Beginning Aldus@SFU

Welcome to Aldus@SFU, a project at Simon Fraser University which digitizes, highlights, and remediates SFU Library’s Wosk–McDonald Aldine Collection, comprising ~126 books^[1] published by the famed Venetian press of Aldus Manutius between the 1490s and the 1580s.

These books are exemplars in the history of publishing and the history of the book more broadly because they are key models and the prototypes for the book as we have come to know it today. These books span the end of the ‘incunabula’ period (1450–1500) in which the printed book is still escaping its manuscript heritage, to the beginning of the modern era in which the form of the book, its layout, typography, navigational features, and so on become recognizable to us today as what a book should look like. This is the dawn of the modern print era.

The Aldine Press generally and the Wosk–McDonald Collection in particular provide a terrific crucible for studying the evolution and emergence of the modern form of the book, because it plays out very much in these volumes, across these decades. There were, of course, other publishers in Europe and indeed in Venice in this period, but Aldus’ enterprise has long been recognized as the premiere press of the time, in part because of the scale and scope of his business (hundreds of editions, thousands of copies, and an international market), in part because of the innovations (in the form of the book, in typography and layout), and in part because of his scholarly work in establishing and promoting what we now recognize as the classical canon – the foundation of humanities scholarship.

Aldus@SFU had its beginnings in 2015, the quincentenary of Aldus’ death, when we (Publishing@SFU and SFU’s Special Collections & Rare Books division) began digitizing the collection to share online. Over the past few years, Alessandra Bordini and I have been strategizing how to make the project into an exemplar of open, social scholarship in showcasing, interpreting, and remediating the collection online with an eye to attracting non-traditional, non-scholarly audiences: students, designers, publishers, and interested bibliophiles more generally.

The project is simply awash with ideas and ambitions… the collection itself is an embarrassment of riches, and there are so many things we want to do that it’s sometimes difficult to get our agenda to sit in a straight line. This blog is one way of sorting through all that: sorting through the books, the Aldine press, the historical context, the technologies (both old and new), and what we mean to do by “remediating” them.

Stay tuned for much more!