Bound in Venice: The Serene Republic and the Dawn of the Book by Alessandro Marzo Magno

Informative but disorganized, frequently digresses into trivia

Following the pioneering of the printing press (in the Western world) by Johannes Gutenberg and others in Germany, German immigrants soon brought the technology to Venice. At that time, Venice was more than just a city in Italy, which had not yet formed into the nation we know today. The Republic of Venice included a stretch of territories in Italy, Greece, the Balkans, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Venice’s unique position as a center of world trade, a mulitcultural melting pot, a hub of intellectual activity, and a religiously tolerant environment makes it the ideal blooming ground for the publishing industry. By the early 16th century, roughly half of the books published in Europe were printed in Venice. In his 2013 book Bound in Venice, Italian journalist Alessandro Marzo Magno chronicles the rising, thriving, and eventual decline of this publishing boomtown. Along the way, he provides mini-biographies of important historical figures, such as printer extraordinaire Aldus Manutius and blockbuster author Pietro Aretino, and highlights landmark books in the history of Venetian printing.

In substance and structure, Magno’s book is similar to The Bookshop of the World, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen’s 2019 study of printing and publishing in the 17th-century Netherlands. Separate chapters cover different genres of publishing (e.g. religious books, medical books, music publishing, maps and atlases) or publishing in different languages (e.g. Hebrew, Greek, Armenian). However, unlike Pettegree and der Weduwen’s study, which is very articulate, logically organized, and really brings the time and place of its subject to life, Bound in Venice is a disorganized mess. Magno jumps all over the place chronologically, his prose lurches from one topic to another like a string of non-sequiturs, and he frequently goes off into digressions that amount to little more than trivia. He can’t seem to mention the name of a city, for example, without adding that oh, by the way, this is where some totally unrelated person comes from, be they athlete, actress, or politician of any century but the one he’s talking about. There are a whole lot of parentheses in this text, even parentheses within parentheses, and much of what’s printed between the covers of Bound in Venice could be considered merely parenthetical information. About the best one can glean from this incoherent stream of names and dates are the details of some historic firsts—first book published in Armenian, first medical book published with illustrations, first published geological treatise, first periodical, first board game, and so on. If all these firsts were compiled into an appendix, there would be no reason to read the book.

Bound in Venice is made even harder to endure by its atrocious grammar. This can likely be blamed, however, not on the author but on his translator, Gregory Conti. The English prose is replete with incomplete sentences, orphaned clauses, and unfinished thoughts. Repeated and unnecessary words abound. The punctuation is so haphazard that it almost reads as if the commas were placed by arbitrarily throwing darts at the manuscript. On the bright side, I didn’t notice many spelling errors.

Despite all its faults, those with an avid interest in the history of books are bound to find plenty of interesting nuggets of information in this miscellany of data and anecdotes. If anyone can find pleasure in a jumbled mishmash of arcane factoids, it’s a bibliophile. Just know what you’re in for. If you are looking for an authoritative history on 16th-century book production in Venice, expertly written with impeccable scholarly rigor, this isn’t it (at least not the English edition).
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R718657Q1D88I/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm