Rare books and their readers

After spending a dreary day on EEBO, I enjoyed Sarah Werner's nice piece on rare books, and the readers who read them, over at Wynken de Worde.

Emblematic: a once and future book

Books, being economic and social objects, come into being and either thrive or fail for economic and social reasons. Here is an example of how early modern book design and brand marketing brought one book back from the brink.

On July 16, 1602 one William Everard entered a bookshop or stationers’ stall and bought a book. He paid 6s. 8d. for a quarto bound in eights, a moderately expensive book but an expected price for several hundred pages of print. On the inside margin of signature B5r Everard inscribed his Latinized name, Guill. Everardi, the date and price, and added a Greek motto in bold ink, Láthe biósas (Δαθε βιωσασ), an Epicurean commonplace meaning “live concealed.”


This phrase urges the ideal life lived in moderation and withdrawal from the distractions of power or riches, but written here and not in the traditional space of the title page, the phrase is a sly wink at the enduring paradox of prominent seclusion. If indeed Everard wished to live in scholarly seclusion, announcing this fact where he did may be the sole reason his book has not slipped into oblivion with him.

Everard’s book survives as a fragment in the British Library with the running title A Triall of Wits. Katherine Pantzer correctly identified this fragment in the revised STC as the first English edition of Juan Huarte’s Examen de Ingenios, probably published by John Wolfe around 1592, but the fragment has not been closely examined to establish its relation either to Huarte or the English book market. First published in Baeza in 1575, Huarte’s Examen was widely translated before being reissued posthumously in 1594 in an expurgated edition. But by then the original had become a publishing sensation, best know in English from Richard Carew’s stylish indirect translation from the Italian translation by the poet and linguist, Camillo Camilli, and printed by Adam Islip in 1594.

What happened to the version of Huarte that Everard bought? John Wolfe, attuned as he was to the fashion for foreign, and particularly Italian, books in early 1590s London, jumped on the Huarte bandwagon by entering to his copy on 5 August 1590 “A booke entituled Essame degli Ingegn[o]s, to be printed in Italian and Englishe.” This was the Camilli translation, which printed four times between 1582 and 1590. There is no evidence Wolfe produced an Italian version.

Everard’s book could not be more different than Islip's production, textually and paratextually. Where Carew’s translation is fashionably literary, with elegant phrasing and humanist polish, the version Everard read proves to be an accurate translation of Huarte’s Spanish, down to Huarte’s awkward syntax and phrasing. Where Carew follows Camilli in nearly eliminating scholarly citations and marginal notes, Everard’s reproduces all of Huarte’s scholarly features (but with frequent typesetting errors and authorial intrusions: at one point “Christe” replaces “Aristotle”). Most notable is textual presentation, with A Triall of Wits following the typical mixed typography of the late 1580s and early 1590s: “english” (13 point) black-letter type set densely, 37 lines to the page with tight margins. Islip pretends he’s printing prose romance: 33 lines of octavo pica italic, with ample margins. Old school, new school?

If a prominent printer such as John Wolfe published a very popular work such as Huarte’s, why do we have only a scant fragment extant, but more important, why was a competing edition published (to great success) a mere two or so years later? One answer is that fashion had passed Wolfe’s more traditional version by, but it could also be that it was marred by production errors and translator bias. In either case, the print-run was still not exhausted in ten years. Circumstances suggest a reason. By 1592 Wolfe was principally a publisher and many of his late books, before he became Printer to the City in 1593, were printed for him. Supervising his many copies, Wolfe may have overlooked the poor production of his Huarte. In any case, one of his printers was Adam Islip, who apparently bought much of Wolfe’s printing material in 1593/4 along with rights to some copy, including Huarte, and set up shop.

Islip's 1594 production of Carew’s translation, far from setting itself up in direct competition with Wolfe’s edition, signals its filiation to it in several ways that indicate both Islip’s debt to Wolfe and savvy marketing. Most obvious is that the Carew edition shares Wolfe’s running title, despite the different book title, An Examination of Men’s Wits. Islip also deploys what had amounted to Wolfe’s brand on numerous editions during the 1580s and early 1590s: the famous frontispiece emblem of the palm tree with snakes below it and the motto, Il vostro malignare non giova nulla, encircling the trunk (see the title page above).

Derived from a cut in Hadrianus Junius’ Emblemata (1565, at left), but also appearing in Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586), the emblem appeared on Wolfe’s clandestine "Palermo" editions of Machiavelli, beginning in 1584, and more recently on Gabriel Harvey’s Foure Letters (1592) and Pierces Supererogation (1593). It is quite likely that it appeared on the cover of Triall of Wits; Harvey had read Huarte in the 1570s in Spanish and as Wolfe’s would-be literary consultant in the early 1590s, he might have suggested Huarte as a sure bet in the English market. It was, but with the readers who found Wolfe's presentation unappealing.

After its transfer from Wolfe, Islip immediately puts the emblem to use marketing all editions of The Examination (1594 [3 issues], 1596, 1604, 1616) and numerous other books. It’s final appearance in 1616, well after Wolfe’s death and Everard’s purchase, retires the brand that links one likely publishing failure with its refashioned successor.