The King of Typography

Christopher Plantin, a leather tooler of Antwerp, was making a late delivery one night in 1555 when thugs set upon him with swords and deeply pierced his shoulder. Thus crippled, Plantin had to turn to an easier and less muscular occupation; having made many leather bindings for books, he chose publishing. The same year he printed a small volume on etiquette called The Instruction of a Girl of Noble Birth--the first publication of what was to become the greatest printing house of the 16th and ryth centuries.

The old presses still run at Plantin's establishment in Antwerp, but only to print souvenirs for tourists or the scrolls for such honorary citizens of Antwerp as General Anthony C. McAuliffe, Viscount Montgomery and Sir Winston Churchill. The house is now a museum, filled not only with the tools of the trade (15,000 type matrices and 5,000 punches, mostly from the 16th century), but also with more than 18,000 drawings, woodcuts and copperplate engravings used for illustrations. Though it is the best collection of its kind, it has been shown outside Antwerp only twice--in Belgrade and Paris' Bibliotheque Nationale. Last week a generous portion of the collection was on view at Dartmouth College in the hills of Hanover, N.H. Some rare and old items: a Spanish manuscript of a medical treatise by Andreas Vesalius and Juan Valverda, ten title pages designed by Peter Paul Rubens, and such fastidious examples of the illustrator's art as the drawing of the Adoration of the Shepherds by Martin de Vos.

Plantin has been called "the Henry Ford of printing," for he was the first to turn out books, not merely for rich and noble collectors, but for as wide an audience as possible--the whole "republique Chretienne," as he called it. In 34 years he printed 1,500 publications amounting to more than a million volumes. He pioneered in the use of copperplate engraving, and got original type faces (still widely copied in modern printing) from the great French designers Garamond and Granjon. He printed the first pocket-sized books for travelers, produced the first modern atlas. He spoke French, Flemish, Spanish, German and Latin, and scholars from all over Europe came to Antwerp to get him to publish their works.

Plantin was made Printer to the King by Philip II of Spain, but also kept on good terms with his own Prince 'William of Orange-Nassau. He died worth $1,600,000 and was buried in the cathedral in a grave marked "The King of Typography."

Christopher Plantin left his business to a son-in-law, Jan Moretus, and the house of Plantin-Moretus continued to flourish for three more generations. But gradually it went into a decline, and in 1876 the Plantin-Moretus family sold it to the city as a museum. Today, says Dartmouth Professor Ray Nash, "it is the greatest single source for the history of printing, publishing, book design and illustration." But it is also something more. Plantin and his successors hired the best craftsmen and artists they could find to turn their books into works of art, an achievement rarely matched, but never forgotten, by those who have published since.

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