Page - 779 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

779Ambitions as a Publisher what may have been his intention can be had from the similar Dresden manu- scripts already mentioned [cf. above, Ch. 13.7.1, Figs. 13.78 and 13.79–13.81]. Apart from such practical insights, Strada’s letter to Plantin gives a rare in- kling of his approach to business. As his part of the deal he proposed to provide Plantin with a carefully edited manuscript of the Description of Italy and all the illustrations he had collected for it, both those he already had had engraved, and those he had merely drawn onto the woodblocks. But he expected Plantin to have engraved the remainder of the illustrations as well as to print as many copies of the book as he thought feasible, all entirely at his own expense, while Strada nevertheless laid claim to half of the profit once the books would start selling. He envisaged the same conditions for any of the other works in the list in which Plantin might be interested. In view of the doubtless considerable sums Strada had already invested in his various projects, this is not entirely unreasonable. But though not unreasonable, it is neither very realistic, in view of the huge investment Plantin would need to make should he agree to print such an ambitious book as the Description of Italy—for which at least a market can be assumed to have existed—let alone for the Indices to Strada’s polyglot Dictionary, for which any potential market would have been restricted to the scholarly world. So it is not surprising that Plantin’s response was lukewarm at most. The draft of his reply was actually written by his son-in-law Jan Moretus [Fig. 14.40], who ran the Antwerp branch of the firm while Plantin himself managed the branch in Leiden, where he had been appointed printer to the newly founded University.119 Recognizing that Strada had brought together the manuscripts he proposed at great expense, Moretus first reacted to Strada’s business propo- sition, stating quite clearly that Plantin was not used to pay for manuscripts of new books: his usual procedure was to let the author have one or two dozen copies of the book as printed. As an alternative the book could be printed en- tirely at the author’s expense, in which case of course all copies and any even- tual profit were his, rather than the printer’s. Plantin’s firm had never wanted to print books ‘in compagnia’, that is in a co-production between two or more investors sharing the eventual profit, which is basically what Strada proposed. Moretus explains that Strada is unreasonable in expecting the printer to bear all the expenses of the engraving of the illustrations and the printing of the book, and then still only allowing him half of the copies produced, ‘which even when printed perhaps are not worth as much as the cost of the illustrations he 119 Doc. 1578-10-00: Jan Moretus’ draft for the letter, which itself has not been preserved.