Marks of Significance: On Punctuation’s Occult Power

“Prosody, and orthography, are not parts of grammar, but diffused like the blood and spirits throughout the whole.”
—Ben Jonson, English Grammar (1617)

Erasmus, author of The Praise of Folly and the most erudite, learned, and scholarly humanist of the Renaissance, was enraptured by the experience, by the memory, by the very idea of Venice. For 10 months from 1507 to 1508, Erasmus would be housed in a room of the Aldine Press, not far from the piazzas of St. Mark’s Square with their red tiles burnt copper by the Adriatic sun, the glory and the stench of the Grand Canal wafting into the cell where the scholar would expand his collection of 3,260 proverbs entitled Thousands of Adages, his first major work. For Venice was the home to a “library which has no other limits than the world itself;” a watery metropolis and an empire of dreams that was “building up a sacred and immortal thing.”

Erasmus composed to the astringent smell of black ink rendered from the resin of gall nuts, the rhythmic click-click-click of movable type of alloyed lead-tin keys being set, and the whoosh of paper feeding through the press. From that workshop would come more than 100 titles of Greek and Latin, all published with the indomitable ’s watermark, an image filched from an ancient Roman coin depicting a strangely skinny Mediterranean dolphin inching down an anchor. Reflecting on that watermark (which has since been filched again, by the modern publisher Doubleday), Erasmus wrote that it symbolized “all kinds of books in both languages, recognized, owned and praised by all to whom liberal studies are holy.” Adept in humanistic philology, Erasmus made an entire career by understanding the importance of a paragraph, a phrase, a word. Of a single mark. As did his publisher.