Aldus and His Dream Book: An Illustrated Essay

Book Club of California Quarterly News-Letter, vol. 55, no. 2, 1993
Christmas shopping led me to the discovery of a fine little paperback, newly published, that has received inadequate publicity in the book world. It is Aldus and His Dream Book by Helen Barolini. I'm impressed.


Italian Americana, 1993
Where else are you going to find this graceful biographical sketch and these woodcuts? Italica Press composed Aldus and His Dream Book on a Macintosh computer using a program named after the scholar-publisher himself, the Aldus PageMaker. It's a small, inexpensive, carefully researched volume, printed in Adobe Garamond on acid-free paper in a Smyth-sewn binding. Aldus would have liked it."


Italian Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, 1992
The book is an important and stimulating contribution to our understanding of early printing."


A Common Reader, Summer 1992
In this marvelous, learned, and friendly volume, Helen Barolini traces the contours of his career and reveals Aldus and the Aldine press in historical and cultural context; she admirably conveys the magic of an age in which the book as we know it was invented. In addition, this book reproduces all the illustrations, and many full pages, from the Aldine edition of Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, considered to be among the masterpieces of printing and book design. Altogether, Aldus and His Dream Book is a valuable, delightful, satisfying tome.


Book Description
Aldus and His Dream Book is a tribute to the life and work of the pioneering scholar-publisher, Aldus Manutius (1449/50-1515). Helen Barolini's text discusses Aldus, his education, his publishing vision, his typographic innovations, and his famous Venetian press. At the same time, this book reproduces all the illustrations, and many of the full pages, from the Aldine press edition of Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which many consider the most beautiful book printed in the Renaissance. It also includes a bibliography of works on Aldus and the Hypnerotomachia. Second printing. Illustrated, introduction, notes, bibliography, index.


From the Publisher
This edition is certain to appeal to the historian, bibliophile, art historian, designer, and student of the many psychologically rich and emblematic illustrations that have delighted and intrigued generations of readers and scholars.


About the Author
Helen Barolini is the author of many works of fiction and criticism and was the editor of the widely acclaimed Dream Book, a collection of writings by Italian-American women, which received an American Book Award.


Excerpted from Aldus and His Dream Book : An Illustrated Essay by Helen Barolini. Copyright © 1991. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Given Aldus' natural proclivity towards seriousness and an austere morality, plus his deathbed pledge to dedicate himself in full to the religious life if he is spared, it is rather surprising that his great endeavor following his recovery was the printing in 1499, at the close of the age of incunabula, of that somewhat scurrilous and certainly paganized book of the pursuit of love, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the most glorious book of the Renaissance, profusely illustrated and richly ornamented, which to this day remains a mystery, a text of symbols and bizarre jargon in various languages and dialects.


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