After Hours with Aldus Manutius
November 4, 2021, via Zoom In the last decade of the 15th century, a middle-aged private tutor named Aldus Manutius made the stunning decision to leave the comfortable employ of a noble family and enter the cutthroat world of printing. The implications of that career change reverberate to this day throughout the worlds of textual criticism, book design, typography, book production, copyright law, collecting, and classical philology. Whether by accident or design, Aldus’s career change put him in the right place at the right time to apply the relatively new technology of printing with movable type to the difficult task of printing Greek, catalyzing the re-entry of ancient science to western Europe. As a result, virtually the entire surviving Greek canon found its way into print for the first time, and therefore into posterity. Collector and scholar G. Scott Clemons and Jason W. Dean, the Library’s Vice President for Special Collections, explore the enduring legacy of the Aldine Press, exemplified by materials held by the Library. The speakers: G. Scott Clemons has collected the Aldine Press since his days as an undergraduate in the Classics Department at Princeton University. He is the immediate past president of the Grolier Club of New York City, the treasurer of the Bibliographical Society of America, and is a trustee of Rare Books School at the University of Virginia, as well as the Morgan Library and Museum. In 2015 he co-curated an exhibition at the Grolier Club, drawn largely from his own collection, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Aldus Manutius. By day, Clemons is a partner at the investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York City. Jason W. Dean is Vice President for Special Collections at the Linda Hall Library. Prior to coming to the Library, Jason was Director of Special Collections & Archives at Southwestern University. He has previously held positions at the University of Arkansas and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Hardin-Simmons University and his MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University. He is a member of the Grolier Club, and a past Institute of Library and Museum Services-Rare Book School fellow.
