 and honours than any printer, I believe, ever 
 was before or since. There was hardly a per- 
 son of distinction in Europe at that time who 
 had not visited his press. In 1802 the city of 
 Parma had a medal struck in his honour, and 
 there is a book issued from his press describing 
 this occasion. He was invited to send proofs 
 of his work to the Paris Exposition of 1806, 
 the jury of which awarded him the gold medal 
 over his French competitors . In 1 8 1 o , Parma 
 then being a part of the French Empire, Na- 
 poleon offered him a pension of 3, 000 francs, 
 and in 1 8 1 o also he was given the decoration 
 of the Order of the Two Sicilies by the King 
 of Naples in acknowledgment of a complete 
 collection of his works which he had sent to 
 that monarch. There were other like honours 
 showered upon him in the bombastic manner 
 of the period — so many that it would be tire- 
 some to name them all. I will mention only 
 one more which was less formal, but which 
 must have meant much to the old man, who, 
 when he was confined to his bed a year before 
 
his death, was visited by the Gomte St.ValHer. 
 With characteristic grace and simplicity the 
 Frenchman approached his bedside and said: 
 " M. Bodoni, I come to render homage to the 
 genius of typography. You are very well known 
 in France. The Emperor esteems and likes 
 you, and it is he who has ordered me to make 
 this visit. Another day I will make my own. " 
 Bodoni showed such appreciation of this and 
 expressed himself in such a lively manner that 
 the Count further remarked: "M. Bodoni, if 
 you have so much fire being sick, \\'hat will 
 you be when you are well again?" 
 
 Bodoni never really got well again, but 
 struggled to his feet only long enough to 
 do some work on the "Manuale," without 
 hope, however, of being able to publish it 
 himself. He died toward the end of Novem- 
 ber, i8i3. 
 
 Of Bodoni s personality, as I said at the 
 outset, one does not gather an entirely satis- 
 factory image from the biography by De Lama. 
 Nevertheless, it is possible to dislodge from 
 that monumental pile of human and super- 
 human virtues enough minor circumstances 
 
with which, aided by the accounts of some of 
 his distinguished visitors and critics and the 
 few excellent portraits which exist, to construct 
 a figure of attractive proportions. The over- 
 flowing vigour, of which his labours them- 
 selves are sufficient evidence, was tempered 
 by North-Italian firmness of character. Of a 
 lively temper and a sprightly good humour 
 as well, he nevertheless had the perseverance 
 and the steadfastness of purpose that generally 
 are associated with characters of more sober 
 mien. He appears to have been generous, 
 and vain in the highest degree, but with the 
 simple , unconscious , and whole-hearted vanity 
 of the Latin temperament. He bathed freely 
 and joyously in the honours which were show- 
 ered upon him, and no doubt toadied not a 
 little to the favour of the great persons from 
 whom these distinctions flowed , but one should 
 bear in mind that it would have been next to 
 impossible, at that time, to have developed 
 and maintained such an enterprise on any 
 other terms. 
 
 In 1818 his widow published the final 
 edition of the "Manuale" which contains 
 
 45 
 
specimens of all of his types and ornaments, 
 but as you will have an opportunity to see 
 this and examine it for yourselves I shall not 
 tax you with a further description of it. 
 
 In 1872 a statue of Bodoni was erected at 
 Saluzzo, and on this occasion an exhibition 
 was held by the United Typographical Societies 
 of Italy to which American printers were in- 
 vited to contribute. This year the anniversary 
 of his death is to be celebrated by the different 
 printing organizations of Italy. 
 
 We have seen with what esteem he was 
 held in his own day, how much he was ad- 
 mired, and how greatly his works were prized, 
 and the influence he had upon the other 
 printers of the period, some of whom, the 
 Didots, Firman, and Pierre, I am inclined 
 to think, surpassed him in many respects in 
 his own manner. 
 
 It only remains to consider the position he 
 occupies in the History of the Art of Typog- 
 raphy from the viewpoint of our own day. 
 In a paper read at the Sorboiiiio in 1900, 
 Piero Barbera said of him that though ho had 
 a great idea of the perfection of printing from 
 
the artistic point of view, and had high esteem 
 for the dignity of the art, he lacked perhaps 
 that of the influence it must have upon society 
 — he had not the clear vision of its ultimate 
 evolution. He was a kind of court officer, 
 like a "first gentleman of the bedchamber," 
 or any other. His was, in short, a wholly 
 aristocratic art. Mr. Alfred Pollard, in his 
 work entitled "Fine Books," which is one 
 of the more important recent publications 
 upon the history of printing, dismisses Bodoni 
 with scant courtesy as a mere follower of 
 Baskerville and a printer of books very good 
 in their way, but in quite a wrong way. But 
 Mr. Pollard's work, scholarly and replete as 
 it is with an intimate knowledge of his subject, 
 is written in what might be called the British 
 perspective method of criticism. That is to 
 say, the critic stands in the middle of England 
 and views his subjects in diminishing per- 
 spective in all directions, his estimation de- 
 creasing as the geographical location of the 
 object viewed recedes from the British Isles. 
 Baskerville is in the immediate foreground, — 
 he is on the Island , — life size , and Bodoni over 
 
in Parma, off on the horizon, is scarcely visible 
 to the naked Enghsh eye. 
 
 And then by the critic so disposed, it may 
 very well be argued that Bodoni represents 
 an epoch of affectations and a school founded 
 upon false conceptions. But if we grant all 
 this, may we not be tempted as well to inquire 
 with the same rigour into the quality and value 
 of the inspiration by which recent English , and 
 to a great extent American, "revivals" of the 
 art of printing have been set on foot? To the 
 powerful personality and uncompromising 
 craftsmanship of WiUiam Morris we certainly 
 owe much of the interest of our own particular 
 day in printing as a fine art, and his teachings, 
 more than any others, have dominated most 
 of the attempts at fine bookmaking in England 
 for some years past. His masterful revivals 
 of fifteenth-century printing are certainly 
 beautiful objects of art in themselves, and if 
 they possess any fault, it is only that they are 
 nearly, if not quite, impossible to read. They 
 were printed in characters modeled after those 
 of an age in which he did not live — they 
 attempted, through an inspiration largely 
 
founded upon sentiment, to bring back a 
 manner irrevocably gone by. Was this an 
 affectation better or worse, or only as bad as 
 that under which Bodoni laboured? 
 
 The interest which Morris aroused has cer- 
 tainly done much good, but one cannot help 
 feeling that the style he created has rather 
 hindered than helped the present-day printer 
 in the advancement of his art. It has given 
 rise to a curious notion that any art in printing 
 has inevitably something to do with the style 
 of the fifteenth century and is hence not 
 appropriate for the demands of every-day 
 work, but should be exercised only on ex- 
 pensive and rare occasions. In consequence, 
 we find printing generally conceived as of 
 two distinct kinds — "commercial" and 
 ' ' artistic." In reality the two kinds of print- 
 ing which exist and always have existed are 
 good printing and bad printing , and any piece 
 of work, no matter what its purpose, if it be 
 well and appropriately done, is artistic, if it 
 be paid for, is commercial. 
 
 Bodoni, whose name is anathema to the 
 more ardent followers of the Morris school, 
 
made improvements and infused new life 
 into what was current in his day. What 
 mannerisms he had were of his own time 
 and did not interfere with the utiHty of his 
 work — he made printing more readable and 
 not less so. 
 
 •^-^"i;^- 
 
173 78 1