The Bodoniana collection in the Angelica Library consists of 540 specimens and is sufficiently representative of all of Giambattista Bodoni‘s typographic production and artistic technical process. Most of the works were acquired by the Library in 1919 from the Venetian Count Nicolò Papadopoli and came to augment that primitive group of Bodonian editions (about 50) present in Angelica since the last years of the 18th century. It was in fact due to the interest of the Augustinian father Agostino Giorgi, prefect of the library in the years 1752-1797, a distinguished scholar in oriental languages and an admirer of the work carried out by the young Bodoni at the Propaganda Fide Printing House, that the library reserved special attention to this kind of editions.

Indeed, it is not coincidental that the Library possesses the specimen of the Epithalamia exoticis linguis reddita (1775), containing the dedicatory inscription to Father Giorgi, the Alphabetum Tibetanum (1762), a work by the same, and the Euchologion (1764) works that came out of the Tipografia di Propaganda Fide, precious testimonies of the young Bodoni’s Roman apprenticeship.

The Bodonian collection in the library documents the activity of the Parma printing house from its earliest years; from the friezes and majuscules engraved and cast by Giambattista Bodoni (1771), to the many occasional compositions in which the author succumbed to the eighteenth-century taste for the illustrated book, adorned with friezes, vignettes, and finales, as well as frontispieces with plaques, medals reminiscent of the Empire style, in which Bodoni often availed himself of the collaboration of skilled intaglio printers. Alongside the many celebratory publications came out of Bodoni’s workshop a very rich series of Latin and Greek classics in which the author abandons decoration and aspires to a conception of “pure” typography, aimed at demonstrating that magnificence, in an edition, must be achieved by typographic means alone.

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