Fine Books
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Title: Fine Books
Author: Alfred W. Pollard
Release date: March 6, 2011 [eBook #35494]
Language: English
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Credits: Produced by Marius Masi, Chris Curnow and the Online
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THE CONNOISSEUR'S LIBRARY
GENERAL EDITOR: CYRIL DAVENPORT
FINE BOOKS
[Illustration: Deucalion et Pyrrha repeuplant la Terre, Suivant l'Oracle
de Themis.]
FINE BOOKS
BY
ALFRED W. POLLARD
[Illustration: The Connoisseur's Library]
NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
LONDON: METHUEN & CO. LTD.
1912
TO
SIR EDWARD MAUNDE THOMPSON, G.C.B.
DIRECTOR AND PRINCIPAL LIBRARIAN OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
1888-1909
PREFACE
If the mere taking of trouble ensured good work, this contribution to
the _Connoisseur's Library_ should be entitled to the modest praise of
being "superior to the rest" of its author's book-makings, since it has
been ten years on the stocks and much of it has been written two or
three times over, either because the writer's own information had
increased or to take account of the successful researches of others. Yet
in the end defeat in one main point has to be acknowledged. The book was
begun with a confident determination to cover the whole ground, from the
beginnings of printing and printed book-illustration down to our own
day, and in the case of printing the survey has been carried through,
however sketchily. But the corresponding survey of book-illustration
ends, with rather obvious marks of compression and fatigue, about 1780,
leaving the story of a hundred and thirty years of very interesting
picture-work untold. Pioneering is always so exciting that recognition
of the impossibility of carrying out the full plan of the book within
the limits either of the present volume or of the author's working life
was not made without sincere regret. The subject, however, of the
abandoned chapter was not only very large, but very miscellaneous, and
the survey for it would have had to include at least three other
countries (France, Germany, and the United States) besides our own. To
one section, moreover, that of illustrations in colour, a separate
volume of this series has already been devoted. The author would,
therefore, fain console himself with the hope that in one or more other
volumes a competent account may be given by some other hand of the
wood-engravings, etchings, steel-engravings, and lithographs, with which
books have been decorated since 1780. The poorness of paper and print
with which these modern illustrated books have too often been
handicapped has caused collectors to take little interest in them--it
even suggested the unworthy excuse for the failure to write the missing
chapter that these are not really _Fine Books_, but only books with fine
pictures in them, and so are outside our subject. But both students and
collectors have their duties as well as their delights, and in view of
the high artistic value of quite a large proportion of these modern
illustrations, the preservation of clean and uncropped copies of the
books in which they occur and the tribute of careful cataloguing and
description are certainly their due.
While the desired completeness has not been attained the ground here
covered is still very wide, and for the book as a whole no more can be
claimed than that it is a compilation from the best sources--a list of
these will be found in the Bibliography--controlled by some personal
knowledge, the amount of which naturally varies very much from chapter
to chapter. The obligations incurred in writing it have thus been great,
and a sad number of these are to fellow-workers and friends--Proctor,
John Macfarlane, W. H. Allnutt, Konrad Burger, Dr. Lippmann, Anatole
Claudin, and the Prince d'Essling--who have died while the book has been
in progress. Among those still happily alive acknowledgment must
specially be made to Sir Sidney Colvin for help received from his
masterly introduction to the great monograph on _Early Engravers and
Engraving in England_ published by the Trustees of the British Museum;
to Mr. A. M. Hind for use made of the list of engravers and their works
in the same book; to Mr. Campbell Dodgson for dippings into the wealth
of information in his _Catalogue of German and Flemish Woodcuts in the
Print Room of the British Museum_ (Vols. I and II); to Mr. Gordon Duff
for help derived from his three series of Sandars Lectures on English
Printing, and to Mr. Evans for information obtained from his _American
Bibliography_. Among other obligations the chief is to the writers
(notably Mr. H. R. Plomer) of numerous papers contributed to the
_Transactions_ of the Bibliographical Society and to _The Library_, and
these are acknowledged with special pleasure.
A. W. P.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I. COLLECTORS AND COLLECTING 1
" II. BLOCK-BOOKS 19
" III. THE INVENTION OF PRINTING--HOLLAND 32
" IV. THE INVENTION OF PRINTING--MAINZ 44
" V. OTHER INCUNABULA 59
" VI. THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING 83
" VII. EARLY GERMAN AND DUTCH ILLUSTRATED BOOKS 100
" VIII. EARLY ITALIAN ILLUSTRATED BOOKS 123
" IX. EARLY FRENCH AND SPANISH ILLUSTRATED BOOKS 143
" X. LATER FOREIGN BOOKS 165
" XI. FOREIGN ILLUSTRATED BOOKS OF THE 16TH CENTURY 180
" XII. PRINTING IN ENGLAND (1476-1580) 204
" XIII. ENGLISH BOOKS PRINTED ELSEWHERE THAN AT LONDON 224
" XIV. ENGLISH WOODCUT ILLUSTRATIONS 250
" XV. ENGRAVED ILLUSTRATIONS 267
" XVI. MODERN FINE PRINTING 297
BIBLIOGRAPHY 309
INDEX 319
LIST OF PLATES
I. Deucalion and Pyrrha repeopling the world. From Ovid's
_Metamorphoses_, Paris, 1767 _Frontispiece_
TO FACE PAGE
II. An author (Caxton?) presenting a book to Margaret of
Burgundy. Fifteenth century engraving inserted in the
Chatsworth copy of the _Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye_ 1
(From the plate made for the Bibliographical Society's edition
of Mr. Seymour De Ricci's _Census of Caxtons_.)
