Incunabula Cataloguing Project

In Europe, the new technology of printing with moveable metal type began in the middle of the 15th century, invented by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany. By 1462, printing had spread to Strasbourg, Bamberg and Cologne, as printers who had learned the art in Mainz began to move further afield in search of opportunities.

The first printers we know of outside Germany were Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who brought printing to Italy. Sweynheym was from Mainz and had probably worked with Gutenberg, or with Gutenberg’s former partners Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer. Pannartz appears to have been from Cologne. They moved to Italy, probably after the sack of Mainz in 1462, formed a partnership and sometime around 1464 set up their first printing press in the ancient Benedictine monastery of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco, about 30 miles east of Rome.

Subiaco

In Subiaco, Sweynheym and Pannartz printed four works. The first, a Latin grammar by Donatus, has not survived. The earliest extant book printed in Italy is an undated edition of Cicero’s De oratore (‘On the Orator’), which was printed sometime before the end of September 1465 and was possibly the first classical text printed anywhere (Figure 1).

It was printed in a relatively large format with wide margins. Even at this early stage, Sweynheym and Pannartz had abandoned the gothic blackletter typefaces in use in Germany in favour of a new style of rounded, proto-roman type, which was modelled on the handwriting of contemporary Italian humanists.

The two other works printed in Subiaco were Lactantius’s Opera (‘Works’), which was the first book printed in Italy with a date (29 October 1465) and was also the first book to feature printing in Greek (Figure 2), and St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei (‘The City of God’), which is dated 12 June 1467.

Rome

In 1467 Sweyhneym and Pannartz moved to Rome, where there was a larger and more lucrative (or so they hoped) market for their books. Their patrons, the brothers Pietro and Francesco of the aristocratic Massimo family, gave them the use of the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, behind Piazza Navona, to set up their printing shop. The first book printed in Rome was Cicero’s Epistolae ad familiares (‘Letters to Friends’), dated 1467 (Figure 3).

In Rome they worked prolifically, printing chiefly classical texts and works of the Church Fathers. During the years 1467-1473 they issued forty-eight works, typically in editions of 275 to 300 copies. These included the first editions of, amongst others, Aulus Gellius, Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Strabo and Lucan. Many of these books have a verse colophon in which the printers advertise their names, which reads (translated from the Latin):

          Illustrious reader, whoever you are, who see these books,
          if you would know the names of their craftsmen, read on.
          You will smile at the rough Teutonic surnames:
          perhaps this art the Muses knew not will soften them.
          Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz
          have printed many such books together at Rome.
          Pietro da Massimi and his brother Francis
          have lent a house fitted for the work. 

However, their business was experiencing major problems. There simply were not enough buyers for such a large number of new books and the market was soon flooded. They also faced competition from other printers. Ulrich Han, a native of Vienna and citizen of Ingolstadt, was probably already at work in Rome when Sweynheym and Pannartz arrived. By 1473 at least six other printers had issued books in Rome.

Sweynheym and Pannartz faced a crisis in March 1472. They had run out of money and all of their funds were tied up in a large stock of unbound and unsold books. At the time they were printing a massive five-volume edition of biblical commentary. In the final volume they included an appeal to Pope Sixtus IV asking for financial aid, which lists twenty-eight works printed by them in thirty-seven print runs, and the number of copies made of each. The grand total is given as 12,475 volumes, many of which remained unsold. The expense of printing their current book was so great, it said, that they had nothing left to live on and had to beg for their daily bread (Figure 4).

The appeal was partially successful as the pope granted them a few ecclesiastical benefices in Mainz, though that did not solve the problem of their unsold stock. Sweynheym and Pannartz struggled on but an edition of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in May 1473 was to be their last. Their business was dissolved and they parted company. Afterwards, Sweynheym engraved the copperplate maps for an edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia but died in 1477 shortly before their completion (it was printed in 1478). Pannartz continued printing on his own until his death sometime around 1476.

The John Rylands Library has one of the most complete collections of Sweynheym and Pannartz, lacking only the editions of Aristotle and Perottus of 1473.