Eros and Cupid. Bow, arrow, target. Ready. Set. Go! Early editions of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (published first in the mid-14th century) feature arresting black-and-white wood-engraved illustrations. My 1761 copy’s title-page vignette depicts a chubby archer (Cupid) bending the ear of a man (Boccaccio himself?) spying half-naked ladies cavorting on a castle verandah’s balcony (Eros).
Te 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375) assembled 100 short stories of love and lust. Ten tales a piece were told across ten days by seven young women and three young men. They have sheltered in place at secluded Italian villas amidst the Black Death of 1348. Completed perhaps in 1353, Boccaccio’s masterpiece particularly prangs Catholic Church bishops, priests and nuns who connive corruptly in venereal venery.
Pretty hot stuff for the mid-14th century. How did publishers get away with it? Well, partly by hiding authorship, typography, publishing and sale. My copy of The Decameron is what is known in bookselling parlance as a "false imprint." Lascivious stories were easily enough typeset and printed, but were not so openly published, sold and consumed in Middle Ages Europe. My copy says "Amsterdamo" as the place of publication and is mute as to typesetter, printer and publication, but was more likely to have been printed in Venice, perhaps by Antonio Locatelli, for at the end of Volume II it is noted in Latin, "Si Vende Lire Venti Venete."
A Swann Gallery catalogue notes that "false imprints" have been issued for hundreds of years, either to “duck a charge of heresy (no one wanted to run afoul of the Inquisition)” or to “stay out of hot water with the ruling powers.” “False Imprints” help to conceal the origins of the item altogether (in case of a controversial title or topic) and to avoid tarnishing the good reputations of the better typographers, printers, publishers and booksellers. A famous(ly dubious) copy of Il Decamerone, “Impresso in Firenze: Per li heredi di Philippo di Giunta, 1527,” was actually printed in Venice by Pasinello in 1729; its typos were reproduced for decades thereafter.
The first U.S. edition was published in 1851. Subsequent editions have expurgated passages and toned down illustrations. Libraries hid their rare editions in Special Collections. U.C.L.A. houses “The Marteau Collection” of false imprints. “Pierre Marteau, Cologne” never published a single book but Dutch and French and other publishers deployed his fabricated identity to publish anti-monarcheal pamphlets, frank erotica and anti-Catholic screeds and many, many times.
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