III. The "Bona Inspiratio angeli contra vanam gloriam." From a
smaller version of the _Ars Moriendi_. Block-book from the
Lower Rhine, _c._ 1465 26
IV. Leaf 3a of a fragment of the _Doctrinale_ of Alexander
Gallus. One of the so-called "Costeriana" 32
V. Beginning, with printed capital, of the _Rationale
Diuinorum Officiorum_ of Gulielmus Duranti. Mainz, Fust and
Schoeffer, 1459 44
VI. Leaf 7b of the first book printed at Cologne, Cicero, _De
Officiis_, Ulrich Zel, not later than 1466 60
The space left in the sixth line from the foot stands for the
words _ab ostentatione_, which the printer apparently could
not read in his manuscript. The word _vacat_ at the end was
inserted to show that the space in the last line was
accidental and that nothing had been omitted.
VII. Leaf 41a of Cicero's _Rhetorica_, Venice, Nicolas Jenson,
1470, showing spaces left for a chapter heading and capital 84
VIII. Part of leaf 4a, with woodcut, from the _Geschicht von
dem seligen Kind Symon_ of Tuberinus. Augsburg, Gunther
Zainer, about 1475 100
IX. Woodcuts of Saracens and Syrians from Breidenbach's
_Sanctae Peregrinationis in montem Syon atque in montem Sinai
descriptio_. Mainz, Erhard Reuwich, 1486 114
X. Woodcut on leaf 1b of the _Egloga Theoduli_. Leipzig,
Conrad Kachelofen, 1489 116
XI. Page (sig. H 8 verso) from the _Psalterium Beatae Mariae
Virginis_ of Nitschewitz, showing the Emperor Frederick and
his son Maximilian. From a press at the Cistercian Monastery
at Zinna, _c._ 1493 118
XII. The Harrowing of Hell, with text, from leaf 4a of the
_Belial_ of Jacobus de Theramo. Haarlem, Bellaert, 1484. (Size
of the original, 7(1/4)" X 5") 120
XIII. Woodcut of the Betrayal. From leaf 14b of the
_Meditatione sopra la Passione del Nostro Signore_ attributed
to S. Bonaventura. Venice, Geronimo di Sancti, 1487. (Size of
original, 6(3/4)" X 5(1/4)") 124
XIV. Woodcut, De Atheniensibus petentibus regem, illustrating
Fable xxii. in the _Aesop_ printed at Naples, by Francesco
Tuppo, 1485 126
XV. Woodcut of Lorenzo Giustiniano preceded by a crucifer,
from his _Della vita religiosa_. Venice, 1494 130
XVI. Page with woodcut of the Procession to Calvary, from the
_Meditatione sopra la Passione del Nostro Signore_ attributed
to S. Bonaventura. Florence, Ant. Miscomini, _c._ 1495 138
XVII. Titlepage of _La Festa di San Giovanni_. Florence, Bart.
di Libri, _c._ 1495 140
XVIII. Leaf 5a, with woodcut of Death seizing an Archbishop
and a Chevalier, from the _Danse Macabre_. Paris, Gui
Marchant, 1491. (Size of original 8(3/4)" X 6(1/4)") 144
XIX. Leaf 2a, with woodcut of Adam and Eve, from a _Bible en
Francoys_. Paris, Antoine Verard, about 1505. (Size of
original, 9(3/4)" X 7") 150
XX. Page (sig. C 6 verso), with woodcut of the Massacre of the
Innocents, from the _Grandes Heures_. Paris, Antoine Verard,
about 1490. (Size of original, 7(7/8)" X 5(1/4)") 152
XXI. Page (sig. U 7 verso) from the edition of _Terence_,
printed by J. Trechsel at Lyon, 1493 160
XXII. Titlepage from the _Improbratio Alcorani_ of Ricoldus.
Seville, Stanislaus Polonus, 1500 162
XXIII. Hroswitha presenting her plays to the Emperor Otto I,
leaf 4b of the _Opera Hrosvite_. Nuremberg, Sodalitas Celtica,
1501 180
XXIV. Titlepage of Jornandes _De rebus Gothorum_. Augsburg,
1515 186
XXV. Page (leaf 246b) of a _Missale Romanum_, printed at
Venice by Gregorius de Gregoriis, 1518 194
XXVI. Title-cut from _Les dix premiers livres de l'Iliade
d'Homere, Prince des poetes, traduictz en vers Francois, par
M. Hugues Salel_. Paris, Jehan Loys for Vincent Sertenas, 1545 200
XXVII. Page from the _Fifteen Oes_. Westminster, Caxton, about
1490 204
XXVIII. First page of text from the first edition (left
incomplete) of Tyndale's _New Testament_. Cologne, 1525 224
XXIX. Part of sig. K 5 recto, with woodcut of Christ raising
the Centurion's Daughter, from the _Speculum Vitae Christi_ of
S. Bonaventura. Westminster, W. Caxton, about 1488 250
XXX. Titlepage of Bishop Fisher's Funeral Sermon on Henry VII.
London, W. de Worde, 1509 254
XXXI. Woodcut of the translator presenting his book to the
Duke of Norfolk, from Alexander Barclay's version of Sallust's
_Jugurtha_. London, R. Pynson, about 1520 256
XXXII. Portrait of the Author, from John Heywood's _The Spider
and the Flie_. London, T. Powell, 1556 260
XXXIII. Woodcut of Queen Elizabeth hawking, from Turberville's
_The Booke of Faulconrie_, 1575 264
XXXIV. Engraving of Christ in a mandorla from Bettini's _Monte
Santo di Dio_. Florence, Nicolaus Laurentii, 477. (Size of
original, 10" X 7") 268
XXXV. Last page of preface, giving the arms of the Bishop of
Wurzburg, from the Wurzburg _Agenda_. Wurzburg, G. Reyser,
1482 270
XXXVI. Titlepage of the _Dialogus_ of Amadeus Berrutus. Rome,
Gabriel of Bologna, 1517 274
XXXVII. Engraved portrait of the Author by Theodore de Bry
after J. J. Boissard, from the _Emblemata_ of Denis Le Bey.
