7. early bestsellers

The criterion of popularity of medieval books is the number of manuscripts that have survived or are known to have existed. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, with more than eighty manuscripts, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with more than sixty, rank among the favourites of entertaining narrative literature.

From Gutenberg onward the number of editions and the size of each edition have to be combined in assessing the success of a book. Care must be taken, however, to distinguish between the visible, and usually instantaneous, success of some books, which can be expressed in figures, and the imponderable, and usually slow, effect of others, which defies arithmetical analysis. There have always been books which, despite their modest circulation, have exerted a tremendous influence on the general climate of opinion. Neither Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy nor Karl Marx’s Das Kapital was a publisher’s success, but the study of history, art history, sociology, economic theory, political science and the state of the world would be very different from what they are today but for these two books.

On the other hand, the ‘bestseller’ provides the historian with a fairly reliable yardstick of the prevalent mode of thought and taste of a period. There are, of course, certain categories of printed matter which give no clue to the real interests of the public. When, for instance, Johann Luschner printed at Barcelona 18,000 letters of indulgence for the abbey of Montserrat in May 1498, this can be compared only with the printing of income-tax forms, which hardly respond to a genuine demand on the part of a public thirsting for information or entertainment.

For similar reasons schoolbooks must be excluded from the consideration of bestsellers, although their publication has, from the incunabula period onwards, always been the most profitable branch of the publishing trade. Gutenberg’s press issued no fewer than 24 editions of Donatus’s grammar. Some 20 Latin grammars and dictionaries were published by one Cologne printer within only four years. Between 1518 and 1533, Robert Wittington published 13 Latin grammars, all of which had to be reprinted several times. Ten thousand copies of the popular ABC and Little Catechism were sold within eight months in 1585. Lily’s Latin grammar, first published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1527, remained in use at Eton until 1860. And so the tale goes down to Noah Webster’s The American Spelling Book (1783) of which about 65 million copies were sold within a hundred years, and to Hall and Stevens’s School Geometry (1903) and Kennedy’s Latin Primer, probably the best-selling schoolbooks in Great Britain.

The greatest difficulty in assessing bestsellers is our ignorance of the numbers of copies printed or sold of any given book. On the whole, publishers have been rather secretive on the subject unless they want to use such figures for advertising purposes. A statement such as ‘third edition’ or ‘fifth reprint’ may mean much or little, according to the size of each impression. It may, of course, be prudent not to reveal the fact that only 1000 copies have been printed of a book which the blurb asserts ‘no intelligent reader can afford to miss’; but it may be suggested that publishers would do themselves and the public a service if they would openly state ‘2nd edition (11th–20th thousand)’ or whatever the case may be. At best, it would be splendid publicity, free of cost; at worst, it would show the solicitude of a publisher for a book which he considers worth keeping alive even if of limited appeal.

The average edition of a book printed in the fifteenth century was probably not more than about 200 – which, it must be kept in mind, was a 200-fold increase on a scribe’s work. Exceptions can usually be explained by special circumstances. Thus, the 800 copies on paper and 16 on vellum of the Revelations of St Bridget, which Gothan printed in Lübeck in 1492, were commissioned by the convent of Vadstena in Sweden. Aldus Manutius of Venice seems to have been the first publisher who habitually printed editions of 1000 copies. He was also the first publisher to make the imprint of his firm a determining factor in the sale of his books. Book-buyers in 1500, just as book-collectors in 1950, asked for an ‘Aldine’ Horace because of the general reputation of the house rather than the particular quality of the edition.

The first printed book that deserves the appellation of bestseller (and quickly also became a steady seller) was Thomas à Kempis’s De imitatione Christi. Two years after the author’s death (1471), Günther Zainer of Augsburg printed the editio princeps, and before the close of the century 99 editions had left the presses, including translations of which a French one, printed by Heinrich Mayer in Toulouse in 1488, and an Italian one, printed by Miscomini in Florence in 1491, were the earliest. The collected edition of Thomas’s writings which Hochfeder published in Nürnberg in 1494 was less successful, but the Imitation remained the most widely read book in the world, next to the Bible. More than 3000 editions have been listed, and it was considered worthy to be the first publication of the Imprimerie Royale (Paris, 1640) as well as to be included in the popular Penguin Classics.

The next supplier of bestsellers of European format was another Dutchman, Erasmus of Rotterdam. Between 1500 and 1520, 34 editions of 1000 copies each were sold of his Adagia; 25 editions of his Colloquia familiaria were printed between 1518 and 1522 and enlarged and revised editions followed year after year; and the Encomium Moriae surpassed both of them.

