In condemning Egenolff’s ignorance, Fuchs elevates his own professional status as a physician by implying that the study of botany is too sophisticated to be understood by lay figures without appropriate scholarly instruction. Egenolff’s encroachment on Fuchs’s work was neither surprising nor unprovoked: even as Fuchs praised the quality of Isingrin’s printing in his 1542 epistle, he also expressly condemned Egenolff’s skill as a printer and implied that the university-educated Egenolff lacked the knowledge needed to publish works of botany.
Nearly immediately after it appeared, De historia’s carefully produced illustrations were copied and adapted to accompany a new edition of Dioscorides’ De materia medica edited by Walther Ryff and published in Frankfurt by the printer and block-cutter Christian Egenolff (1543, USTC 683351). Much to Fuchs’s indignation, however, the imperial decree protecting De historia stirpium was insufficient to keep unauthorized agents from mimicking elements of the book. Footnote 3 Nonetheless, though Fuchs claims authority over “these our commentaries” as both an author and a publisher, his phrasing makes it clear he understands that the ultimate rationale for the imperial decree is to guard Isingrin’s outlay of the capital needed to produce the printed volumes rather than his own investment of scholarly and creative labor in the production of the verbal text and the illustrations it contains. As a professor at the University of Tübingen, Fuchs received an annual subsidy from his employer to supplement the costs of his publications, and his sympathies for Isingrin’s costs are impossible to separate from this shared investment in the publisher’s role. As the grateful Fuchs explains, Isingrin’s industry has been protected by an “imperial decree,” and Fuchs’s phrasing makes explicit the way that Renaissance legal protections over books primarily concerned not the intellectual property of their authors but the financial interests of their publishers. Held in the hands, Fuchs and Isingrin’s volume is appreciably, monumentally, voluminous.ĭe historia stirpium’s magnitude makes it obvious that Isingrin took a considerable risk in supplying the immense capital needed to publish the volume. Footnote 2 When readers encounter a physical copy of De historia stirpium, Fuchs’s insistence that Isingrin is “the most painstaking printer of Basel” can be readily verified in the very weight and materials of this folio.
De historia stirpium’s preliminaries (including a title page, full-length author portrait, dedicatory epistle, explanation of difficult terms, and tables of plant names in Greek, Latin, German, and in the contemporary jargon of apothecaries) were likely printed last, and Fuchs’s epistle may have been written while he reviewed the bulk of Isingrin’s labor, enabling him to anticipate the experience of future readers encountering his book for the first time. Though his dedicatory epistle appears in the first pages of the printed book, Fuchs seems to suggest that he holds the remainder of the volume in his hands as he writes – as indeed he very well may have done. Since this is so, we must have a thought of Isingrin, too, who has incurred enormous expense in publishing this work and to that end a prohibition has been issued by imperial decree, that no one else anywhere may print these our commentaries without penalty, as we warned at the very beginning of this book. This is done for no other reason than to profit at the expense of others. Students of herbal matters owe much to this man, who spared neither expense nor labor in order to serve their convenience and aid their pursuits.īut the fact is that there are many today who, like drone bees, sneak into other people’s labors and by their inept copying spoil and debase books that were set up in the best and most elegant type and adorned with superb pictures. However, how great an expense he was put to can be estimated by anyone who cares to weigh the magnitude of the work and the pictures themselves for their quality. And surely this work speaks for itself well enough, as to how diligent he was in printing it. At this point I should say more about the hard work and care in the printing of this book by Michael Isingrin, the most painstaking printer of Basel, except that we know that these qualities are sufficiently known and proved by the many works that have issued from his workshop for some years now.
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