Wyman’s earlier chapter on Aldus Manutius (fl. 1494-1515) makes very clear the serious issues that faced early printers: the average lifespan of a Venetian press founded between 1479 and 1490 was eighteen months. The vast majority were able to bring out only a single edition of a single book before they failed. Start-up expenses for a new press were enormous: the printing machine itself, of course, and the paper and the labor all cost money, but the greatest investment was the metal types, which costs thousands of ducats and took months or years to create. (For comparison, a well-off nobleman’s estates might bring in two hundred ducats a year.) And then, of course, you had to bet on your product: how many people wanted to buy your new edition of Caesar? There weren’t enough rich and educated men in Venice to justify a print run of 500, but if you began to expand to other cities, how far should you expand? Would someone in Augsburg or Cambridge or Lyon want a copy? Could you get it to them and get paid? The marginal cost of printing one additional book was more or less the cost of the paper, a tiny fraction of the total cost of your print run, but what if you produced 3000 copies and then discovered that a competitor in Danzig brought out the same text six months ago? What if you didn’t catch errors in the manuscript you used as a source, or the ship carrying your books went down, or your agent in Germany pocketed the profits?
Of course, printing still happened, and Aldus Manutius took risks: he created a whole new set of types in Greek and brought out first grammars and dictionaries, then beautiful editions Theocritus, Hesiod, Aristophanes, Aristotle, and more. Although Aldus himself was never a particularly impressive scholar, the Aldine Press made ancient Greek accessible to early modern Europe, so one could argue that he did more for the Renaissance4 than any other single individual. But he didn’t do much for the economics of printing. That took the Reformation.
Aldus had, to some degree, been able to create his own market for Greek texts by introducing a reading public eager for classical learning to a new language. But he had nothing on Martin Luther, who wrote — and sold — forty-five works in 1518 and 1519. It started simply enough: Johann Tetzel, the Dominican preacher whose indulgence-selling campaign5 had first roused Luther’s ire, wrote a reply to the Ninety-Five Theses, which was printed up (and then burned by an angry crowd). Luther wrote back a short, punchy text, the Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, in German this time to appeal to the public — and appeal it did, getting at least twelve editions across Leipzeig, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Basel, and Wittenberg. Tetzel replied, also in print and in German; Luther shot back; other opponents of reform began to pick up on some of the more radical interpretations of Luther’s arguments and Luther, needled, came out with increasingly extreme and vitriolic responses. And it all sold like gangbusters.
No one had realized there was such a market for vernacular arguments about church reform, but printers quickly realized that it would all sell — at enormous profits. Most of Luther’s works were short, eight pages or fewer, so they could be printed on a single sheet of paper in quarto format. This meant minimal up-front investment, no more months or years of setting and printing an entire volume before you could make money; anyone between major editions could make a few quick ducats by printing a Luther pamphlet. Of course, small print jobs like handbills, advertisements, and even those indulgences (which were also printed, though often on vellum) had often filled the space and coffers between major editions, but the demand for reform pamphlets dwarfed anything that had come before. The controversy of their contents heightened the appeal, and as Luther’s ideas spread in print defenders of the church published their own rejoinders. Again and again, Luther responded, pushed by his interlocutors and the popularity of his more extreme views into positions he would never have espoused on October 31, 1517, when he nailed his call for disputation to the door of the church in Wittenberg.
This should be a familiar dynamic to anyone who’s spent five minutes on Twitter: extreme and controversial statements get people’s attention, and if a platform or medium can make money off people’s attention then it’s in their interests to publicize extremism and controversy. Many of the printers were not themselves particularly invested in the question of church reform, but they knew what sold — and before long, it was radical advocates of violent revolution like Thomas “God instructs all the birds of the heavens to consume the flesh of princes” Müntzer, rather than boring old Martin Luther, who became the Main Characters of the press. But printing thrived.
From the article: