Aldus Manutius, italic type and small-format books The year 1501 saw an important innovation in the rapidly expanding printing industry. The Venetian printer and bookseller Aldus Manutius (Aldo Manuzio, c. 1450–1515) commissioned an italic typeface from the engraver Francesco Griffo in imitation of the sloping handwriting of contemporary Italian scholars. Most printing up to 1500…
The new year in 1642 saw an escalation of the friction between King Charles I and his Parliament. A ‘Grand Remonstrance’ had been drafted by M.P. John Pym and his colleagues, which detailed Charles I’s abuses, both real and imagined, since Charles’s accession in 1625. On 4 January 1642 the King entered the Commons chamber…
In an earlier blog post ‘Cornetts and sackbuts in Canterbury Cathedral at the Restoration’, I told the story of the re-appointment in 1660 of the four sackbut and cornett players at Canterbury Cathedral after the long break in cathedral music during the Parliamentary Interregnum. Entries for their salaries in the Treasurers’ Books for the 1660s…
In 1503 Queen Isabella of Spain decided to found a hospital at Compostela for pilgrims making the journey to the shrine of Saint James. It was to be called the Hospital of the Catholic Monarchs after Isabella and her husband King Ferdinand. The work of the hospital was managed by a religious confraternity which lodged…
Thinking of moving to a different town? No problem if you were well off. If you were down on your luck, the Poor Relief Act of 1662 specified that the parish where you lived would have to support you out of the rates, so the place you were trying to move to might not want…
In the year 1792, three Canterbury shopkeepers had advertising bills printed announcing the goods they were offering for sale: a draper, a grocer, and a soap merchant. The survival of printed ephemera of this sort is very patchy. Just think of all the advertising leaflets which you throw away after they drop through your letterbox,…
In 1628 Dr Isaac Bargrave, Dean of Canterbury since 1625, proposed to Chapter that the Cathedral’s Library needed reviving. At the June meeting of Chapter, an order was approved for this purpose : That every man should do his endeavour to refurnish the ancient library of the said church. And that a book of velume…
In 1758 John Baskerville, a Birmingham printer and businessman, decided to launch a project to print a large folio Bible, of the sort needed for lecterns in churches, using a new typeface which he had designed. This new type had caused a great stir in 1757 when he used it to print an edition of…
By the year 1500, the printing industry was over forty years old and had spread to all the major centres of Europe. Many institutional libraries were starting to add printed books to their collections and were even discarding manuscript copies from their shelves in favour of the new ‘modern’ products of the printing press. It…
The Treasurer’s Book for 1676/1677 (CCA DCc/TB-13) has several records of payments relating to the Chapter Library which had been newly built ten or twelve years earlier. The half-yearly stipend for Arthur Kay the Library Keeper is recorded as £2–10–0 and that of his deputy John Sargenson as £1–0–0 (p. 61). Under the heading Expensae necessariae…