Erhard Ratdolt and His Work at Venice by Gilbert R. Redgrave

Arcane details for scholars and collectors

Printed page by Ratdolt

Of the old masters of the early days of European printing, few have survived in public memory to become household names. Everyone knows Joannes Gutenberg and his famous Bibles, of course, and many in the publishing, printing, or design industries may have heard of Aldus Manutius or William Caxton. Other than that, if these pioneers of the printing press don’t have a font named after them, their names have been lost to all but the most knowledgeable collectors. Alas, one such unsung fontless hero is Erhard Ratdolt, a 15th century printer from Augsburg, Germany. Collectors in the know recognize Ratdolt for the superior quality of his printing work. He is also the first European printer to successfully print multicolor woodcut illustrations beyond just black and red.

There aren’t very many books about Ratdolt, and if you search for one, the first to come up will likely be Erhard Ratdolt and His Work in Venice by Gilbert Richard Redgrave. Published in 1894, this slim book is in the public domain and therefore downloadable for free from sites like HathiTrust and the Internet Archive. If you’re looking for an introduction to Ratdolt’s life and work, however, this is probably not the book for you. The text of this book is a paper that was originally presented by Redgrave at a meeting of the Bibliographical Society in London, so the information is intended for a very specialized audience of scholars, collectors, and experts in early printing.

Redgrave focuses exclusively on the decade that Ratdolt spent in Venice, where he began his career as a printer and did some of his finest and most groundbreaking work. Redgrave doesn’t provide much biographical or historical information because he assumes his audience already knows all there is to know about Ratdolt’s career. Mostly, Redgrave talks about specific books that Ratdolt printed, some of which Redgrave owns in his personal collection, and how his copies differ from other copies due to variations in the printing. In keeping with this topic, the latter half of this book is a detailed bibliography of all the books that Ratdolt and company printed in Venice. Undoubtedly, this compilation of book specifications is a valuable source for collectors of Ratdolt’s work, many of whom would have been members of the Bibliographical Society. For the uninitiated reader, however, this book really doesn’t offer much of use.

The best thing about Redgrave’s monograph is that he includes a few reproductions of Ratdolt’s work that exhibit the printer’s skill and his fine taste in typography and decorative illustrations. These attractive examples offer some sense of Ratdolt’s career, but for the most part any narrative of the pioneer printer’s life or career gets lost in the morass of arcane detail in Redgrave’s text.
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