At his own press, the Officina Bodoni, Dr. Giovanni Mardersteig has for half a century combined scholarly research and fine craftsmanship. A bibliography of his work is now proposed.

‛Scholarly publishing,’ in the widest sense, exactly describes the work which Dr. Giovanni Mardersteig began at Montagnola di Lugano in 1922 and still continues at Verona. Giovanni Mardersteig was born in Weimar in 1892. He became co-editor of a journal of modern art called Genius, by Kurt Wolff in 1919, and then set up his own office, the Officina Bodoni, in 1922.

Mardersteig named his press after the printer and punch-cutter, Giambattista Bodoni, who worked at Parma from 1769 to 1813, because its first books were printed in types cast from Bodoni’s original matrices. Exclusive use of this ma-terial was given him by the Italian government. Mardersteig selected a few of Bodoni’s founts (Bodoni cut over 25,000 punches) and began to make excellent books with them from the first trial proof, a short text by Goethe. Ten numbered copies of Goethes Urworte were made. I know of only one surviving copy, now in the hands of a private collector in New York.

In addition to this proof, twenty-one editions were printed at Montagnola. Then the press was moved to Verona. In a courtyard within the printing house of Arnoldo Mondadori, Mardersteig set up his new office in 1927, and worked there until 1937. Then he removed the press to Via Marsala, overlooking the old city of Verona.

At the time of this move from Mondadori to a private villa, the Officina Bodoni added to its printing equipment (a hand-press made by Fomm, Leipzig) a lithographic hand-press and a copperplate press. Mardersteig then began making books illustrated by modern artists. Gunter Boehmer, Fritz Kredel, Arturo Martini, Massino Campigli, Mino Maccari, Giacomo Manzù, and many others have worked for him.

During the years of working within the office of Mondadori, Mardersteig printed for the Italian government the Opera Omnia of Gabriele d’Annunzio, having won an open competition for the person most suited to edit and print the forty-nine volumes of this collected, national edition. By the end of 1969, he had printed on the hand-press more than one hundred and fifty editions in addition to the d’Annunzio volumes

In 1948 Mardersteig established a fully mechanized printing works, the Stamperia Valdònega, also in Via Marsala. This he continues to control with his son, Martino. He has also been active as a type designer. With the aid of a punch-cutter from Paris, Charles Malin, Mardersteig has made three text types, Griffo, Zeno, and Dante. The originals of these types are exclusively used at the Officina Bodoni; Dante has subsequently been re-cut for use on the Monotype machines.

This is the briefest outline of Giovanni Mardersteig’s activities. The quality of his typographic skill, matched with his editorial skills in scholarship and original research, now demand an adequate bibliography which may perhaps establish him as the scholarly publisher of the century.

Figure 1. A page from the check-list printed at the Officina Bodoni in 1929.

The first appraisal of Officina Bodoni books came from Hermann Hesse. He wrote an article for the Neue Zürcher Zeituns which appeared on 4 November 1923. The first checklist of books appeared in 1929 at the end of a volume entitled The Officina Bodoni; the operation of a hand-press during the first six years of its work. (See figure I.) This was written, printed, and published by Mardersteig in three separate language editions. Then in 1930 an article by Frederich Ewald appeared in The Fleuron (volume VII). Since then Hans Schmoller has written in the Penrose Annual and John Dreyfus has written Giovanni Mardersteig: an account of his work, which Mardersteig printed on the hand-press in 1966. Nothing, however, appeared in Signature throughout its long life from 1935 to 1954 concerning Mardersteig as a printer-publisher. And then only in 1954, when more than one hundred editions had been printed in addition to the Opera Omnia, did Luc Indestege persuade Mardersteig to exhibit his work in the Royal Library, Brussels. Later in 1954 the exhibition was shown at Antwerp, Hamburg, and at the British Museum.

Figure 2.

For these and subsequent exhibitions in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, a record of the first 103 titles was prepared and printed at the Stamperia Valdònega in five separate language editions. (See figure 2.) Though now incomplete, it is a valuable record that needs to be brought up to date, expanded, and annotated.

Among the books printed and published by Mardersteig are many titles which owe their existence to his research. He has long been interested in the life and writing of Felice Feliciano, has issued a number of books concerning this fifteenth-century Veronese scribe, and in 1960 published the Vatican codex 6852 (c. 1460), a renaissance geometric reconstruction of the Roman alphabet by Feliciano. In 1968 he published a facsimile of Bodoni’s Manuale Tipografico of 1788, and added to it his own researches on the development of the early Bodoni founts based on Fournier’s designs through the Baskerville period to the later, individual style exemplified in the Manuale of 1818. In 1969 Mardersteig published Bembo’s youthful tale of climbing Mount Etna and combined this with an historical account of Griffo’s typeface used in the original edition of 1496 (figure 3) and subsequent re-cuttings of this design. Then in 1971 appeared a further study of renaissance letters, The Alphabet of Francesco Tornielleda Novara. The alphabet follows closely that of Pacioli and reproductions of Torniello’s letters are shown together with those of Pacioli. Who Torniello was and what other work he did has been the subject of Mardersteig’s research for several years in both public and private libraries and in family archives. Of this rare manual printed by Gotardo da Ponte at Milan in 1517 only four copies have been recorded.

