Rascally Printers

A person who prints cloth, paper, books. A coiner. The owner of a publishing business. A person who works there.

"The city of Venice, so famous on many counts, is especially celebrated owing to the Aldine Press, and so whatever in the way of books is distributed from there to other countries finds a market for the sake of its place of origin alone. But this inducement is so misused by rascally printers, that from no other country do we get publications so shamelessly incorrect, and those not just of anybody's works, but of the greatest, Aristotle, for instance, and Cicero and Quintilian, to say nothing of the Holy Scriptures. The law sees to it that no one may make shoes or boxes without the approbation of the masters' guild, and yet authors of this stature, on whose works even religion depends, are handed out to the public by people so illiterate that they cannot even read, or so lazy that they don't trouble to go over what has been printed, or so mean that they would rather let a good book get choked up with six thousand mistakes than spend a few coins on paying someone to supervise the proof-reading."

Erasmus, Adages ("Festina lente") (1508).

[translated by Margaret Mann Phillips (1967)].