Frankfort, De Bry, 1596 280
XXXVIII. Page 22 from the _Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man_
by Quarles, the engraving by W. Marshall, London, 1638 286
XXXIX. Page, with engraving after Eisen, from Dorat's _Les
Baisers_, La Haye et se vend a Paris, Lambert, 1770 292
XL. Engraving by W. W. Rylands after Samuel Wale, from
Walton's _Compleat Angler_. London, T. Hope, 1760 296
[Illustration: _Engraving of an Author, possibly CAXTON, Presenting a
Book to Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, prefixed to the Chatsworth copy
of the 'Recuyell.'_]
FINE BOOKS
CHAPTER I
COLLECTORS AND COLLECTING
From the stray notes which have come down to us about the bibliophiles
of the later Roman Empire it is evident that book-collecting in those
days had at least some modern features. Owing to the abundance of
educated slave-labour books were very cheap, almost as cheap as they are
now, and book-collectors could busy themselves about refinements not
unlike those in which their successors are now interested. But in the
Middle Ages books were by no means cheap, and until quite the close of
the fourteenth century there were few libraries in which they could be
read. Princes and other very wealthy book-buyers took pleasure in
possessing finely written and illuminated manuscripts, but the ruling
ideals were mainly literary and scholastic, the aim (the quite right and
excellent aim) being to have the best books in as many subjects as
possible. After printing had been invented the same ideals continued in
force, the only difference being that they could now be carried out on a
larger scale. Libraries like those formed in the sixteenth century by
Archbishop Cranmer and Lords Arundel and Lumley, or that gathered in
France by the historian De Thou, were essentially students' libraries,
and the books themselves and the catalogues of them were often
classified so as to show what books had been acquired in all the
different departments of human knowledge. Even in the sixteenth century,
when these literary ideals were dominant, we find some examples of
another kind. In Jean Grolier, for instance, we find the book-lover
playing the part, too seldom assumed, of the discriminating patron of
contemporary printing and bookbinding. Instead of collecting more old
books than he could find time to read, Grolier bought the best of his
own day, but of these sometimes as many as four or five copies of the
same work that he might have no difficulty in finding one for a friend;
and whatever book he bought he had bound and decorated with simple good
taste in Venice or at home in France. It would be an excellent thing if
more of our modern collectors, instead of taking up antiquarian hobbies,
were content to follow Grolier's example. Books always look best when
clad in jackets of their own time, and this in the future will apply to
the books of the twentieth century as much as to any others. Moreover,
there is more actual binding talent available in England just now than
at any previous time, and it is much to be desired that modern Groliers
would give it scope, not in pulling about old books, but in binding
beautifully those of our own day.
Grolier found a modest imitator in England in the person of Thomas
Wotton, but with some at least of the Elizabethan book-lovers the havoc
wrought in the old libraries by the commissioners of Henry VIII and
Edward VI provoked an antiquarian reaction which led them to devote all
their energies to collecting, from the unworthy hands into which they
had fallen, such treasures of English literary and bookish art as still
remained. Putting aside John Leland who worked (to what extent and with
what success is not quite clear) for Henry VIII, Matthew Parker,
Archbishop of Canterbury, was the earliest of these antiquaries, to the
great benefit of the libraries of Lambeth Palace and of Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge, though as to how he came by his books perhaps the
less said the better. Parker was soon followed by Sir Robert Cotton,
whose success in gathering books and documents illustrating English
history was so great that his library was sequestered and very nearly
altogether taken from him, on the plea that it contained state papers
which no subject had a right to possess. Owing to the carelessness and
brutality of the previous generation, Cotton's opportunities were as
great as his zeal in making use of them, and at the cost of his fortune
he laid the foundations of a national library. Humbler men imitated him
without being able to secure the same permanence for their collections,
more especially Humphrey Dyson, a notary, who seems to have acquired
early printed books and proclamations, with the same zeal which Cotton
devoted to manuscripts. Many of his treasures passed into the hands of
Richard Smith, the Secondary of the Poultry Compter, but at his sale
they were scattered beyond recall, and the unity of one of the most
interesting of English collections was thus unkindly destroyed. Both
these men, and some others of whom even less is known, worked with a
public aim, and already Sir Thomas Bodley had gone a step further by
founding anew the University Library at Oxford on lines which at once
gave it a national importance. This it preserved and developed for over
a century and a half, and has never since lost, though no national help,
unfortunately, has ever been given it, save the right already conceded
by the Stationers' Company, of claiming a copy of any new English book
offered for sale.
Bodley's munificent donation marked an epoch in the history of English
book-collecting because its tendency was to make private book-collecting
of the kind which was then admired incongruous and even absurd. When
there were no public libraries open to scholars, for a great man to
maintain a splendid library in his own house and allow students to read
in it was worthy of Aristotle's [Greek: megalopsychos], the man who does
everything on a scale that befits his dignity. But in proportion as
public collections of books and facilities for obtaining access to them
are increased, the preservation of a library on a large scale in a
private house, where none of the inmates have any desire to use it,
becomes an easy and justifiable object of satire. A man without
literary instincts who inherits a fine library is indeed in a parlous
state, for if he keeps it he is as a dog in the manger, and if he sells
it he is held up to opprobrium.
That considerations of this kind were beginning to have weight is shown
by the rapidity with which during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries one private collection after another drifted into public
ownership. In some cases there were intermediate stages. Thus Archbishop
Usher's books were not bequeathed to Trinity College, Dublin, but were
purchased for it by the subscriptions of the soldiers of Cromwell's army
in Ireland. The manuscripts of Sir Simeon d'Ewes remained in the
possession of his family for nearly a century, were then purchased by
Harley, and came to the British Museum with Harley's collection.
Stillingfleet's manuscripts were in the same temporary ownership; his
printed books came to Dublin through the public spirit of Archbishop
Marsh. So again Bishop Moore's books were purchased for the University
Library at Cambridge by George I. Thus even when a collector was not
inspired by, or could not afford to indulge, public motives, respect for
his memory or desire to benefit an institution often brought his books
to a safe haven. But more often the munificence was personal and direct.
