ERHARD

R AT D OLT
!

R ENA I S S A NC E
T Y P O G R APHE R

John D. Boardley
saigon · mmxv

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 WAKING THE DEAD

I have always been fascinated by origins, in how ideas and things

actually get started, whether that be the origins of words, ideas, the uni-
verse, or how a particular letterform or style of script came to be. My later-
developed interest in typography has at its kernel that same fascination with
origins. The origins of typography and of printing with movable type is a
story well-known and often told, and I need not repeat it at length here.
For those even casually acquainted with the European incunabula, Johann
Gutenberg, Nicholas Jenson, and the great printer, publisher and scholar,
Aldus Manutius are familiar names. Gutenberg is credited with the inven-
tion of a new mode of production and for producing the very first printed
books from the 1450s; Jenson for his significant contribution to the aesthetic
development of the roman typeface; and Aldus, for the first italic type, his
early Greek types (both with Francesco Grifo), and for his libelli portatiles,
small octavo-format classics. This trinity of characters from Germany, France,
and Italy dominate many a preliminary history of the first decades of the
printed book, and deservedly so.
But my work is devoted to a fourth protagonist who deserves the company
of our aforementioned prototypographers. Erhard Ratdolt (1447–1527/8) has
only once been the subject of a detailed study and that by Gilbert Redgrave
in 1894. 1 And while Redgrave’s book is an excellent survey of Ratdolt’s work
and innovations, it focuses, as is explicit in its title, only on his work in Venice
between 1476 and 1486. Ratdolt left quite an impression on Redgrave, for
he describes him as “one of the most wonderful masters of the art of print-
ing during the fifteenth century.” Little is known about Ratdolt beyond the
artifacts — books and broadsides — that he bequeathed to us, and no portrait

1 Erhard Ratdolt and his Work at Venice, Redgrave (1894).

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of him exists. That more record of Ratdolt’s personal life has not survived
is a great pity. However, in the nineteenth century, hitherto hidden away
for the best part of 500 years was a document, a memorandum penned by
Ratdolt himself — the only one in existence. It reveals little about his work,
but does provide some insight into his personal life, including a spell in Mainz
as a teenager, and records details of his two marriages and the births of his
children and grandchildren. Besides this short three-page memorandum,
oicial tax records, and scant details in his colophons and title-pages, little
else is known about Ratdolt the man. However, in surveying his work we can
begin to assemble a picture of a passionate craftsman, an astute business-
man and, above all, a great innovator. Half a millennium hence and many of
his innovations, owing to their present-day universal adoption, might not
appear particularly revolutionary or even innovative, but I hope that by the
end of this short book, you will come to agree that Ratdolt is indeed one of
history’s greatest printer-typographers.
For more than a thousand years, from the introduction of the codex,
through the long Dark Ages to the close of the Medieval period, books were
handwritten and relatively scarce. The fifteenth century revolutionized the
making and distribution of books and the incunabula is punctuated by some
remarkable typographic innovations, a good number of them attributable to
Ratdolt. Ernst Goldschmidt wrote of him:

“Of all the fifteenth-century printers Ratdolt stands out as the most inventive experimenter
and as the originator of a greater number of technical innovations than any other. His
whole career is distinguished by his constant willingness to tackle any new technical
printing problem that presented itself.”

This book began as little more than a comprehensive bibliography of Ratdolt’s

books and printed ephemera and a detailed conspectus of his typefaces, in
addition to a survey of his most notable innovations. But my account of

