BODONI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA. - The most famous printer of the 18th century, born at Saluzzo on 16 February 1740, died at Parma on 30 November 1813. A compositor in the printing house of Propaganda Fide in Rome, whose entire stock of punches for composition in Oriental languages he reorganized in the years 1758-66, he moved in 1768 to Parma, where he became director of the "Reale stamperia" and, from 1791, also owner of a private workshop. Celebrated both as a punch-cutter and as a publisher, he brought typographic aesthetics to its highest expression of elegance, faithful to the principle that the beauty of a book must be achieved by typographic means alone, without recourse to illustrations. A follower, though not a slavish one, of the French manner of Fournier, he brought it to such perfection as to succeed in casting types (above all the famous rotondi or romani) of a beauty still unsurpassed today, and of an astonishing variety: his Manuale tipografico contained in its 1st ed. (1788) 150 specimens of Latin types and 28 of Greek, in its 2nd ed. (published posthumously by his widow in 1818) 291 of Latin, 34 of Greek, 48 exotic, all of them engraved by him. His name today also designates a special type of binding, with cardboard boards without covering and a flat spine, devoid of mouldings.
B. received honours from every country: Pius VI and Pius VII addressed briefs to him, not sparing in praise; Charles III of Spain granted him the title of "printer to His Catholic Majesty" and his successor Charles IV assigned him a pension; another he received from Napoleon, who also invested him with the order of the Réunion.
Among his editions particular mention deserves to be made of: the Epithalamia in exotic languages, with engravings by Cagnoni, Volpato and others (1775); the Greek Anacreon (1784); Tasso's Aminta (1789); the Gerusalemme liberata (3 vols. in-fol., 1791); the Oratio dominica polyglotta, published at the urging of Pius VII (1806); the Greek Iliad (3 vols. in fol., 1808); the Fénelon (1812). Although they are defective from the philological point of view, because not always correct, they were much sought after by bibliophiles already during B.'s lifetime, and have today reached hyperbolic values: a copy on parchment of the Iliad was purchased by the Italian government for the Palatine Library of Parma, after the First World War, at the price of 90,000 lire.