For some cause not quite easy to see the flow of benefactions to English
libraries has dwindled sadly of late years,[1] so that journalists with
short memories write of gifts and bequests to American libraries as if
they were unprecedented. Even of late years, however, the foundation of
the John Rylands Library, Chancellor Christie's gifts and bequest to the
Victoria University, the Sandars legacy to the University Library,
Cambridge, and Mr. Alfred Huth's bequest to the British Museum of any
fifty books it might choose to select from his fine collection, show
that the stream is not quite dried up, while for nearly two centuries
and a half from the foundation of the Bodleian it ran with splendid
freedom. Thus Archbishop Williams gave noble gifts of books to S. John's
College, Cambridge, and to the Chapter House Library at Westminster
Abbey; Selden's books enriched the Bodleian; Laud was a generous
benefactor alike to the Bodleian, to S. John's College, Oxford, and to
the library of Lambeth Palace; Sir Kenelm Digby gave both to Bodley and
to Harvard; Ralph Sheldon benefited the Heralds' College; Pepys (through
his nephew) bequeathed his collection to Magdalene College, Cambridge;
Archbishop Marsh founded a library at Dublin; Richard Rawlinson gave his
manuscripts to the Bodleian, and Harley arranged that his should be
offered to the nation.
The example of the men who bought under the influence of an intention to
bestow their books on some public institution naturally affected others,
and was responsible for a good deal of rather haphazard collecting in
the eighteenth century. The private modern library was often confused
with the antiquarian collection, and the antiquarian collection itself
was seldom dominated by any central idea. Yet collectors who devoted
themselves to one subject and knew thoroughly well what they were aiming
at were already coming into existence, and these also, when their work
was done, were inspired by an honourable ambition to preserve it intact,
and so the libraries were once more enriched. Thus Garrick, guided by
his professional interest, devoted himself to early plays, and
bequeathed his collection to the British Museum. Malone bought the books
which were useful to him as a student of Elizabethan literature, more
especially of Shakespeare, and bequeathed them to the Bodleian, while
Capell left his similar collection to Trinity College, Cambridge. The
library of Natural History books brought together by Sir Joseph Banks
and bequeathed by him to the British Museum is another example of
well-defined collecting, though of a different sort. Among men who were
not themselves specialists the vogue lay in the direction of first
editions of the Greek and Latin classics and of a few Italian and
English authors of special merit, together with books illustrating the
history of printing down to about the year 1480 or 1485. The early
classics seem to have been the indispensable element in any collection
of the first rank, and they appear with monotonous regularity in the
libraries of George III, of the Rev. Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode, and of
Thomas Grenville, which all three passed to the British Museum; in the
Spencer Collection, now in the John Rylands Library, Manchester; and in
the Sunderland Library, sold at auction in 1881-3. When these prizes
were secured the collector seems to have felt himself free to follow his
individual taste in supplementary purchases, and the Grenville Library
is a fine proof of the broader interests of its possessor. Two notable
collectors, Heber, the last of the great book-gluttons, and William
Henry Miller, founder of the famous Christie-Miller Library at Britwell,
cut themselves free from the cult of the _editio princeps_, the latter
(despite a taste for modern Latin verse) devoting himself to English
poetry, while Heber added to this the literatures of France, Italy, and
Spain.
Despite the exceptions we have mentioned, in almost all of the
collections of the early years of the nineteenth century two different
ideals were combined: the student's ideal of the best books in the best
editions, and the antiquary's ideal of the books by which the history of
printing and its kindred arts could be most vividly illustrated. The
combination is still common, for one of a Beckett's comic histories
(though I am not prepared to assert that this is a "best book") still
figures as the first entry in many sale catalogues which contain also
incunabula assuredly not bought for their literary interest. It is more
easy to defend such a medley on the ground of sentiment than of logic.
Whoever uses books has reason to be grateful to the men who invented or
diffused the art of printing, and may be interested in learning
something about them. Yet it can hardly be denied that to collect
various kinds of books from an antiquarian, aesthetic, or any other
well-defined point of view, not directly literary, is an independent
pursuit in its own right, just as to collect old or beautiful china or
silver is an independent pursuit, whether or no the china or silver be
used for eating or drinking from. It will be said, of course, that on
this view books are no better than china (or postage stamps), and there
are indeed some strange instances of men who have fallen below their
possibilities and have collected books, and not without success, despite
a most amazing indifference to their contents. This reduces the joy they
can get from their hobby to the bare pleasure of collecting for the sake
of collecting, an ignoble delight in indulging acquisitiveness, redeemed
to some extent by the higher pleasure of overcoming difficulties and
observing the rules of the game. But the ignorant book-collector, until
he has educated himself, is like a rose-fancier who cannot distinguish
one odour from another. By the time they attract the collector books
have become, or are on the road to becoming, so precious that their
primary usefulness has to be left dormant. To use them constantly for
our daily reading would approach the fault which the Greeks called
[Greek: hubris], the arrogance which makes a man esteem himself so
highly that he thinks nothing too good for his own use. But even when
this limitation is recognized, for those who can appreciate them they
preserve all the associations of their primary use, and it is because
these associations are so delightful and so various that the bookman
claims that his form of collecting is the best of all.
What then are the associations and qualities which give books value in
the eyes of a collector? We may answer the question negatively in the
first instance by reducing to their proper importance the two qualities
which are popularly supposed to be the most attractive to the
book-hunter--rarity and age. If a book is otherwise uninteresting, what
is it the better for being rare? In passing it may be noted that unless
a book is interesting for other reasons its rarity is necessarily an
unknown quantity. Sir Sidney Lee's Census of the extant copies of the
First Folio Shakespeare, a comparatively common book, but of supreme
interest for its associations, is a striking example of the zeal with
which every discoverable copy of a valuable book is now hunted down.
Those whose business it is to gather such information can tell in the
case of dozens of books of much less importance exactly how many copies
have been discovered and in whose possession they remain. But in the
case of a book of little interest the most that can be said is that it
is "undescribed," and it may be "undescribed" not in the least because
it is really rare, but because no bibliographer has troubled himself to
make a note of it. Were some real point of interest discovered in it the
chances are that the attention thus attracted would speedily bring to
light other copies, as in the case of the school magazine to which Mr.
