Books Printed during the Reign of Peter the Great. To Mark the Year of Peter the Great at the Hermitage Museum

The display contains books printed during Peter’s reign as an independent ruler (1689–1725). The exhibition clearly demonstrates how the appearance of books changed over that time, how diverse the range of works being printed became and how there was an abrupt change in publications of a secular character from the old Cyrillic alphabet to the new civil type. Visitors will also be able to see a printing press and prints that add to our perception of book-printing and public education activities in Peter’s day.

“This is a fascinating story about how, the change in the contents of books was accompanied by a change in their outward appearance, how they became an indication and symbol of Peter’s era. The typeface sometimes says just as much as the word,” Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, observed.

The “rebellious” 17th century that began with the Time of Troubles and the intervention by Polish and Swedish forces and ended with the mutiny of Russia’s first standing army, the Streltsy, was one of the crisis periods in the country’s history. At that time, Russian society encountered a large number of insoluble problems in the administration of the state and the social sphere, which were accompanied by gradually developing backwardness compared to Western Europe. Peter I’s reforms, marked by their secular character and practical orientation, were intended to eliminate that gap. The measures to overcome the crisis proved a crucial turning point in Russia’s cultural life and ushered in major consequences for the evolution of book-printing. Peter himself assumed an organizing role in publishing, adapting it “for the sovereign’s most necessary imperative affairs and for the education of Russian people”.

The first quarter of the 18th century became a distinct and highly important period in book-printing in this country. Publications brought out at that time can be divided into three groups. The first is made up of works of a religious nature, service books and polemic texts that continued to be printed in the Church Slavonic type. The first group also includes some secular publications with scholarly or political content, for which new typefaces later came to be used. The best-known example is Leonty Magnitsky’s Arithmetic, which was set in the traditional Cyrillic.

The second group, relatively small in number, comprises publications printed in Russian but by foreigners abroad using a peculiar typeface that was a combination of Slavonic and Western European characters, such as Symbols and Emblems, a constant reference work for 18th-century nobles who used it as a source of mottoes and allegorical images.

The third, most important, group contains works printed in Russia using the civil typeface under the new publishing programme. These are the “Petrine books” in the precise meaning of the term.

The need to produce a large number of secular books (for which the old style of type was little suited) led Peter I to the idea of introducing a civil typeface in Russia. The reform included the abolition of redundant letters, as well as changing the shape of others, making their design less elaborate and closer to the shape of letters in the Latin alphabet. At the same time, Arabic numerals were also introduced, replacing the inconvenient method of indicating numbers using letters of the Church Slavonic alphabet. The designs for the new typeface were produced in 1707–08 by a draughtsman named Kuhlenbach from drawings made by Peter himself, and on 29 January 1710 the new style of lettering was officially confirmed.

After the introduction of civil type in book publishing, new forms of illustrative and written information appeared, bringing about a change in how books looked. The readability of the text became a priority. The use of a variety of compositional techniques and particular attention to the design of headings and end pages contributed to an improved appearance for the new books. To emphasize particular paragraphs, the text might be set in different fonts or another type size. A noticeable innovation was the title page, little used previously, which conveyed some of the information that used to be consigned to forewords and afterwords. Great significance was attributed to having a pictorial accompaniment to the text. Of the 295 illustrated publications in the civil type, half  were embellished with copperplate engravings, which gave the books a European look.

All the secular publications of the period were either closely connected with events in the life of the state or else were textbooks enabling anyone who wished to obtain knowledge in various fields of learning. The historical significance of the civil book was determined by the way that it served as a means of education. Furthermore, in publications of the first quarter of the 18th century, a simply colloquial form of the Russian language, understandable to a broad readership, became predominant. On the other hand, the European book remained a model for the civil book in terms of both content and form. It set the pattern for a variety of handbooks on fortifications, artillery, seafaring and other disciplines, fresh forms of disseminating news, editions of the Vedomosti newspaper and numerous decrees. So, the “Petrine era” in book-printing as a distinct period in the evolution of the publishing industry lasted from 1708 to 1725.

Before the century was out, books from Peter’s reign had become collectors’ items. At the present time, the study of their typographical features, as well as of the specifics of their subsequent history in various periods, is continuing.

The curator of the exhibition is Yevgeny Viktorovich Platonov, head of the State Hermitage’s Research Library. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue in Russia (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2022)

The exhibition “Books Printed during the Reign of Peter the Great” can be visited by all holders of tickets to the Main Museum Complex during the museum’s opening hours.