Hieronimo Squarciafico was a 15th-century Venetian editor, who worked for the Italian humanist and printer Aldus Manutius, the founder of the Aldine Press at Venice. [1] [2] Squarciafico is best known for bemoaning the printing press in an aphorism that reads as a pithy summation of his contemporaries' concerns over the spread of printed works: "Abundance of books makes men less studious". [3] Initially, in 1477, he wrote enthusiastically about the works he was engaged in having printed. [4] Yet, a few years later, in 1481, Squarciafico appeared to hold a more skeptical view when he imagined a discussion between the spirits of the great authors of the past being held in the Elysian Fields in which some of them lauded the craft of printing; while others complained that "printing had fallen into the hands of unlettered men, who corrupted almost everything"; [4] and yet still others lamented that "their works would perish if they were not printed, since this art compels all writers to give way to it". [5]
Squarciafico remains relevant today in criticisms of modern electronic culture; [3] he has, in recent times, been quoted by theologian Walter J. Ong and technology critic Nicholas G. Carr, among others. [6] [7]
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The Aldine Press was the printing office started by Aldus Manutius in 1494 in Venice, from which were issued the celebrated Aldine editions of the classics. The first book that was dated and printed under his name appeared in 1495.
Aldus Corporation was a software company that developed desktop publishing (DTP) software. It is known for developing PageMaker, an early product in the desktop publishing field. The company is named after 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, and was founded by Jeremy Jaech, Mark Sundstrom, Mike Templeman, Dave Walter, and chairman Paul Brainerd. Aldus Corporation was based in Seattle, Washington.
Aldus Pius Manutius was an Italian humanist, scholar, educator, and the founder of the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preservation of Greek manuscripts mark him as an innovative publisher of his age dedicated to the editions he produced. His enchiridia, small portable books, revolutionized personal reading and are the predecessor of the modern paperback.
In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, italics normally slant slightly to the right. Italics are a way to emphasise key points in a printed text, to identify many types of creative works, to cite foreign words or phrases, or, when quoting a speaker, a way to show which words they stressed. One manual of English usage described italics as "the print equivalent of underlining"; in other words, underscore in a manuscript directs a typesetter to use italic.
Octavo, a Latin word meaning "in eighth" or "for the eighth time", is a technical term describing the format of a book, which refers to the size of leaves produced from folding a full sheet of paper on which multiple pages of text were printed to form the individual sections of a book. An octavo is a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets on which 16 pages of text were printed, which were then folded three times to produce eight leaves. Each leaf of an octavo book thus represents one eighth the size of the original sheet. Other common book formats are folios and quartos. Octavo is also used as a general description of the size of books that are about 8 to 10 inches tall, and as such does not necessarily indicate the actual printing format of the books, which may even be unknown as is the case for many modern books. These terms are discussed in greater detail in book sizes.
Nicholas Jenson was a French engraver, pioneer, printer and type designer who carried out most of his work in Venice, Italy. Jenson acted as Master of the French Royal Mint at Tours, and is credited with being the creator of one of the finest early Roman type faces. Nicholas Jenson has been something of an iconic figure among students of early printing since the nineteenth century when the aesthete William Morris praised the beauty and perfection of his roman font. Jenson is an important figure in the early history of printing and a pivotal force in the emergence of Venice as one of the first great centers of the printing press.
Alciphron was an ancient Greek sophist, and the most eminent among the Greek epistolographers. Regarding his life or the age in which he lived we possess no direct information whatsoever.
Marcus Musurus was a Greek scholar and philosopher born in Candia, Venetian Crete.
Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1928–1929 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the "old-style" of serif fonts, with its regular or roman style based on a design cut around 1495 by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, sometimes generically called the "Aldine roman". Bembo is named for Manutius's first publication with it, a small 1496 book by the poet and cleric Pietro Bembo. The italic is based on work by Giovanni Antonio Tagliente, a calligrapher who worked as a printer in the 1520s, after the time of Manutius and Griffo.
Hieromonk Makarije is the founder of Serbian and Romanian printing, having printed the first book in Serbian language and the first book in the territory of Walachia.
Print culture embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication. One prominent scholar in the field is Elizabeth Eisenstein, who contrasted print culture, which appeared in Europe in the centuries after the advent of the Western printing-press, to scribal culture. Walter Ong, by contrast, has contrasted written culture, including scribal, to oral culture. Ong is generally considered one of the first scholars to define print culture in contrast to oral culture. These views are related as the printing press brought a vast rise in literacy, so that one of its effects was simply the great expansion of written culture at the expense of oral culture. The development of printing, like the development of writing itself, had profound effects on human societies and knowledge. "Print culture" refers to the cultural products of the printing transformation.
Sebastian Gryphius was a German bookseller-printer and humanist.
Aldus Manutius, the Younger was the grandson of Aldus Manutius and son of Paulus Manutius. He was the last member of the Manuzio family to be active in the Aldine Press that his grandfather founded.
Raphael Regius was a Venetian humanist, who was active first in Padua, where he made a reputation as one of the outstanding Classical scholars, then in Venice, where he moved in the periphery of an elite group composed of a handful of publicly sanctioned scholars, salaried lecturers employed by the Serenissima itself: on the fringes of this elite world also moved the scholar-printer Aldus Manutius.
Paulus Manutius was a Venetian printer with a humanist education, the third son of the famous printer Aldus Manutius and his wife Maria Torresano.
The Soncino family was an Italian Ashkenazik Jewish family of printers, deriving its name from the town of Soncino in the duchy of Milan. It traces its descent through a Moses of Fürth, who is mentioned in 1455, back to a certain Moses of Speyer, of the middle of the 14th century. The first of the family engaged in printing was Israel Nathan b. Samuel, the father of Joshua Moses and the grandfather of Gershon. He set up his Hebrew printing-press in Soncino in the year 1483, and published his first work, the tractate Berakot, February 2, 1484. The press was moved about considerably during its existence. It can be traced at Soncino in 1483–86; Casal Maggiore, 1486; Soncino again, 1488–90; Naples, 1490–92; Brescia, 1491–1494; Barco, 1494–97; Fano, 1503-6; Pesaro, 1507–20 ; Rimini, 1521–26. Members of the family were at Constantinople between 1530 and 1533, and had a branch establishment at Salonica in 1532–33. Their printers' mark was a tower, probably connected in some way with Casal Maggiore.
Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains! is a magazine article by technology writer Nicholas G. Carr, and is highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition. It was published in the July/August 2008 edition of The Atlantic magazine as a six-page cover story. Carr's main argument is that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition that diminish the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not specifically targeted at Google, but more at the cognitive impact of the Internet and World Wide Web. Carr expanded his argument in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a book published by W. W. Norton in June 2010.
Giorgio Interiano was a Genovese traveler, historian and ethnographer. His travelogue La vita: & sito de Zichi, chiamiti ciarcassi: historia notabile was among the first European accounts of the life and customs of the Circassian people.
The Aldine was a monthly arts magazine published in New York in the 1800s.
Italica Press was founded in New York in 1985 by Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto. The press, now in its fourth decade, publishes English translations of works from the Middle Ages and Renaissance and English translations of contemporary Italian literature. It also publishes essays and collected essays in the study of art and history. It specializes in urban studies, medieval pilgrimage, medieval romances and chansons de geste, women writers, fiction, poetry, short stories and plays.