# Osservazioni intorno all’arte di fabbricare la carta, dedotte da varj autori dell’Accademia Reale delle Scienze per la maggior perfezione delle cartiere negli stati di S.A.R. il Sig. Infante D. Filippo Duca di Parma, Piacenza, Guastalla ec. ec. ec. Con la dimostrazione del Mulino all’Olandese fatto a cilindro. Date dalla Segreteria della R. Azienda



**Dati editoriali:** Parma, Fratelli Borsi stampatori, e libraj, 1762

**Codice archivio:** 184

**Prezzo:** 1100.00 USD

**Stato commerciale:** Disponibile

**Link ufficiale:** https://www.govirarebooks.com/products/osservazioni-fabbricare-carta-1762

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## Descrizione accademica e analisi

First edition. Published in Parma in 1762, under the authority of the Secretariat of the Royal Financial Administration (Segreteria della Regia Azienda), this uncommon treatise represents a particularly revealing episode in the reception of Enlightenment science within the economic and industrial policies of eighteenth-century Italy. Its immediate purpose, explicitly announced on the title-page, was to promote the improvement of papermaking in the territories of Philip of Bourbon (1720-1765), Duke of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, by communicating recent technical knowledge developed and investigated under the auspices of the French Académie royale des sciences. The publication is principally based on Joseph-Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande’s Art de faire le papier, issued in Paris in 1761 as part of the celebrated Descriptions des arts et métiers, faites ou approuvées par MM. de l'Académie royale des sciences. Lalande’s substantial folio treatise, comprising 150 pages and fourteen engraved plates, was among the most ambitious contemporary attempts to present the manufacture of paper as a systematic technical discipline. The Parma edition, published only one year later, offered a considerably abbreviated Italian adaptation, supplemented by material relevant to its intended readership, reducing the extensive French exposition to a practical manual accompanied by two folding plates. This editorial transformation is central to the importance of the book. Rather than reproducing the French treatise as an encyclopaedic description of an established craft, the Parma administration selected and reorganized technical information with the declared intention of improving the productivity and quality of its own paper mills. The work thus belongs to the history of technological transfer as much as to that of papermaking. Scientific knowledge, first assembled and published by a learned academy, was recast as an instrument of industrial reform by a territorial government. The French original itself had a particularly complex history. The Académie Royale des Sciences had begun investigating papermaking towards the end of the seventeenth century, when Des Billettes was entrusted with preparing a description of the craft. Eight plates had already been engraved in 1698, and a memoir was presented to the Académie in 1706. When Lalande undertook his revision, he retained and updated this earlier iconographic material while substantially rewriting the text to reflect eighteenth-century working practices. Six additional plates were prepared by Pierre Patte, while the historical illustrations were revised from the earlier engravings associated with Louis Simonneau. The resulting publication united decades of technological observation within a coherent account of the manufacture of paper. One of the principal subjects of both Lalande’s investigation and the Parma adaptation was the mechanization of pulp preparation, particularly through the introduction of the Hollander beater, explicitly advertised on the Italian title-page as the Mulino all’Olandese fatto a cilindro. Developed in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century and subsequently adopted in other European manufacturing centres, the Hollander represented a major alternative to the traditional stamping mills used to reduce linen and other textile rags to papermaking pulp. In the older system, water-powered stampers repeatedly struck the rags in wooden or stone troughs until their fibres had been sufficiently separated and processed. The Hollander instead employed a revolving cylinder equipped with metal blades, operating against a fixed bedplate within a circulating trough of water and fibres. This arrangement allowed the papermaker to regulate the treatment of the pulp more directly and, under suitable conditions, to shorten the time required for its preparation. The technical advantages were potentially considerable, although the quality of the finished paper still depended upon the preparation of the rags, the water supply, the adjustment of the machine and the skill of its operators. The discussion of the Dutch cylinder is particularly significant because it exemplifies one of the central preoccupations of eighteenth-century technological writing: the conversion of workshop experience into sufficiently precise descriptions and illustrations to permit the reproduction of machinery elsewhere. Lalande was acutely aware that published representations of machines did not necessarily disclose the information required for their construction. In discussing earlier Dutch sources, including