Hieronimo Squarciafico

Hieronimo Squarciafico was a 15th-century Venetian editor, who worked for the Italian humanist and printer Aldus Manutius, the founder of the Aldine Press at Venice.^[1][2] Squarciafico is best known for bemoaning the printing press in an aphorism that reads as a pithy summation of his contemporaries' concerns over the spread of printed works: "Abundance of books makes men less studious".^[3] Initially, in 1477, he wrote enthusiastically about the works he was engaged in having printed.^[4] Yet, a few years later, in 1481, Squarciafico appeared to hold a more skeptical view when he imagined a discussion between the spirits of the great authors of the past being held in the Elysian Fields in which some of them lauded the craft of printing; while others complained that "printing had fallen into the hands of unlettered men, who corrupted almost everything";^[4] and yet still others lamented that "their works would perish if they were not printed, since this art compels all writers to give way to it".^[5]

Squarciafico remains relevant today in criticisms of modern electronic culture;^[3] he has, in recent times, been quoted by theologian Walter J. Ong and technology critic Nicholas G. Carr, among others.^[6][7]

Notes

Bibliography

• Ong, Walter J. (1982), Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Methuen Publishing 
• Lowry, Martin J.C. (1979), The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press