Magno’s Bound in Venice

Our book today is an energetically delightful translated work put out by the good folks at Europa Editions: Bound in Venice: The Serene Republic and the Dawn of the Book by Alessandro Marzo Magno. The book was originally published in Italy (as L’alba dei libri. Quando Venezia ha fatto leggere il mondo) in 2013 and is here given a very lively translation into English by Gregory Conti.Magno’s Bound in Venice is even more gripping than another – and, erm, very different – book I read by the same title back in the less-accountable 1970s; it’s the story of the birth of the modern conception of the publishing world, and Magno quite rightly locates that birth in Venice, the home of some of the earliest printed editions of the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, the great classics of Greece and Rome, and the works of the great thinkers and humanists of the Renaissance (and home also to Aldus Manutius, the great pioneering printer). For centuries, Venice was the center of the Western world’s booming book trade, and in this delightful book, Magno has the inspiration to tell that history like the adventure story it really is.He takes his readers inside his copious researches into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, dramatizing the day-to-day reality of the printer’s shop, the import-export exchanges, and at the heart of it all, the mighty bookshops where tastes were set and careers were made and broken – and to the sainted Information Desk, which was once upon a time the nerve center of such places:

The command post of the shop is the counter; that’s where the lectern that holds the journal in which the owner makes a note of everything he needs is located. Sitting on the counter are various objects: an ink bottle, a quill, and anything else that might be useful in the day-to-day operation of the shop. The counter’s numerous drawers and cubbyholes allow the owner to keep his accounts and receipts reserved, as well as to keep hidden bundles of sheets intended for a restricted readership (such as works originating in countries of the Protestant Reformation).

“Like a captain on the quarterdeck of his ship,” Magno writes, perhaps taking things just a bit too far, “the bookseller observes from the counter everything that happens in his shop, listens with discretion to the conversations, careful not to violate the rules of polite behavior.”He also fills his story with the vivid personalities of the time, especially Manutius but also plenty of other merchants, writers, and scholars, each of whom is given a memorably colorful portrayal, as in the case of the great and now-forgotten Arentino:

A genius. A pornographer. A pervert. A refined intellectual. Pietro Aretino has been called all of these and more. And, at the end of the day, all of them are justified. He published what can be defined as the first pornographic book in history. And he, “the scourge of princes,” invented the figure of the author-celebrity, the writer-star that droves of nameless readers throng to see. Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, he writes not to please but more often than not to satirize. Nor does he write to instruct or teach. His is a militant use of writing, and in this sense too he turns out to be a surprisingly modern writer.

Bound in Venice is a practically perfect example of Venetian history at its personable best. I loved it when I first read it back in 2013, and I loved it even more during this recent re-read.