You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. This week I'm joined by Erin

Maglacki, a historian at Sheffield University,

and the author of Venice's intimate empire, family life and scholarship in the Renaissance Mediterranean.

She has a piece in the latest issue of the LRB on the Renaissance Venetian printer, Aldous Manusius,

whom she describes as the bibliophile's bibliophile, though not only that.

Anyone who has sat in the park with a paperback,

Erin writes, has Aldous to thank for freeing the book from the library, the desk, the metal chain

that sometimes bound books to shelves. Her piece is a review of Aldous Manusius, The Invention of the

Publisher by Orin Magogales. Hello, Erin, and thank you very much for talking with me.

Thank you so much for having me. It's so fun to be back to talk to you about this piece.

Yeah, better than Florentime plagues we talked about nearly four years ago. You call

Aldous Manusius the secular patron saint of pedants and editors. He revived the use of the

semicolon, which would be enough for my

Hall of Fame on its own. But why else was he so important? Well, yeah, so he, I think probably

the best way of explaining his importance is to say that he issued more first editions of classical

tax than anyone ever before, but also anyone's sin. And this was from his

press in Venice that he started in the sort of mid-1490s and continued until his death in 1515.

So in that time, he printed ancient Greek and ancient Latin text that had never before been

printed at a printing press that had previously

only circulated in manuscript. He really created a kind of readership for Greek tax in particular

that hadn't existed before his press, as well as kind of producing books in new formats that

changed what reading meant. And that's kind of my

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