Kipling was found to have contributed. Of this the first set catalogued
sold for over L100, with the result that so many others were unearthed
that the price speedily sank to less than as many shillings.
Granted, however, that it could be proved that a dull book is not merely
undescribed, but absolutely, what so few works are, unique, in what way
does this make it of interest to the collector? A great library might
buy it for a trifle out of compassion, or under the idea that its
registration in a catalogue might help to piece out a genealogy, or that
it might count as another unit in statistics (a poor reason), or justify
its purchase in some other haphazard way. But considerations of this
kind, such as they are, cannot affect private collectors. A really dull
book is merely a nuisance, and whether only one copy of it, or many, can
be proved to exist, nobody wants it. If this be so we are justified in
saying that, although as soon as a book is found desirable for any other
reason its rarity becomes of paramount importance in determining its
price, Rarity by itself is of no interest to collectors.
The attractiveness bestowed by Age cannot be treated quite so summarily,
because although the same line of argument can be followed, it has to
be helped out by an explanation arising from a particular case. No
collector would value a dull sermon printed in 1800 any higher than a
dull sermon printed in 1900, and if we go back two centuries instead of
one, in the case of a book printed in London its value is none the
greater for the extra hundred years. If, however, the sermon chanced to
have been printed in 1700 in some provincial town, its age would
distinctly be an element of value. Down to 1693 printing was only
permitted in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and (after the outbreak of the
Civil War[2]) at York. When the restraining Act was dropped in 1693
printing made its way, not very rapidly, into one provincial town after
another. Hence a dull sermon with a provincial imprint may be dear to
the heart of some local antiquary as the first-fruit of the press in his
neighbourhood.
If we go back another sixty years from 1700 we reach another typographic
zone, as we may call it, within which some slight interest attaches to
all examples of English printing, for the end of the year 1640 is the
limit of the special catalogues of early books published by the British
Museum, the Cambridge University Library, and the John Rylands Library,
Manchester. The first and last of these have indexes of printers; in the
second the primary arrangement is typographical. Thus all books which
are old enough to have been printed before the end of 1640 are thereby
invested with some slight interest solely as products of English
presses. When we get back to before 1600 we are in the period covered by
the different editions of the _Typographical Antiquities_ of Joseph
Ames. When we go back another hundred years we are within the fifteenth
century; printing has been introduced into England for less than
twenty-five years, and the smallest fragment of a book from one of the
early presses at work at Westminster, Oxford, St. Albans, or the City of
London, is esteemed as of interest and importance.
Thus if we go far enough back Age does add to the interest of a book,
but only by bringing it under another influence, that the interest of an
English fifteenth century book is due to its importance in the history
of printing and not to its antiquity being easily demonstrated by the
fact that a contemporary unadorned manuscript of the same work will
probably have only a fraction of the value of the printed edition. There
are, of course, other cases in which age may be said to have some
secondary influence, as in the case of books dealing with social
customs, ballads and the like. But here it is still more evident that
the social or literary interest is the primary consideration, and that
this cannot be created, though it is greatly enhanced, by Age.
Having thus to the best of our ability abated the pride both of Age and
Rarity, we come back to our original question as to what are the
qualities and associations which give books value in the eyes of a
collector.
The only good qualities which a book can possess in its own right are
those of strength and beauty of form. Everything else about it is
inherent in no single edition, though association of ideas may give
greater dignity to one edition than to another. Type, paper, ink,
presswork, the arrangement of the page, and also (though not quite in
the same way or to the same extent) the illustrations, are all part and
parcel of the book itself, and may be combined, at least so bookmen
believe, in a really beautiful unity. No doubt as to this students run
some risk of losing their sense of proportion. I myself am conscious,
for instance, that I have looked at so many fifteenth century woodcuts,
as compared with other works of art, that I distinctly overrate them.
Mr. Robert Proctor, who knew more about fifteenth century books than any
other man has ever known, or is ever likely to know, once said to me in
all seriousness, that he did not think he had ever seen an ugly one.
Allowing, however, for this very human tendency to set up our own
esoteric standard, there yet remains a more generally recognizable
beauty of form which some books possess in a higher degree than others,
and to collect such beautiful books independently of any other kind of
attraction would be no unworthy pursuit. As a matter of fact, bookmen
are more inclined to make beauty of form a secondary consideration to
which, as to age and rarity, they pay attention, but without adopting it
as the basis of their collection.
As a secondary consideration the attention collectors pay to beauty can
hardly be exaggerated in respect to the condition of copies, the ratio
of an unusually good to an unusually bad copy of the same book, even if
the bad copy have no leaves actually wanting, being often as ten to one.
The unusually bad copy, indeed, would often have no selling value at all
were it not that it may be useful to students and so win a purchaser at
a small price. The collector should leave it severely alone, partly
because such "working copies" are the rightful perquisite of poor
scholars, partly because, as he presumably buys books for his pleasure,
he defeats his own object if, except in the case of the very rarest, he
buys copies at which he cannot look without regretting that their
headlines are cut off or the paper rotten through bad cleaning. Mr.
Frederick Locker recorded in his catalogue that his copy of Blake's
_Songs of Innocence and of Experience_ had been cut down by a previous
owner to the dimensions of the old covers of a washing-book. I think it
was his chivalry, his piety toward Blake's memory, that induced him to
rescue it from this dishonour. Had he bought such a poor copy simply
because it was cheap, he would have fallen far below his standard as a
collector.
