You are warmly invited to this term’s Magdalen College Library & Archives Talk
Early Printing and Material Culture
Celebrating Aldus Manutius
Geri Della Rocca de Candal
Aldus Manutius (1449–1515) was a hugely important early printer, the founder of the Aldine Press in Venice. He was one of the people who laid the cornerstones of the modern publishing industry: popularising pocket-sized printed books, inventing italic type, and creating modern punctuation marks such as the semicolon. He was the first to use the dolphin twined around an anchor as his publisher’s emblem. This exhibition will be a fascinating opportunity to inspect some of Magdalen’s earliest printed books.
Geri Della Rocca de Candal is an ERC Research Fellow (2014–2018) in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. His postdoctoral fellowship is with the ERC-funded project ‘15C Booktrade: An Evidence-based Assessment and Visualization of the Distribution, Sale, and Reception of Books in the Renaissance’. Beyond working on incunabula (1450–1500), his research interests focus on early Greek printing, books for Western traders in the Mediterranean and the circulation of books in the Ottoman Empire.
Followed by refreshments and a chance to see an exhibition of books by Aldus Manutius in the Old Library.
Monday 29th February (7th week), 17.30
Magdalen College Summer Common Room, Cloisters III
RSVP to james.fishwick@magd.ox.ac.uk
