Conrad Gessner and the Mobility of the Book: Zurich, Frankfurt, Venice (1543)

Abstract

This chapter explores the mechanisms that facilitated communication about books in sixteenth-century Europe. It follows the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner as he consolidated information about the state of printing at the tail end of the first century of print. Gessner’s Bibliotheca universalis of 1545 attempted to record all books published in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The chapter locates Gessner within three early modern book spaces: in the print shop of his Zurich publisher, Cristoph Froschauer; among the stalls of the Frankfurt book fair; and amidst Venetian manuscript collections. Nelles shows how Gessner appropriated workaday tools of the early modern trade in printed books and manuscripts to create a self-styled ‘universal library’ and, in so doing, produce a landmark work in the history of bibliography.