Putting on one side beauty of form, the interest of books in the eyes of
a collector lies in their associations, historical, personal, or purely
literary. For reasons touched on already but which we may now consider
more fully, among historical associations those connected with the
history of printing fill a very large place. As we have said before, the
invention of an art by which books were so greatly cheapened and
multiplied was an event of almost unique importance in the social
history of Europe, and everything which throws light on the first
discovery, on the manner in which it was carried from one country and
city to another, and on the methods and lives of the early printers, is
of interest, and in its degree and measure, of importance. Moreover,
just as foxes are hunted because they show such good sport, so these
early books are collected because the study of them combines in a
singular degree the charms of scientific and historical discovery, with
all sorts of literary, social, and human side-interests. The claim which
Henry Bradshaw put forward that antiquarian bibliography must be studied
scientifically has been perverted by the unwise into the assertion that
bibliography is a Science, or as they are sometimes pleased to put it,
an Exact Science, till sensible people are wearied of the silly phrase.
But the claim itself is absolutely true, and the gifts which enabled Mr.
Proctor to classify, exactly or approximately, any fragment of early
printing according to its country, place, printer, and date, if employed
on any other field of scientific inquiry would easily have gained him a
Fellowship of the Royal Society, besides the European recognition which,
in his own small field, was already his before he died.
A large proportion of early printed books are without any indication
whatever of their place of origin, printer, or date. The dates are
obscured by the quickness or slowness of individual printers in adopting
various improvements--sheet-numbering, leaf-numbering, printed capitals,
titlepages, methods of imposition, etc.--which thus become uncertain and
delusive landmarks. The place of origin is obscured by the existence of
almost identical types in different cities and even in different
countries. A fortiori the identity of the individual printer may baffle
research from types being transferred or copied in all but one or two
letters of the fount, which thus become the sole means of
differentiating them. As helps the bibliographer has, in the first
place, such a classification of the two or three thousand fifteenth
century types as he is able to carry in his head. This, in proportion to
its completeness, enables him to narrow down the field to be
investigated. Some small typographical peculiarity, the way in which the
illuminator or rubricator has filled the blank spaces, the note which by
good fortune he may have appended in this or some other known copy
saying when he finished his work, similar notes by early purchasers
which occasionally give the date of their bargain, these and other
points may all help forward the happy moment of final identification.
Such a hunt as this may sound alarmingly difficult, as if it were all
over five-barred gates and inconveniently hedged ditches. But facsimiles
and other aids have been greatly multiplied of late years; many a book
can be run down and the identification verified in a few minutes, and
the possibility of hunting successfully in one's own library presupposes
the purchase of many books giving full information as to their origin.
These, while offering the means of identifying other books, will
themselves raise no questions, so that the collector's life need not be
unceasingly strenuous.
The side-interests of these old books are very varied. Many of them, at
least to eyes trained to perceive it, are of great beauty. Others,
although the half century during which printing was in its infancy
produced few masterpieces of literature, have real literary interest.
More than any other single event the invention of printing hurried on
the transition from the medieval world to the modern, but while many
printers in Italy nearly ruined themselves by the zeal with which they
helped forward the classical renaissance, all over Europe the medieval
books which were still read were seized on for the press, so that in the
books printed between 1470 and 1490 we are presented with a conspectus
or summary of medieval literature. Caxton printed the works of Chaucer
and Gower and prose renderings of the old romances. The Italian presses
were busy with Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante. The enormous size of the
great Speculum or Encyclopaedia of Vincent de Beauvais did not deter the
printers of France and Germany, and the ponderous tomes of medieval
theology and law seem to have found a ready market. Above all, the
highest skill available in the best equipped workshops was employed
almost ceaselessly in the production of beautiful and often magnificent
editions of the service-books of the Church for the use both of priests
and laity, and it is hardly possible to dabble much in old books without
acquiring an interest in liturgiology.
Owing to this fact, that the early presses were so largely occupied with
printing the works of the previous three centuries, there is
comparatively little human interest in incunabula on their literary
side. Instead of authors we have mostly to deal with editors, an
assertive and depreciatory race, always vaunting their own accuracy and
zeal and insisting on the incredible blunders by which previous editions
had been deformed past recognition. We receive, however, no small
compensation in the personal details which many of the early printers
give us about themselves. Titlepages, though they occur at haphazard in
a few books of the early seventies (and there is one still earlier
example), did not become common till about 1490, and even twenty years
later we find many books still without them. The information which we
now expect to find on a titlepage was given in a paragraph, mostly at
the end of the book, to which bibliographers have agreed to give the
name "colophon," from [Greek: kolophon], the Greek for a "finishing
stroke." As we have already noted, in many books no information of this
kind is given, but when printers, or their proof readers or editors,
took the trouble to write a colophon at all, they had no reason to
confine themselves to the severe brevity and simplicity of statement
which marks the modern titlepage. It was in colophons that editors cast
stones at their predecessors, or demanded sympathy for the severity of
their own labours, and it is in colophons that we find the expressions
of the printer's piety and pride, his complaints of his troubles with
his workmen and rivals, his pleas for encouragement, and occasionally,
penned by another hand, the record of how he was struck down by death in
the midst of his work. I have never heard of any one making a
representative collection of books with interesting colophons, but
collecting has taken many worse forms.
To lend grace to their colophons, or sometimes as a substitute for them,
the early printers and publishers often used a woodcut containing their
mark, sign, or device. Like the colophon itself, this was printed as a
token of the master's pride in his work and his desire that it might be
recognized as his, and many printers' marks are very decorative and even
beautiful. Comparatively neglected until recently, within the last few
years the devices used in various countries have been almost
exhaustively reproduced in facsimile, thus leaving few chances of fresh
discovery.
