The Golden Compasses

The History of the House of Plantin-Moretus

[p. V]

[Deel II]

Preface

Plantin and his descendants were the greatest typographers produced by the Southern Netherlands, the present Belgium, and they rank high among the great international printing families.

This is not meant to imply that they completely dominated the typographical scene in their day. The Manutius family in Italy, the Estiennes and Didots in France, the Blaeus and Elseviers in Holland - quite apart from those who, like Baskerville, Ibarra, and Bodoni, founded no dynasties - also influenced printing in the centuries discussed in this volume, sometimes more profoundly. However, all that remains of these other giants and of the thousands of their lesser contemporaries are the books bearing their names or imprints, and sometimes a few letters and other documents that allow the broad outlines of their lives to be reconstructed, their hopes and ambitions, struggles and disappointments to be traced. Only in the Plantin House (now the Plantin-Moretus Museum) is it possible to see down to the smallest detail how books were made before the Industrial Revolution, at the end of the eighteenth century, ushered in an age of mechanization. Only here can an authentic old press, type-foundry, and proof-readers' room, with their furnishings and tools, be inspected and admired.

The masters of the Golden Compasses preserved their materials and equipment with a devotion that bordered on mania, making it possible for one of the most complete typographical collections in the world to be handed over with the Plantin House in 1876 and entrusted to the care of the city of Antwerp. It is a peerless collection: seven printing presses (including the two earliest examples known); an early eight-

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eenth-century press for copper intaglio printing; some 5,000 punches and 20,000 matrices, cut by the greatest sixteenth-century masters of the craft - a unique treasure in itself; about sixty moulds; roughly ten tons of cast type; a vast amount of composing sticks, galleys, reglets, and other small implements; approximately 14,000 wood-blocks and 3,000 copperplates used for illustrating the works produced by the house; and some 500 drawings from which illustrations were cut.

If workmen from the time of Plantin and the Moretuses could return they would be able to set about their tasks straight away with familiar tools and in familiar surroundings, the compositors at their cases, the printers at their presses, the type-founders at their furnace. Only the central heating and the electric lights would seem strange at first.

Plantin and the Moretuses preserved another category of material, less spectacular to the average visitor to the house, who sees only a few samples of it in the display cases, but one of the most important assets of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in terms of cultural history. In an air-conditioned strongroom in the basement are ranged long rows of ledgers, cash books, files, registers, and bound volumes of letters, covering the whole period from the foundation to the winding up of the firm.

Numbers of letters and documents relating to other old printers have been preserved, but the Plantinian collection is the only extensive set of records to have come down virtually complete. Because of their scope and the importance of the printing house to which they belong, they form an invaluable source of information about printing and publishing from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and more generally about economic, social, and cultural life in this period.

The person who turns the pages of these volumes - sometimes the sand still drops from them where once a master of the Gulden Passer or an assiduous book-keeper hastily scattered it, impatient for the ink to dry - is given a glimpse of the old printing world. In a manner not possible anywhere else, he will see how books were written, printed, and distributed in those days. He will be able to picture the rooms of the Plantin House peopled not by museum staff and circulating visitors, but by humanist scholars and workmen. He will sit at banquet tables, hear heated arguments or learned disputations over rummers of wine, witness the visits of great personages attended by

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splendid retinues, and share in the printing of the addresses composed in their honour by the masters of the house. Studying these archives he will hear oaths and curses echoing from press and foundry, and through the windows he will see workpeople brawling in the now-so-peaceful courtyard.

In spite of the vast amount that has been written about Plantin and the Moretuses^1. and the extensive use that has been made of the archives, relatively few works have dealt with all the actual processes of printing and selling; only certain aspects of these activities have so far been studied with any thoroughness.^2.

The author hopes that the present work will do something to fill this gap, although he is well aware that the lack of earlier studies means that many questions can only be touched on at present. The intention has been to survey the activities of the officina in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the period in which it was a flourishing business, but for some aspects of these activities, again because of the extent of the material in the archives and the dearth of previous studies,^3. it has been necessary to limit the scope of the discussion and concentrate more particularly on the time of Christophe Plantin, the founder of the firm.^4.

1. See the bibliography in Vol. I.

2. General surveys for Plantin's time in: M. Rooses, Musée, pp. 153-174; C. Clair, Christopher Plantin, pp. 197-224; L. Voet, ‘The making of books in the Renaissance as told by the Archives of the Plantin-Moretus Museum’, Paga (Printing & Graphic Arts), 10, 1965, pp. 33-66.

3. Study of the period after 1589 is severely handicapped by the fact that the correspondence of Plantin's successors has not yet been published.

4. The Dutch texts reproduced in this work are always accompanied by an English translation. The French texts have not been translated as a rule. The transcriptions aim to render the originals as closely as possible. However, in French texts taken from the Archives accents have been added so that they are read more easilyby the modern reader. In Plantin's accounts very often the word ‘pat(t)ar’ is used for ‘st(uiver)’. In our transcriptions this has been rendered uniformly into ‘st.’.