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 his work was missing context, wanting the stories and Renaissance la vie
quotidienne that might illuminate both the man and the significance of his
typographic innovations. Therefore, I shall endeavor to tell Ratdolt’s story
in the context of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Europe. Besides my
fascination with Ratdolt, the fifteenth century is for me one of the most
enthralling in Pre-Modern history. And not only because it signals the begin-
ning of Western typography and the subsequent transition from manuscript
to printed book, but too because of the cultural, political, religious, and
economic changes that surround it. At the beginning of Ratdolt’s career in
Venice, the Renaissance is in full swing, Europe is on the cusp of a cultural
and spiritual upheaval. The fifteenth century marks the beginning of a new
Europe, a modern Europe unshackling itself from the Middle Ages; an age
of diplomacy, of intellectual inquiry and artistic expression. A population
that is finally recovering from the decimation wrought by the catastrophic
Black Death in the fourteenth century,  the fifteenth is one of innovation
and re-invigoration, of renaissance. This is the era of inventors and artists
like Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, and Dürer; of architects like
Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Palladio; of explorers Vasco da Gama and Colum-
bus; of mathematicians and astronomers like Regiomontanus, Copernicus,
Toscanelli, and Pacioli. Thus new continents, heretofore the stuf of hearsay
and fable, were explored and exploited, antiquity rediscovered, celebrated,
and re-assimilated. In astronomy the heavens too were re-imagined and
reshaped from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican. Back on earth Christen-
dom stood on the brink of a Reformation that would tear Europe asunder.
We witness too the death throes of feudalism, increasing literacy rates, the
expansion of banking and commerce and the growth of cities and city states.
Planted in Florence, the seed of Renaissance bloomed throughout Europe.
“Its ideas and its achievements ran like an ineradicable dye through the fabric
of Europe,” wrote historian, J. H. Plumb. But that dye was often crimson
and the most noble aspects of the Renaissance should not blind us to its

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concomitant horrors: its despots, its enthusiastic bloodletting, pestilences
and internecine wars. In Italy, Venice was at war with Milan and Genoa,
Milan with Naples, Rome with Florence, Florence with Pisa; Perugia a near
permanent bloodbath of the most unimaginable deeds of cruelty and blood
lust. In France and England the final episodes of the Hundred Years’ War;
Bohemia at war with Hungary; in Germany feuding archbishops and the
subsequent Sack of Mainz. Add to this the constant and real threat of the
Ottomans poised to the east, and a pervasive atmosphere of brutality, murder,
corruption and frequent assassinations. These events are an inseparable facet
of the Janus-faced Renaissance: the cruelty, self-indulgence and bellicosity of
its patricians, politicians and Popes — who at the same time were generous
and enthusiastic patrons of the arts and sciences. Their patrimony a violent
and sublime coalescence of blood and art.
My interest in Ratdolt began as admiration for his books, his mise en page,
his typography and his numerous beautiful and charming woodcut borders
and initials. But the more I learned of this incunable printer, the more I
came to admire his innovations and his enthusiastic willingness to tackle
even the most diicult of typographic challenges.
But to concern ourselves only with the form of the book or its typogra-
phy — to pass over their contents — is to do their authors, editors, translators,
artists and illustrators a great disservice and to reduce the printer’s role to
one who presses ink into paper and vellum. Each and every book, beyond its
substrate and ink — the artefact — has its own pre-history. With every edition
and with every copy issued from the printing press its history is prolonged
and amplified. Though space, time and the limits of readers’ patience do
not permit exhaustive descriptions of Ratdolt’s more than 270 books and
printed ephemera, a survey of a select number will prove enlightening from
an historical, cultural, and literary perspective, and will reveal something of
the printers and patrons behind their publication. If a person’s library is to
some extent a reflection of its owner’s learning and taste, so too we might

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 fancy that much can be learned about a printer from the books he chooses
to print.
When asked why I should devote so much time to researching and writing
a book about Ratdolt, I must appropriate the words of the brilliantly curious
Ciriaco de’ Pizzicolli (c. 1391–1455), the Italian Humanist, indefatigable
epigrapher and avid collector of antiquities, who, when asked why he should
sojourn so far afield to painstakingly catalogue ancient treasures, responded,
“to wake the dead.” Erhard Ratdolt died in his hometown of Augsburg in
southern Germany at the close of 1527 or during the course of 1528 at the
age of eighty after a career spanning almost five decades. This little book is
an attempt to wake the dead, to resurrect the spirit and make permanent the
legacy of my favorite Renaissance typographer, Erhard Ratdolt.