A Great Printer
Robert Estienne: Royal Printer. By Elizabeth Armstrong. (C.U.P., 55s.) ANTHONY TROLLOPE, when congratulating himself, his mother and his brother in his Autobiography for 'writing more books than were ever before produced by a single family,' qualified the boast by a footnote admitting the claims of the Estienne family. Robert Estienne, the most outstanding member of that family, has never been the subject of an English biography before, and it would be good if Mrs. Armstrong could be persuaded to produce as com- petent and exhaustive a book about the others as well.
• Estienne did more than any other printer to spread the New Learning in France. He exercised an enormous influence because he was not only a printer but a publisher, bookseller, scholar, editor and lexicographer as well. Nothing like that is ever seen today and, reading Mrs. Armstrong's study, one wonders how one man could possibly achieve so much. Not very much of hi5 per- sonality emerges from the mass of facts, except for a certain nobility of temper, and one or two interesting sidelights—we learn, for instance, that Latin was alwayi spoken in his house, even by the maidservants. • This nobility, however, did not prevent him from pirating books by other printers, although he complained bitterly when he himself suffered in the same way. And although, towards the end of his life, a book of his was the occasion of what must have been one of the very earliest copyright agreements between two cities, he could never be called an innovator. He had all the prejudice of the Renaissance scholar against illustration in his books, and he was /list as much a child of his time in his attitude to censorship. In his celebrated controversy with the Sorbonne, he objected not to the principle of censorship but to the stupidity of the censors who condemned him but approved Rabelais.
All these details throw an•invaluable light on the organisation of the book trade in the sixteenth century. Especially interesting is the account of the functions of the King's Printer, and it must always be a matter for regret that we have had no monarchs like Francis I (or Louis XIV later) to encourage fine printing here.
Mrs. Armstrong does not profess to be an expert on typography and, apart from a description of Estienne's Hebrew and Greek types, she has little to say about the design of his books, Perhaps there is room, as she says, for another work on this subject.
It would be ungrateful to conclude without a word of praise for the printing and binding of this volume, which is one that Estienne himself would have been proud to produce.
DAVID BLAND
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