Italic Type Was Invented in 1501 to Stop Pirates From Copying Books

Aldus Manutius opened his press in Venice in 1494, three decades after Gutenberg, and reshaped the economics of the printed book. The early printers worked in folio and quarto, large-format volumes priced for institutions. Aldus moved to a smaller octavo format — about the size of a modern paperback — designed for a literate professional or merchant who wanted to carry a Virgil in a saddlebag. The economics required fitting more text per page than the upright Roman types of the time would allow.

In 1500, Aldus commissioned the punchcutter Francesco Griffo to design a slanted, narrow typeface modeled on the contemporary Italian humanist cursive — the everyday handwriting of Italian scholars. The first book printed in it was the 1501 octavo Virgil. Griffo's letters were drawn at an angle of about eight degrees, with tighter spacing and connecting strokes left over from the cursive influence. The visual texture differed from anything readers had seen in print. The capital letters were still upright; only the lowercase tilted. About 50 percent more text fit per line. The savings paid for the smaller format.

Aldus, foreseeing the obvious copy risk, applied to the Senate of Venice for an exclusive privilege on the new design. He received a ten-year monopoly in 1502 — one of the earliest known intellectual-property grants for a typeface — and another exclusive on the octavo format. Both were widely flouted. Lyon presses, especially, copied the italic almost immediately. By 1505 there were knock-off Italic Virgils circulating across Europe.

The italic kept its association with light, fluent reading and with classical texts. By the late 16th century, it was being used for emphasis inside roman-set books — the role it has held ever since. Aldus's practical compromise has become a permanent grammatical tool of typesetting.