Aldo Manuzio, V Centenary of the death of the rst modern editor. One of his original edition in the Library of the University of Murcia

Abstract

On the occasion of the V Centenary of the death of Aldo Manuzio, the University of Murcia digitises and makes available the beautiful original edition preserved in the General Library Maria Moliner. This emphasises a great gure of the modern history of the book.

Aldo is very important for the publication and the distribution of almost two hundred titles of the most signicant Greek and Latin classical authors, within an editorial framework that could already be dened contemporary. Aldo Manuzio is considered the rst modern publisher for the attention dedicated to the choice of books that he published. In addition to be an editor, he was also a writer and a salesman. In the following pages the attention will be focused on both the original edition kept in Murcia and his trajectory in becoming a unique and exemplary humanistic gure. He symbolises, with his idea of the book as an object and with his immense cultural and editorial entrepreneurship, the modern, yet humanistic, dream of a potential universal library in which every book exists, relates or moves away from another one thanks to the existence of all the other books.