PRINTER’S NOTE TO THE READER [Vesalius's instructions to the
printer]
Since the letter sent from Italy by Andreas Vesalius, which we received
along with the illustrations made for these books of De humani corporis fabrica
and their Epitome, seemed to us to contain many things about which we thought
the reader should generally be informed at the outset, and which seemed
noteworthy to printers, especially those who have such little regard for the
decrees of princes and are born to degrade things published for literary use,
we judged it worthwhile to communicate it to our kind readers just as it was
sent to us.
TO JOHANNES OPORINUS, PROFESSOR OF GREEK LITERATURE AT BASEL, his very
dear friend.Greetings.
You will soon receive with this letter, by way of Milanese merchants,
the Danoni, the wood blocks engraved for my books De humani corporis fabrica
and their Epitome. I hope they will be delivered to Basel as safe and sound as
when I packed them lest they be damaged in any way, or their transport cause
any harm. In this I was aided by the meticulous engraver and by Nicolaus
Stopius, the trustworthy business agent of the Bombergs here, a young man with
a first-class humanistic education.
Between the wood blocks we have placed an exemplar
of each illustration, piece by piece, together with a printed
copy of each figure on which I have written where each should be placed, lest
by chance their order and arrangement cause trouble for you or your workers and
they be printed out of order. You will readily see in the exemplar where the
type style must be changed: I have distinguished with lines the [roman] part of
the text, which contains my account of the organs and is separated into
chapters of running text, from the [italic] part explaining the characters
engraved in the illustrations, which is for that reason called the index of
figures and characters. In the running text, which is uninterrupted with
figures to be identified, you will use small letters which in printing shops
you call superlinear. These will correspond to annotations that I have added to
the inside margins with less industry than tedious drudgery to serve as a kind
of commentary for the reader, explaining in what illustration the part being
mentioned can be seen. In the same way, the annotations on the outer margin set
forth a summary of the narrative. For the inside marginalia, I have used a
system to avoid prolixity: whenever an illustration is cited which stands at
the head of the chapter where the note is seen, I do not state the chapter
number; I add such a number elsewhere if the illustration is at the head of
another chapter. Again, if an illustration is found in the book where the note
occurs, I do not include the book number. You will find fully explained in the
titles of the books and in the figure legends why I thought illustrations
should be placed in one spot or another. For markers to locate anatomical parts
in a particular illustration, we engraved on our blocks characters in constant
use in printing shops, usually beginning with capital letters, then the other
[lower-case] roman letters, then small Greek letters, followed by Greek
capitals which are not cognate to the roman; when all these were not enough, we
used numerical figures and whatever other signs occur in ordinary type
sets.
In the description of these identifiers it has been my practice to place
an identifying letter by itself in the margin when it has a single, separate
legend. If a description does not apply to a single item and is written for
another letter as well, I put a period after the letter in the margin to make
it clear to the reader that it is together with others in a series. I have
already written to you at greater length about this system, and particularly
why I thought the figure legend must not be combined with my account of the
anatomy.
Now, in every way I can, I urge
you and ask that everything be printed as elegantly and swiftly as possible, so
that with the aid of my efforts you may fulfill the expectation that all have
formed about your printing house, now for the first time established for the
great convenience of scholars and by happy omen of the Muses.
Special attention will have to be paid while printing the plates,
because they are not just simple outlines drawn in the common schoolbook
manner; the artistic style (except sometimes where the surface is outlined on
which the specimens are resting) is nowhere neglected. Although here your
judgement is sound and I have the highest expectations regarding your
meticulous craftsmanship, I cherish this one hope, that while printing you
imitate as closely as possible the sample made by the engraver as his proof
copy, which you will find packed together with the wooden forms. Thus no
identifying character, however hidden in shading, will escape the sharp-eyed
and careful reader; and the thickness of the lines in certain parts, which is
the most artful feature of these illustrations and thoroughly delightful for me
to view, will appear along with the elegant darkening of the shadows.But I should not write these things out for you, since it depends on the
smoothness and solidity of the paper, and particularly on the diligence of your
efforts, that each of the illustrations issued from your printing shop be like
the specimens we are now sending, of which we have printed a number here, and
uniform through many copies. I shall take pains to set out soon to see you and
will stay over in Basel, if not for the entire duration of the printing, at
least for some time, and I will bring with me a copy of the decree of the
Venetian senate forbidding anyone from
printing
any of my illustrations without my consent.