A number of Mardersteig’s publications are of particular importance because of his ability to reproduce woodcut originals in a manner more faithful than any facsimile made direct from sixteenth-century printing could do. For instance in 1940, and again in 1952, the Officina Bodoni published editions of Boccaccio’s The Nymphs of Fiesole with cuts by Bartolomeo di Giovanni, pupil of Domenico Ghirlandaio. Photo-mechanical reproductions of these fifteenth-century originals would not have satisfied Mardersteig and so he had all the illustrations recut with a knife on wood by Fritz Kredel in exactly the same way as the originals were made and, of course, printed them from the wood. Again, The Holy Gospel According Matthew, Mark, Luke and John was printed in 1962 with 114 cuts, also by to Bartolomeo di Giovanni, recut by Bruno Bramanti. The portrait of Torniello was originally cut on wood by Guillaume le Signerre: the recut version by Italo Zetti as printed by Mardersteig is a revelation. Now two books with illustrations by Dürer are being made at Verona. One is The Little Passion, for which new cuts are being made by Italo Zetti. The other is Andria, a comedy by Terence, for which Fritz Kredel has cut Dürer’s designs for the first time. The illustrations for this book were drawn on wood by Dürer but only one of them was ever cut—the projected publication having been cancelled before the cutting was done. Yet to be published is an early Veronese illustrated edition of Aesop’s Fables. Mardersteig is having its eighty woodcuts remade and they will all be hand-coloured in accordance with the most beautifully coloured copy in the British Museum. Mardersteig’s research on this book will tell us the illustrator’s name—after five hundred years of anonymity—and no doubt the name of the colourist who worked on the British Museum copy!

In addition to books resulting from his own researches, Mardersteig has pub-lished many texts of classical and modern authors. Among the moderns are Italo Svevo, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Rilke, Ezra Pound, André Gide, and Kenneth Grahame. The list of classical authors is long but the following names give an idea of their scope: Michelangelo, Shelley, Dante,Ovid, Voltaire, Pushkin, Feliciano, Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Virgil, Catullus, Chesterfield, Pacioli, Goethe.

A sample entry made to demonstrate the projected bibliography is shown in the three pages that constitute figure 3. Many entries would be shorter than this example but the complete book would attempt to show the development of Mardersteig’s work in this field of printing, publishing, writing, and designing typefaces. All these activities would be linked together in a chronological sequence of descriptions of the books. If an unpublished item, or proof, or piece of ephemeral printing contained the essence of some further development it would be mentioned. Wherever a new typeface appears in a book, the entry for that book would also contain a type specimen together with some details of the original model or models, cutting problems, period and place of production, matrix-making, and type-casting. Subsequent adjustments to a typeface would also be shown as a second state specimen accompanying the description of the book in which it was first used.

On the following three pages: Figure 3a, Trial proofs of four pages set up at the Stellar Press in 1971 for a projected bibliography.

On the following three pages: Figure 3b, Trial proofs of four pages set up at the Stellar Press in 1971 for a projected bibliography.

On the following three pages: Figure 3c, Trial proofs of four pages set up at the Stellar Press in 1971 for a projected bibliography.

The Officina Bodoni has used hand-made papers from a number of mills in Italy, Holland, France, and Germany. Details of these papers might be elaborated, watermarks shown, and sometimes a note about the mill itself might explain the use or discontinued use of a particular paper.

The devices of the press as used in the colophons to be found at the end of each book should also be shown, preferably in the colours in which they appeared in those colophons.

Bindings of the press are usually elegantly simple. In Thomas Jones’s bibliography of the Gregynog Press, bindings are described in some detail but in the exhibition catalogue bindings of the Officina Bodoni are not even referred to. Mardersteig has often said of his books that it is the texts which are important—not the bindings. But of course the bibliography must describe bindings, must describe variants, and record the changes in styles as they are introduced. A number of marbled papers used on books of the Montagnola period were made by the printer himself.

Such a bibliography, containing details of text and research, type and printing, illustration and decoration, paper and binding, publication and distribution, could be further enhanced by the addition of pertinent annotations. Notes on location of the rarest items—some editions consist of a single copy—would be more than interesting. Notes on Mardersteig’s customers, especially those who have coin-missioned private editions, are needed. Notes on editions for other publishers for whom Mardersteig has acted as printer-more than printer in most cases and rarely if ever printer under instruction-would help to complete a picture of the influence of the Officina Bodoni. Notes on some unusual features in books, like the cutaway leaf in the prelims of the Arrighi writing manual published in 1926, would be of value. Notes concerning the misplaced break between sections of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets should be given. The colourist who painted the shadow lines in Feliciano’s alphabet is mentioned in the colophon of Alphabetum Romanum but nowhere is the calligrapher mentioned who wrote the initials for Ovid’s Amores and Giustinian’s Poems and Lore Songs: a note on this work of Claudio Bonacini’s would be welcome. Occasional references to auction records would be interesting, especially when related to books like Dylan Thomas’s Twenty-Six Poems where prices have risen to startling heights. References to important reviews should be noted. Although the bibliography should be of the books printed by hand at the Officina Bodoni, some books printed at the Stamperia Valdònega need cross-references in this list. For instance, a particularly important piece of bibliographical and printed the research by Mardersteig, on machine press by him, is to be found in his Book made at Padua in 1477, a monograph which gives the most complete account of the making and publishing of any book before 1500. Since the monograph was issued in 1967 Mardersteig has found more information and will shortly reprint it. The book with which it deals is Gentile da Foligno’s Commentary on Avicenna printed by Petrus Maufer. Some other researches of Mardersteig have been published elsewhere, such as his study of Francesco Alunno da Ferrara (calligrapher, writing master, miniaturist, poet, and mathematician of the sixteenth century) or are not yet published, such as his work on Francesco Griffo, punch-cutter of Bologna, which may become his greatest bibliographical study.

With nearly fifty years of printing and publishing behind him, Dr. Giovanni Mardersteig has created and dispersed a considerable wealth of material which any talented bibliographer would be stretched to recapture in detail. I doubt it can be done without much help from the master.