The mention of devices brings us to a very interesting section of early
printed books, and one which has attracted only too much attention of
recent years, those decorated with the primitive cuts on wood or metal
with which fifteenth century printers endeavoured to imitate the glories
of illuminated manuscripts, or to increase the popularity of their books
with not too critical readers. Occasionally, as in the metal cuts in the
best editions of the French Horae, in the Florentine and Venetian
woodcuts of the last ten years of the century, and in the best work of
other countries, these early pictures possess real beauty. Often they
are badly spoilt by the incompetence of the cutters, who were working
without the aid of modern gravers or modern methods of preparing the
wood. The early German wood-cutters, whilst their outlines are often
less graceful than those of their French and Italian competitors, had a
special gift for characterization, and the quality of their work is much
more uniform, perhaps because even before the invention of printing with
movable types they were an organized craft. But in almost all fifteenth
century cuts there is a certain naive simplicity which captivates those
who allow themselves to study it, until they are apt, as the present
writer has confessed is probably true of himself, to rate it too
highly. As is the case with the more ambitious artists in oils of the
same periods, wherever there was any demand for book-illustrators a
local school with strongly marked characteristics at once appears. The
work of the Augsburg cutters can be told at a glance from that executed
at Strassburg, and the styles predominant at Venice and Florence, at
Milan and Naples are all absolutely distinct. With one or two exceptions
we know nothing, until after 1500, of the men who designed or cut these
illustrations, and (except in the case of those of the Low Countries)
hardly any attempt has been made, or seems possible, to subdivide the
work done in any given locality so as to group it under individual
masters. Otherwise the problems of fifteenth century book-illustrations
are much like the problems of the types with which they harmonize so
well, and the collector can either devote himself to representing as
fully as possible the work done in any single district, or range at
large over the Continent (as regards fifteenth century illustrations
England may almost be left out of account) and collect a few good
specimens of each school.
It has been made a cause of complaint recently against bibliographers
that they know more of the work done at any insignificant fifteenth
century press than of the history of printing at any subsequent time. It
is not easy to coerce men into taking up any sections of a subject
beyond those in which they are interested, and the supposed culprits
have at least this much justification for their neglect of the later
work that very little of it repays examination. Until 1465, save for
some possible Dutch experiments, Germany enjoyed the monopoly of
printing. From 1465 to about 1530 she shared the primacy in it with
Italy, though during most of this period Italy was slightly ahead; from
1530 to about 1570 France was far in advance of the rest of Europe;
after 1570 there was a higher technical level in the Low Countries than
elsewhere, and Plantin and the Elzevirs gained individual reputations.
But there was very little good taste even in the Low Countries, and
from a typographical standpoint the seventeenth century is a Sahara with
hardly any oases. From this wilderness the eighteenth century, under the
guidance of France and England, timidly felt its way back to a kind of
trim neatness, but the positive experiments of Baskerville and the
Didots, and in Italy of Bodoni, were not very exciting, and at present
are quite out of fashion. In the nineteenth century the work of the
Whittinghams in England deserves more attention from collectors than it
has received, and throughout the whole period any one working on
historical lines, with the desire to illustrate the vicissitudes of the
art of printing and not merely its successes, has an ample field. But
for positive excellence, after the period of "origins," the French books
of the middle of the sixteenth century offer almost the only hunting
ground in which the fastidious collector is likely to find an attractive
quarry, and it is no use to try to tell any other tale.
Of the later book illustrations a somewhat better account may be given.
Owing to the steady deterioration of paper and presswork, which was the
real cause of the typographical decline, woodcuts by the end of the
sixteenth century had gone quite out of fashion, the old simple style
having been lost and no printer being able to do justice to the finer
work on which designers insisted. But copper engravings throve in
Germany and the Low Countries, and when the fashion of engraved
frontispieces and titles took root in England in the last years of the
century it was pursued with considerable success for a couple of
generations, while in the eighteenth century the French _livres a
vignettes_ attained an extraordinary brilliancy and elegance, and
Gravelot and other French engravers bestowed some of their skill on
English books.
The use of wood, now worked with the graver and no longer with the
knife, was revived in England by Bewick about 1784, and was pursued with
varying success for over a century, great technical skill and, at least
in the "sixties," very fine design being marred by the poverty and
often the tawdriness of its typographical setting. Despite these
drawbacks, the collectors who are bestowing attention on all this
wood-engraved work of the nineteenth century will probably reap their
reward.
When wood engraving was killed a few years ago by the extraordinary
perfection attained, at a much smaller cost, by the process block, its
fate was shared by the line-engraved illustrations which had appeared
fitfully throughout the century, and had lingered on in the beautiful
work of C. H. Jeens, who died in 1879, and in the use of old plates. As
the wood engraving was killed by the half-tone block, so the line
engraving disappeared before the photogravure, and the colour processes
now being rapidly perfected threaten to reduce all black and white
illustrations to unimportance. In so far, however, as the new processes
necessitate the use of heavily loaded papers as a condition of their
being even tolerably well printed, the least antiquarian of collectors
may be forgiven for neglecting the books illustrated by them. Some of
them can only be preserved by every plate being backed with sound paper,
and a hundred years hence of all this illustrated work, much of it
really beautiful, which is now being produced in such quantities, very
little will remain. The modern Groliers whom we tried to call forth at
the beginning of this chapter will need to be experts both in paper and
in leather if they are to leave behind them any permanent record of
their good taste. But this is only a crowning proof of how urgently they
are needed.
It would be pleasant to glance briefly at some of the more literary
considerations which bring books within the collector's scope. But the
scheme of this series restricts the subject of the present volume to
books which are prized either for their typographical beauty, their
place in the history of printing, or the charm of their illustrations.
This is in itself so large a field that no more pages must be wasted on
introducing it.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Even Mr. Carnegie will only help to found new libraries, not to
make old ones more efficient.
[2] During the Civil War itself presses were also set up temporarily
at Newcastle-on-Tyne, at Shrewsbury, and perhaps elsewhere.
CHAPTER II
BLOCK-BOOKS
The collector of the time of George III, whose heart was set on
Typographical Antiquities, and who was ambitious enough to wish to begin
at the beginning, must have hungered after a block-book. Even in the
days of Bagford, at the very outset of the eighteenth century, interest
had been aroused in the block-printed editions of the _Speculum Humanae
Saluationis_, so that Bagford himself travelled from Amsterdam to
Haarlem on purpose to see a copy of one of the Dutch editions, and set
an English wood-cutter to work, with very poor success, to manufacture a
bogus specimen of it, wherewith "to oblige the curious." This, with a
similar imitation of a page in the _Biblia Pauperum_, was intended to
illustrate the History of Printing which Bagford had the temerity to
plan, although such of his smaller dissertations as have been preserved
show conclusively that he was quite incapable of carrying it out.