Though you have a general writ of copyright for
all the copies of a book that you are the first to publish, my mother will send
you the Emperor’s from Brussels. It was obtained for me some time ago, but I
did not arrange to have it written out until now to make it more recent and
valid for more years. The bishop of Montpellier, the ambassador to Venice,
undertook to obtain copyright of the French king for me.
Granted, I have little worry on that score: indeed, I would not think
that even a page should be taken up with copies of the official letters of
copyright. For what the decrees of princes are worth among booksellers and the
printers who are now so densely planted on every corner, can be seen abundantly
in the fate of my Tabulae anatomicae, originally published three years ago in
Venice and afterward hideously plagiarized everywhere even while it was being
dressed up in more pretentious titles. At Augsburg, my dedicatory letter to
Narcissus Vertunus, chief physician of the Emperor and the kingdom of Naples,
certainly a rare model of the physicians of our age,
was deleted
and some ranter wrote a preface in German, blathering ill-deserved attacks on
Avicenna
and other Arabs, describing me as one of the condensed Galens, and (to delude
the buyer) falsely claiming I had compressed into six illustrations what Galen
covered at length in more than thirty books. After that he adds that he has
rendered Latin terms into German, and claims that he has employed Greek and
Arabic terms, when in fact he has not only removed them completely, but omitted
the ones he was unable to translate — the very terms for which the plates
should have been particularly suitable, except for the fact that the plates
bore only a distorted resemblance to the original Venetian engraving. The man
at Cologne who put his hand to these plates was considerably less skilled and
experienced than the Augsburg engraver.
Much as someone there may write in the printer’s defense that
human anatomy can be better examined in my illustrations than in a dissection
of the human fabric, and also that the forgers greatly improved on my excellent
illustrations, nevertheless they completely spoiled the art work and added a
bungled diagram of the nerves, of which I had made a rough sketch and added a
figure legend for one or two friends who asked me for it until I should publish
the finished plate.
At Paris they did a good job of printing the first three
plates but left out the others, presumably because of the difficulty of
engraving them, though if they had taken students into account the first plates
are the ones they should have omitted.
The Strasburger
whom Fuchs
so fiercely castigates for certain repeated plagiarisms, and
whom I could call a plagiarist with much greater cause than he, has done the
worst disservice to medical study because he has so disgracefully reduced
illustrations which could never be made large enough for students, colored them
execrably, arbitrarily surrounded them with the Augsburger’s version of the
text, and published them as his own work. His glory, it seems, is the envy of
another
who is still
indiscriminately compiling pictures from other people’s books everywhere and
publishing books of that kind at Marburg and Frankfurt. As a result, I am well
content with the divine and most felicitous talents of the Italians, and I feel
great affection for them because they are seeking a different judgement
regarding the doctors of Germany, because of the lackeys
of certain unscrupulous printers; such persons dare to assemble
every kind of publication for the sake of snapping up some cheap reward from
the printers: they alter, copy, and publish them under their own name to look
like some new publication and pass over the decrees of princes in silence.
I write this so you will understand how little I believe such practices
apply to your printing; I should rather have it understood that I would much
more happily send my woodblocks to any hardworking printer, and contribute as
best I can to a literary purpose rather than that some incompetent, whom I for
one shall endeavor in all ways to obstruct, should copy illustrations engraved
with so much labor for the use of all studies, and that they should come into
the hands of men under some pretentious title,
just as if I had
personally sent them out in such poor condition. This is the chief reason why I
prepared the plates at my own expense, and now again and again beg you that
they be preserved by your workmen as undamaged and clean as possible.
Good health, your Andreas VesaliusVenice, Sept. 9