the mechanical engravings published at Amsterdam in 1734, he noted the difficulties caused by incomplete descriptions and insufficiently explicit illustrations. The accurate publication of machinery could therefore challenge the commercial secrecy surrounding technical processes and facilitate their diffusion across political and geographical boundaries. The Parma treatise must be understood within precisely this context. By presenting the Hollander cylinder to Italian readers, it sought to make available a technology associated with more advanced northern European papermaking establishments. Its importance lies not in proving that a particular machine was immediately installed in the Duchy of Parma, for which independent archival documentation would be required, but in documenting a deliberate governmental programme to disseminate technical improvements and encourage their application. The wider contents encompass the principal operations of handmade papermaking, including the selection and preparation of textile rags, their reduction to pulp, the treatment of the fibrous suspension, the formation of sheets, pressing, drying and sizing. Taken together, these processes determined the quality, strength, finish and suitability of paper for different uses. The treatise accordingly addresses paper production as a sequence of interconnected mechanical and chemical operations rather than as a craft governed solely by inherited custom. The political circumstances of its publication are equally important. The Duchy of Parma, under Philip of Bourbon and the direction of his influential minister Guillaume du Tillot (1711–1774), became an important centre of reformist economic policy in eighteenth-century Italy. Du Tillot's administration promoted manufactures, encouraged technical improvement and sought to strengthen the productive resources of the state through the application of contemporary economic and scientific knowledge. The dissemination of practical manuals formed part of a broader intellectual climate in which the improvement of agriculture, industry and commerce was increasingly regarded as an essential responsibility of enlightened government. The designation Date dalla Segreteria della R. Azienda is therefore more than an administrative formula. It identifies the publication as an initiative connected with the ducal financial administration, transforming knowledge gathered by the French Académie royale des sciences into a resource for manufacturers operating within the Bourbon territories. The state appears not merely as a regulator of production, but as an intermediary in the acquisition, selection and dissemination of industrial expertise. Papermaking was an especially appropriate subject for such intervention. Paper supplied the essential material of governmental administration, legal documentation, commercial correspondence, education, scholarship and printing. Improvements in its manufacture could therefore affect a much wider economic and cultural environment than the paper mills themselves. The availability of reliable paper of suitable quality was intimately connected with the growth of bureaucratic institutions and the expansion of printed communication. The date of the present publication is particularly suggestive in the history of Parma’s printing industry. It precedes by six years the arrival of Giambattista Bodoni, who assumed the direction of the ducal printing establishment in 1768. There is no documentary basis for asserting a direct influence of the Osservazioni upon Bodoni's work; nevertheless, the treatise belongs to the same wider programme of administrative and manufacturing improvement which helped shape the environment in which Parma subsequently emerged as one of Europe's celebrated centres of fine printing. The relationship is contextual rather than demonstrably causal, but it underlines the close connections between papermaking, the economics of printing and the cultural ambitions of the Bourbon court. The edition was produced by the Fratelli Borsi, printers and booksellers active in Parma during the eighteenth century. Francesco Borsi is documented as a printer from the 1750s, and the family establishment continued its activities for several decades. The choice of a local printing house reinforces the practical character of the enterprise: a work based on recent French scientific publications was issued under ducal authority through the city’s own book trade, intended for circulation within the territory whose manufactures it sought to improve.

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## Bibliografia di riferimento

Lalande, Joseph-Jérôme Lefrançois de. Art de faire le papier. Paris, Saillant et Nyon, 1761, IV, 150 pp., 14 engraved plates (Descriptions des arts et métiers, faites ou approuvées par MM. de l'Académie royale des sciences); Gasparinetti, Andrea Federico, ed. Osservazioni intorno all'arte di fabbricare la carta. Introduction and notes by Andrea Federico Gasparinetti. Milan: Il Polifilo / Cartiera Ventura, 1962, 85 pp. (Documenti sulle arti del libro, 1) (reissued in 1977); Harris, Neil. Paper and Watermarks as Bibliographical Evidence. Second revised and enlarged edition. Lyon, Institut d’histoire du livre, 2017; Italian Union Catalogue, IT\ICCU\PARE\067763.

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