The trade of the Printer

I mentioned in my post "Illuminated Manuscripts" that I wanted to know "How the people involved in the (re)creation of illuminated manuscripts learnt their craft, comparing apprenticeships and other education today’s ‘tradespeople’ undergo."

Well, as yet I haven't found anything pertaining especially to scribes and manuscripts, but I did come across some great information regarding the printers of the Renaissance. I finished my own training as an apprentice in this industry over 20 years ago and really want to include my ruminations on this accidentally-found pearl, but in view of where I am in my subject and where I should be.... I will post the whole section from "The Infancy of Printing" web site from the Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"Printers themselves became men--and a few women--who bridged many "worlds" of the Renaissance. They were trained through an apprenticeship program in the way that artisans were -- in the first generation often as goldsmiths or silversmiths, and then directly as printers. A boy contracted himself (or his parents contracted him) to a master-printer as an apprentice; he worked for five to ten years in this capacity, then became a journeyman printer, and worked another five to ten years. Then, if he had the capital to establish his own shop and could make a masterpiece acceptable to other printers, he opened a shop and began hiring apprentices and journeymen. Women who became printers were generally not formally apprenticed, but learned the trade from their fathers or husbands. Women printers were not numerous, but there were often a few women in most large printing centers, usually widows, who published books independently and whose names appear on the title page. (For people interested in women printers and in women whose written work was published, I recommend the collection, Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, edited by Elizabeth Goldsmith and Dena Goodman, Cornell, 1995.)

Despite their training as artisans, printers had connections to the world of politics, art, and learning that many other artisans did not. They depended on local and state governments for contracts and patronage, and needed to keep a close watch on what those governments might object to in order to prevent confiscation of the materials they were printing. (More on this later.) They needed artists to produce woodcuts and engravings for insertion in their major works, and to paint colors and gold leaf on pictures and letters once these works had been printed. (There is a good example of this in the exhibition, a copy of Honorius of Autun's De Imagine Mundi printed by Anton Koberger in 1472 in Nuremberg. Koberger ran a huge establishment, with many presses, and had artists on staff to do the illustrations and illuminations. Gold leaf illumination in particular was often done by women who were the wives of goldsmiths. Their husbands had access to the raw material, and these women also often spun gold thread as well as doing book illuminations.)

Printers also needed close and regular contacts with the world of scholarship and learning, and, just as they had artists on staff, major printers also often had scholars-in-residence. The most famous of these was the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, who spent most of the later years of his life working in the printshops of various printer-friends in Basel. Erasmus was widely regarded as the most learned man in Europe, but spent his days copy-reading his own and others' work, along with translating and writing. Print shops became gathering places for scholars and those interested in new ideas, and often, after the Reformation split Christian Europe, places where emigres and refugees met. Some of this atmosphere carried over to early printers' shops in the American colonies, the most famous of which is that of Ben Franklin.

Thus, printing was in many ways a new type of occupation, combining intellectual, physical, and administrative forms of labor and skills. The world of the Renaissance printshop was one where many different types of people met and gathered, and where many different types of people were encouraged to become authors as well as readers.”

Thank you, Merry Wiesner-Hanks