Erasmus is a pioneer in the history of letters as much by his personality (which can still be enjoyed in his correspondence) as his writings. Both the Moria and the Colloquia were later put on the Index librorum prohibitorum, which contributed no little to keeping them in circulation. He was the first author deliberately to seek out a suitable publisher and to try to mould the publishing policy of a firm, as well as to make agreements which stipulated author’s fees – an innovation which was not taken up again by either publishers or authors for about 200 years. But then Erasmus had an international reputation which permitted him to impose conditions on publishers who, conversely, could be sure to get their money’s worth. In Venice, 1507–8, he worked in Aldus’s establishment, in Paris he co-operated with the Ascensian Press of his compatriot, Josse Badius, and in 1513 he came – through the mistake or deception of his literary agent in Cologne – into contact with the Basel firm of Johannes Froben, with which his name has ever since been linked. In his last will he made the directors of the firm his heirs and executors.

Erasmus had the failing of many a zealous partisan in that he saw the country going to the dogs when his faction suffered a set-back. Only thus can it be understood that in 1529 he seriously maintained that ‘everywhere where Lutheranism prevails learning is languishing. For what other reason should Luther and Melanchthon recall people so emphatically to the love of studies? The printers assert that, before this gospel spread, they had sold three thousand copies more easily than six hundred now.’

The truth, of course, is that by this time Erasmus’s theological and moral treatises, commentaries on the Scriptures, editions of the Fathers, and philological controversies had been ousted – never to be resuscitated – by the writings of the Reformers. Erasmus’s epitaph on his lifelong friend Thomas More: ‘If only More had not meddled in these dangerous matters and left theological questions to the theologians’ is sufficient to explain his dethronement by an age which took very seriously theology and other ‘dangerous matters’. (The first edition of More’s Utopia (1517) was printed in Louvain for want of an English printer brave enough to print it.) Both Luther and Loyola rejected Erasmus.

The great publishing successes of the sixteenth century were achieved in the realm of theology. With the publication in 1517 of the 95 theses (those ‘95 sledgehammer blows directed against [the sale of indulgences], the most flagrant ecclesiastical abuse of the age’), which he had nailed to the door of the university church, the unknown young professor of Wittenberg university became at one stroke a figure of national fame, and the small Wittenberg press of Hans Lufft suddenly gained a place among the biggest firms. Thirty editions of Luther’s Sermon on Indulgences and 21 editions of his Sermon on the Right Preparation of the Heart – authorized and pirated – poured from the presses within two years (1518–20). Over 4000 copies of his address To the Christian Nobility were sold within five days in 1520.

The popular appeal of these pamphlets was far outstripped by the sales of Luther’s translation of the Bible. In all about 150 Bibles were produced before 1500, and there had appeared in print nearly 20 German Bibles before Luther, all of which had found a market, above all the splendid Low German version of 1494, printed by Stephen Arndes in Lübeck; but Luther’s translation was the first to become a bestseller in the strict meaning of the term.

The first edition of his New Testament was printed in September 1522 by Melchior Lotter, with woodcuts by Lucas Cranach. Despite the high price (1¹/₂ fl.) 5000 copies were sold within a few weeks, and in December a second edition was called for. Fourteen authorized and 66 pirated editions came out within the next two years. The Old Testament began to appear in parts from 1523, and the first whole Bible came out in 1534. The number of copies printed is not known; that of the edition of 1541 was 1500. All in all, about 400 editions of the whole Bible or parts of it appeared during Luther’s lifetime. Of these, only a quarter were genuine Wittenberg editions; the others were pirated reprints. It is quite impossible to give even an approximate estimate of the number of copies printed, especially as there would have to be added numerous unauthorized editions with major or minor variants.

Luther’s fierce opponent, Hieronymus Emser, not only used Luther’s text almost verbatim for his ‘translation’, but also incorporated Cranach’s woodcuts including the one depicting papal Rome as the Babylonian woman of the Revelation – plagiarists cannot be too careful!

Apart from the writings of Erasmus and Luther only two books of the sixteenth century can be acclaimed as bestsellers. One is Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, ‘the culminating point in the development of the Italian romantic epic’ (Barbara Reynolds), which came out in its final version in 1532, shortly before the poet’s death. Within the next ten years it was reprinted 36 times and down to the present more editions of it have been published than of any other Italian book. It is, however, worth noticing that Orlando furioso is a typical ‘national’ bestseller. This superb epitome of Renaissance civilization has never captured the imagination of non-Italians, even to the extent of the distant respect accorded to Tasso’s unreadable Gerusalemme liberta. It is significant that no translation of even moderate distinction has ever appeared in any European language.

The other is Das Narrenschiff (‘The ship of fools’) by Sebastian Brant (Basel, 1494, and often reprinted elsewhere): a satirical work containing knowing references to classical writers, intended to entertain a new sophisticated reading public. In the book is one of the first references to Columbus’s discovery of America.