The following post is by Andrew Gaudio, Classics, Medieval Studies, Linguistics specialist in the Researcher Engagement & General Collections Division and currently on detail in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
The Gryphius Collection in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division comprises 148 titles printed by Sebastian Greyff (Latinized as Gryphius), a giant of early printing in France during the first half of the sixteenth century. Of the more than one thousand unique texts which were produced by him, the Library’s collection of titles form a representative snapshot of his total output which focused on textbooks and humanist works.
Although born in Germany, Sebastian Gryphius is most known for his printing activity in Lyon, establishing himself as one of the city’s most prominent printers during his career which spanned more than three decades. Born in Reutlingen in 1492, he apprenticed in Germany and then in Venice. He settled in Lyon between 1515 and 1523 and began printing for the Grand Grand Compagnie des libraires des Lyon, a group of well-connected and wealthy publishers with extensive French and Italian contacts. This assembly of publishers with whom Gryphius ingratiated himself originally comprised two groups, the Grand Compagnie des lectures and the Grand Compagnie des textes. In 1519, these two enterprises came together to form what was called the Grand Grand Compagnie des Libraries de Lyon. Gryphius was granted the use of the Grand Grand Compagnie‘s printing presses and types, both of which would have been an expensive investment for a printer at the early stages of his career.
By 1528, Gryphius had saved enough money to purchase a set of Roman and italic type from members of the Grand Grand Compagnie des libraires, and this purchase enabled him to open his own press shop and print under his own printer’s mark.
In Lyon, Gryphius popularized the pocket-sized book (such as the sextodecimo) printed in italic type, which was invented by the famous Italian humanist printer Aldus Manutius at the turn of the sixteenth century.
The earliest extant book which Gryphius printed in his shop dates to 1528 and is a sextodecimo with the title Precationes aliquot celebriores è Sacris Bibliis desumptae ac in studiosorum gratia[m] lingua Hebraica, Graeca & Latina in enchiridii formulam redactae. Each page displays two columns of text in two languages—Greek with a Latin translation on the verso and Latin and Hebrew translation on the recto. The Latin font is Roman on the recto and italic on the verso. The renowned publisher, historian, and bibliophile, Antoine-Augustin Renouard, in his 1834 edition of the Annales de l’imprimerie des Alde ou Histoire des trois Manuce et de leurs éditions, calls this book Gryphius’ “volume d’essai” or his trial volume—a test run so to speak. Certainly, it would have demonstrated his capacity as a polyglot printer to print multiple fonts. Below are images of the verso page containing the Lord’s prayer in Greek and an adjacent Latin translation in Roman font, and the recto page with the Latin text of the same prayer in italics accompanied by a Hebrew translation.
Gryphius quickly established himself as a printer of schoolbooks and works by Renaissance humanists including Guillaume Budé, Josephus Scaliger, François Rabelais, and, notably, Desiderius Erasmus. Print history scholars Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin have described Gryphius as being enormously important for the field of print history, in that, he “published the text books for half of Europe and was the quickening spirit behind the humanist movement in Lyon.”
Between 1528 and his death in 1556, Gryphius published dozens of Erasmus’ editions of Latin and Greek texts as well as his own original works. Twenty of his printed texts can be found in the Library’s Gryphius Collection. The two images below are from a 1531 edition of a pedagogical work by Erasmus, his Conscribendarum epistolarum ratio (the reason for writing letters), also known by the title De conscibendis epostolis (on the writing of letters). In addition to this edition, the Gryphius Collection has a copy from 1542 and 1551.
Gryphius was highly esteemed by his colleagues who praised his Latin abilities and the quality of his editions. For example, Gryphius is featured in Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner’s encyclopedic work Pandectarum : sive partitionum universalium, specifically at the beginning of book 12, De Historia, where he provides a dedication to Sebastian Gryphius, calling him “the foremost printer of Lyon” (praestantissimo typographo Lugduni). Highly rhetorical, the epideictic language of the dedication will strike contemporary readers as long-winded, but Gessner’s work is an excellent example of how classical oratory influenced the humanist movement to which Gryphius belonged. Additionally, the Latin of Gessner’s dedication allows for much longer sentences than English is able to accommodate, so my translation of the Latin will feel a little cumbersome to contemporary readers as well as a little lengthy, but, as it does not appear in English anywhere else, I thought readers might be interested to read the extent of the praise that Gessner bestowed on Gryphius during the printer’s lifetime:
“Initially, I had decided to dedicate each part of this work only to our German printers, but since I thought that there are many poor quality and unpraiseworthy printers among ourselves who either publish books of any authors, or who, if they occasionally publish good authors albeit without any praise for their diligence but for the most part are more corrupted than they were before (for I assess the excellence of the fonts and paper or the beauty of a small publication, although even the considerable splendor of your skill depends on them), I, not graciously obligated to one specific people would prefer to celebrate some renowned foreigners and well deserving printers for their universal endeavors rather than unworthy German ones.
Thus, I think that not all of the wealthy men of your status should be praised, since many of them are consumed by greed, [and I think] that they print utterly false books rather than prefer to earn moderate expenses. I think that there should not be less criticism against all wealthy men among whom there are not a few, since they are not able to publish many works or great works, yet in those works which they are able to publish, they employ thoroughness long sought after. Therefore you, most refined Gryphius, by no means overlooked, come to my mind among the chief men, worth as much as many others, to whom a preeminent spot among the exceptional engravers of our age is owed.”
By the time of his death in 1556, Sebastian Gryphius’s reputation as a master printer was firmly entrenched throughout Europe. His son Antoine inherited his business and continued printing into the 1590s.
Sources
Christie, Richard Copley. “Historical Essays First Published in 1902 in Commemoration of the Jubilee of the Owens College, Manchester.” Sebastian Gryphius Printer, edited by T. F. Tout and James Tait, 1902, (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 307-323.
Febvre, Lucien et Martin, Henri-Jean. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. Translated by David Gerard, (London: Verso, 2010), p. 149.
McLean, Ian. “Competitors or Collaborators? Sebastian Gryphius and His Colleagues, 1528-1556,” in Learning and the Market Place; Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book, Library of the Written Word (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 9:273-89.
Phillips, Margaret Mann. “Erasmus in France in the Later Sixteenth Century.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 34, 1971, pp. 246–261.
Renouard, Antoine Augustin. Annales de l’imprimerie Des Alde: Ou, Histoire Des Trois Manuce et de Leurs Éditions. Chez Jules Renouard, Libraire, 1834.
Source: https://blogs.loc.gov/bibliomania/2024/08/22/sebastian-gryphius-and-the-gryphius-collection/
