Aldus Manutius, printer in Venice.
Around 1495, in a Venetian workshop, a man set out to publish the Greek classics in their own language. They had lain for centuries in manuscripts that almost no one could read. He did not translate them: he did what makes a translation useful — gave them a form you could read, carry and afford. Our name comes from him.
The mark of his workshop, adopted in 1502: a dolphin coiled around an anchor. The dolphin for speed, the anchor for steadiness. Our logo retains the anchor.
A publisher who changed the shape of the book.
Aldus Manutius was born around 1450 in Bassiano, near Rome. A tutor and Hellenist, he settled in Venice and opened his press around 1494. The first book from his workshop was a Greek grammar. There followed the first printed editions of Aristotle, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato—texts that until then existed only as manuscript copies, rare, expensive and often faulty.
Around him worked a small academy of Greek scholars, each in their field: one established the text, another compared it with manuscripts, a third oversaw the spelling. Erasmus stayed there in 1508 to have his Adagesprinted. It was not a print shop, it was a workshop of specialists.
In 1501, two decisions did the rest. He had Francesco Griffo cut a slanted, condensed typeface, drawn after the handwriting of the chancelleries: italic, which fitted more text on a page. And he abandoned the large format of scholarly books for the octavo, the pocket format—the classic you take on a journey instead of consulting it on a lectern. Knowledge ceased to be a piece of furniture.
Make haste slowly.
His motto, engraved beneath the anchor and the dolphin. It says that going fast and working properly are not opposed—provided you know exactly what you are doing. It is the only promise we want to keep: a few minutes, and nothing rushed.
Five centuries later, the craft has not changed in nature.
We do not print, we translate. But the question remains the same: how to bring a text to someone who could not read it, without losing its form along the way.
Aldus Manutius died in Venice in 1515. His anchor mark was copied throughout Europe in his lifetime—which, for a printer, was the surest recognition.