Have You Ever Wanted to Know the History of the Aldine Italic?!

Of course not, but that doesn't make it any less interesting! The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers details the font's history.

From the piece...

We cannot understand the work of Aldus Manutius and the Aldine printing-office, or the innovation made by books in small format printed in italic type, unless we know something of the intellectual condition of Europe at the time of Aldus, and about an experiment which he made in type-cutting some years earlier. “In 1500, men were thinking of new things,” says Pollard. “New editions of many of the old religious and didactic treatises, the old poems and romances, continued to be printed, though mostly in a form which suggests that they were intended for a lower class of readers; but the new publishers would have little to do with them. Scholarship, which till now had been almost confined to Italy, spread rapidly to all the chief countries of Europe, and, amid the devastation which constant war soon brought upon Italy, was lucky in being able to find new homes. With the new literary ideals came new forms for books, and new methods of housing them…. The men for whom Aldus catered wanted books which they could put in their pockets and their saddlebags, and it was not long before the publisher of Paris and Lyons outdid Aldus in the smallness and neatness of their editions.”

The reasons for the invention of a new condensed type were (like most reasons for things) so simple that they are in danger of being overlooked.