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their workshop full of unsold copies (plena quinterniorum) but empty of the necessities of living (inanis rerum necessarium).” 38 Bussi obtained a subsidy, but this did not prevent Sweynheym and Pannartz from failing in business in 1473.
It was hard to argue against the production of needed texts at lower costs than manuscript copying, and inevitably those involved in the printing pro- cess either as printers or editors, such as Bussi, supported it. But as printing shops opened in more locations, and production increased, scholars and religious authorities—especially those not invested in an edition—worried about the proliferation of errors caused by sloppy editing, about loss of control over the editorial process, and the inevitable deterioration of schol- arly accuracy, analogous to the common, justifiable current concern over rapidly generated inaccurate information or deliberate misinformation pro- liferating on the Internet. In 1471 Italian humanist and grammarian Nicco- lo Perotti, Archibishop of Sipponto, incensed by the number of errors in Giovanni Andrea Bussi’s edition of Pliny’s Historia naturalis issued in Rome by Sweynheym and Pannartz, wrote to the Pope asking him to set up a board of learned correctors such as himself who would scrutinize every text before it could be printed. This has been described as the first call for censorship of the press.39
Other book buyers simply refused to adopt the new technology, or they ignored it. A surprising number of fifteenth-century manuscripts are actual- ly copies of printed books produced, one assumes, either because an owner could not afford a printed edition and copied it out for himself, or an owner could not obtain an out of print edition and hired a scribe to copy it, or he could not stomach owning the relatively less expensive new printed edition and hired a scribe to deliver the kind of finely produced deluxe manuscript that he required. The notion that printing came along and simply put all the scribal book producers out of business seems not to be confirmed by evi-
38 Jones, op. cit, p. 4.
39 Davies, “Humanism in Script and Print,” in Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (1996), p. 57. For further discussion of this issue see Jones, Printing the Classical Text (2004), pp. 4-9.
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