In part in order to heighten his praise of Aldus as the ideal printer, Erasmus noted by contrast that most printers, given the absence of regulations, “fill the world with pamphlets and books [that are] . . . foolish, ignorant, malig-nant, libellous, mad, impious and subversive; and such is the flood that even

Pagination with Arabic numerals on both sides of a page was probably first used in a 1513 edition of Niccolò Perotti’s Cornucopiae. This commentary on Martial’s epigrams offered a wide- ranging commentary on every word that Martial used and was valued as the most sophis-ticated Latin dictionary of its time. But since the words were discussed in the order in which they appeared in Martial’s poems, a powerful alphabetical index was essential. The printer Aldus Manutius of Venice explained the novelty of using page numbers in his index: “a very copious index in which each word that is sought can most easily be found, since each half page throughout the whole work is numbered . . . with arithmetical numbers.”

The term “florilegium” (from flores for flowers and legere in the sense of “select”) dates from the early modern period, likely first used by Aldus Manutius for a Latin translation of a collection

For centuries the standard work on Latin grammar was the 12th- century Doctrinale, by Alexander of Villedieu, in 2,000 lines of doggerel. Versified rules were easier to remember, though their crudity appalled Aldus Manutius when he reprinted this work in 1501.