Elzevir Family

For more than a century, across six generations, the Dutch family of Elzevir ran one of the most influential and successful publishing houses in Western Europe. Rising to prominence at the height of the Renaissance, a period that saw a remarkable flourishing of intellectual thought in both the arts and the applied sciences, the Elzevir publishing house was responsible for disseminating across Europe not only landmark classical texts in religion and philosophy and the poetry and drama of antiquity but also groundbreaking and controversial contemporary work in the theoretical sciences, particularly physics and astronomy, in the face of heated criticism from entrenched and powerful conservative Catholic forces centered in the Vatican. The family publishing house effectively closed with the death of the last male Elzevir in 1712. The name was appropriated in the late nineteenth century by the fledgling Elsevier Publishing to align itself with the Elzevir reputation for quality.

Brief History

The crucial role that book printers, bookbinders, and book sellers had in the unprecedented spread of literary and scientific thinking is often neglected in accounts of the Renaissance. German Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in the mid-fifteenth century. Within a generation of Gutenberg’s printing press, the need for experienced and competent printers and binders as well as careful and educated editors was urgent. Books became among the most sought after commodities in Western Europe Books became a sign of status and intelligence in the burgeoning middle class, and the rising university system looked to book printers for ways to provide the wider culture with access to critical new thinking and theoretical work being done in schools and laboratories.

Few men were as prepared for that opportunity as Lodewijk (Louis) Elzevir (c. 1546–1617). Apprenticed as a printer by one of the most respected print shops in the town of Leuven (now part of Belgium), Elzevir migrated to the city of Leiden, a commercial hub in northwest Holland, to open his own printing firm. He published his first volume in 1593, just months after Columbus landed in the New World. Elzevir sized up the growing market opportunities and recognized the need for tailoring books to the needs of the consumer.

The Elzevir imprint came to stand for books designed to be read by people on the go—not the elite, the aristocracy, or the well-off, but rather for merchants and their families, educated but hungry for more learning. The books were smaller, their margins narrower, and their font designed for easy reading. To further meet that market, Elzevir pioneered pocket-sized editions and redesigned the binding to make their books sturdier. Hiring editors with a variety of language backgrounds, Elzevir brought out high quality, inexpensive editions of contemporary works as well as classical, in Dutch, Latin, English, French, and German. Taking advantage of major exporting pipelines, Elzevir before his death in 1617 had already established the name across Europe as synonymous with quality editions impeccably edited and elegantly designed and available at affordable prices.

After Elzevir’s death, his son, Bonaventure, and his grandson, Abraham, took over the firm and, under their guidance, within fifty years the Elzevir family was known around the world for its quality books. Elzevir stayed a family business until, in 1712, after publishing more than three thousand titles, the firm quietly went out of business when the last of the family line died leaving no heir.

Impact

In its century of publishing dominance, the house of Elzevir published some of the most important titles from classic literature and thought, including works by Cicero, Virgil, Aristotle, Hesiod, as well as a wide ranging catalog of Old and New Testament works, each impeccably edited and printed in generous legible typeface that welcomed readers. But the Elzevir family also established critical ties to the emerging university system and became the de facto archivist for the new theoretical works being conducted in scientific research departments in Holland and across Europe. As part of a Protestant country out of the reach of Catholic censure, Elzevir cataloged and published more than five hundred doctoral theses in the sciences, helping to establish the network of theoretical thought that would define the High Renaissance. Most notably, in 1638, agents of the Elzevir family secured a smuggled copy of Galileo’s final scientific treatise, called The Two New Sciences, written while the dying astronomer was under house arrest in Italy at the direction of the Vatican, which regarded his pioneering work on planetary movement as heresy. Elzevir published the book after publishing houses in the Catholic countries of France, Poland, and Germany had declined.

Long after the publishing firm closed its doors in the early eighteenth century, the Elzevir family name carried with it great respect in the emerging world of antiquarian dealers in nineteenth century Europe. The books, some more than three centuries after their publication, were renowned not only for their remarkable durability but also for their careful editing and gorgeous page designs. But more important than the Elzevir family reputation for exquisite collectables (individual Elzevir editions have sold at auction for upwards of $50,000), was their historic mission to bring together academics and readers. Their insignia was a leafy vine wrapped around the base of a flourishing tree with the Latin logo: Non solus or Not Alone. The Elzevir credo that scholars and readers needed each other and mutually supported each other was a radical idea at the time and one that carries potent implications in the twenty-first century, in which academics seem distanced and irrelevant to the mass market of readers. The Elzevir family dedicated itself to bringing information, ideas, and artistic expressions to the hands (and minds) of everyday people.

Bibliography

Abel, Richard. The Gutenberg Bible: A History of Print Culture. Livingston: Transaction, 2012. Print.

Dreger, Alice. Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science. New York: Penguin, 2015. Print.

Frederickson, Elinar E. "The Dutch Publishing Scene: Elsevier and North Holland." In A Century of Science Publishing. E. E. Frederickson, ed. Amsterdam: IOS P, 2001: 61–76. Print.

Man, John. Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words.New York: Wiley, 2002. Print.

---. The Gutenberg Revolution: How Printing Changed the Course of History. London: Transworld, 2010. Print.

Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010. Print.

Rowland, Wade. Gutenberg’s Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation between Galileo and the Church. New York: Arcade, 2011. Print.

Spiegel, Taru. "In Harmony Small Things Grow: The Elzevir Family of Publishers and Printers." Library of Congress, 21 June 2019, blogs.loc.gov/international-collections/2019/06/in-harmony-small-things-grow-the-elzevir-family-of-publishers-and-printers/. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024.

"A Short History of Elsevier." Elsevier. Web. 2 July 2015.