1 - Printers, authors and the rise of the editor

Summary

The first century of printing in italy saw a steady increase in the importance of the editor of vernacular texts. For the three decades after the appearance of the first dated vernacular book in 1470, the fact that an editor had been at work was not always considered worth mentioning, nor was particular attention drawn to it. Often editors were not identified; and even when they were, their names might be hidden away in a dedicatory letter or at the end of a book, in some concluding verses or in a colophon. However, around the start of the sixteenth century, this situation began to change. First of all, title pages of vernacular books announced the fact that they had been revised or that they contained additional material. The first page of the Venetian Petrarch of 1500, for example, said that the poems had been ‘newly corrected’ (‘correcti novamente’). As competition between Venetian editions of Petrarch grew more intense, the next step was to use title pages to identify editors by name. One would only have learned the identity of the editor of the 1500 Petrarch, a certain Nicolò Peranzone, from reading the preface or the colophon. In 1508, though, the edition printed by Bartolomeo de Zanni included Peranzone's name on the title page, pointing out that he had corrected the poems ‘with many shrewd and excellent additions’ (‘con molte acute et excellente additione’).