The Scythe and the Rabbit: Simon de Colines and the Culture of the Book in Renaissance Paris

Simon de Colines was one of the greatest typographers, printers and publishers of the Renaissance. He has nevertheless been unfairly neglected. Apart from a pair of scholarly bibliographies, published a century apart, this is the first book-length study of his work. As Robert Bringhurst writes in his introduction to this volume, “Colines as much as anyone built the semiotic structure of the book as we now know it, with its chapter headings and subheads, page numbers and running heads, tables of contents, indices, and source notes. He also cut lucid and beautiful type at a crucial moment: when the Latin and Greek alphabets were still engaged in their historic metamorphosis from manuscript to metal.…” But Colines was a great publisher as well as a fine technician. “He printed authors and texts that were central to his idea of civilization – Aristotle, Cicero, Sophocles, Hesiod, Horace, Ovid, Virgil, Statius, Martial, Terence, Euclid, Hippocrates, Galen – along with the best of their Renaissance followers and interpreters. Reading his books, these five centuries later, is a serious education not in typography alone but in philosophy, poetry, astronomy, medicine, law, and mathematics.”

Kay Amert was a master typographer, a master printer, and a meticulous, insightful typographic historian, particularly knowledgeable in the field of French Renaissance printing and publishing. She was the director of the Typography Laboratory at the University of Iowa. She died in 2008, leaving her work unfinished. Her published and unpublished writings on de Colines have been carefully edited by Robert Bringhurst.