Comments on: 1.17 Giovanni Fabrini and Self-Study

By: Paul Gehl

Paul Gehl — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:04:36 +0000

This detail shows the passage quoted in the next paragraph. If you click on it, you will see the entire title page of this edition by the highly successful Sessa-family publishing firm at Venice. (In this case the imprint is “heirs of Marchio Sessa.”) As in the Valgrisi title page above, the advertising prose is kept in tiny type so as to provide room for the firm’s trademark. When rival firm’s took on Fabrini’s text, they typically varied the wording and order of the advertising prose but reproduced the list of features on offer to prove that their edition was just as good as others on the market.

By: Paul Gehl

Paul Gehl — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 11:57:47 +0000

Scholars attribute the first edition to Vincenzo Valgrisi, a Venetian printer responsible for several later editions with Fabrini’s revisions. Note, however, that the title page shown here does not name a printer. None is named elsewhere in the book either, suggesting that this first edition was subsidized by the author or his friends and patrons and was not a commercial product. Compare this purely typographic title page, which though wordy is relatively uncluttered, with that of the 1558 Valgrisi edition below where the same advertising prose must be compacted to make way for the prominent commercial printer’s mark of Valgrisi.

By: Paul Gehl

Paul Gehl — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 11:50:09 +0000

The wording and the persistence of these claims suggest strongly that Fabrini himself composed these title page statements. As he added to the apparatus in subsequent editions, each new ‘feature’ was described in an additional title page blurb.