The interest thus early shown in block-books sprang from an entirely
reasonable, but probably incorrect, view of the part which they had
played in the development of printing with movable type. It was known
that woodcuts without letterpress were printed in Germany quite early in
the fifteenth century, the cut of S. Christopher, formerly in the
Spencer Collection, now in the John Rylands Library, bearing the date
1423.[3] On the other hand, printing with movable type was practised at
Mainz in the fifties, and about 1461 Albrecht Pfister published at
Bamberg several books with woodcut illustrations and printed
letterpress. In the logical order of development nothing could be more
reasonable than the sequence:
i. Woodcut pictures.
ii. Woodcut pictures and woodcut text.
iii. Woodcut pictures and text printed from movable type.
Facts, however, do not always arrange themselves with the neatness which
commends itself to an a priori historian, and the most recent students
of block-books are unable to discover sufficient justification for the
early dates which their predecessors assigned to them. On the old
theory, in order to put it in front of the invention of printing with
movable types, the _Biblia Pauperum_, which appears to be the oldest of
the block-books, was placed about 1430 or 1440, and the _Ars Moriendi_
and the other chief specimens of block-printing were all supposed to
have been produced before 1460, the main period of block-printing thus
coinciding with the interval between the S. Christopher of 1423 and
Pfister's activity at Bamberg about 1461. Positive evidence in favour of
this chronology there was none. It rested solely on the idea, at which
bibliographers had jumped, that the block-books were necessary "steps
towards the invention of printing," as they have often been called, and
on what seemed the improbability that any one, when the art of printing
with movable type had once been invented, would have troubled himself
laboriously to cut letterpress on wood.
So far from block-printing being unable to co-exist with printing from
movable type, it was not till nearly a century after printing had been
invented that block-books finally ceased to be produced. The example
generally quoted as the latest[4] is the _Opera nova contemplativa per
ogni fedel christiano laquale tratta de le figure del testamento
vecchio: le quale figure sonno verificate nel testamento nuovo_. As its
title implies, this, curiously enough, is an adaptation of the _Biblia
Pauperum_, which was thus the last, as it may have been the first, of
the block-books. It is undated, but has the name of its publisher,
Giovanni Andrea Vavassore, who worked at Venice about 1530.
The _Opera nova contemplativa_ was from one point of view a mere
survival, but Vavassore is not likely to have produced it solely to
cause twentieth century antiquaries surprise. He must have had a
business reason for having recourse to block-printing, nor is that
reason very hard to find. From the frequency with which the early
printers changed and recast their types, and the short intervals at
which popular books printed with types were set up afresh, it is clear
(1) that the type-metal[5] employed was much softer and less durable
than that now in use, and that only small impressions[6] could be taken
from the same setting up; (2) that only a small amount of type was cast
at a time, and that type was quickly distributed and used again, never
kept standing on the chance that another edition would be wanted. Now
when we come to the illustrations in printed books, we find the same
woodblocks used for five or six successive editions, and then, in many
cases, enjoying a second lease of life as job-blocks, used at haphazard
by inferior printers. It is clear, therefore, that while it was a much
more difficult and laborious business to cut the letterpress of a book
on blocks of wood than to set it up with movable types, when the blocks
were once made much more work could be got out of them. In a word, in
the case of a small book for which there was a steady demand, a printer
might be tempted to have it cut as a block-book for the same reasons as
might cause a modern publisher to have it stereotyped. The labour of
cutting the letterpress on wood was much greater than that now involved
in stereotyping, and the result clumsier. Hence it was only to short
books intended for unexacting purchasers that the process was applied
and with two or three exceptions it was used only for illustrated books
with a small amount of text. But within this restricted field it had its
own commercial possibilities, and there is thus nothing surprising in
its coexistence with printing from movable type.
When the theory that block-books were "Steps towards the Invention of
Printing" is thus opposed by the rival theory that they were forerunners
of stereotyped plates, we are left free to consider, uncoerced by
supposed necessities, such evidence as exists as to the dates of the
specimens of block-printing still extant. Putting aside the late Italian
block-book as a mere survival, we find two[7] broadly distinguished
groups, one earlier, the dates of members of which can only be
conjectured, the other later, several of which can only be definitely
connected with the years 1470 to 1473. The characteristics of the
earlier group are that they are printed (1) with a watery brown ink; (2)
always on one side of the paper only; (3) without mechanical
pressure;[8] (4) two consecutive pages at a time, so that they cannot be
arranged in quires, but must be folded and stitched separately, and the
book thus formed[9] begins and ends with a blank page and has a pair of
blank pages between each pair of printed ones. This arrangement in some
extant copies has been altered by modern binders, who have divided the
sheets, mounted each leaf on a guard, and then gathered them, at their
own will, into quires. The inconvenient intervention of the blank pages
has also sometimes been wrestled with (at an early date) by gluing the
leaves together, so that all the leaves, except the first and last, are
double, and the printed pages follow each other without interruption.
These expedients, however, are easily detected, and the original
principle of arrangement is free from doubt.
In the later block-books, on the other hand, we note one or more of the
following characteristics: (1) the use of the thick black ink (really a
kind of paint) employed in ordinary printing; (2) printing on both sides
of the paper; (3) marks of pressure, showing that the paper has been
passed through a printing-press; (4) the arrangement of the blocks in
such a way as to permit the sheets to be gathered into quires.
In the case of the more popular block-books which went through many
issues and editions[10] we can trace the gradual substitution of later
characteristics for earlier ones. At what intervals of time these changes
were made we have bibliographically no adequate grounds even for
guessing. Analogies from books printed with movable types may be quoted
on both sides. On the one hand, we find the blocks for book-illustrations
enjoying an amazingly long life. Thus blocks cut at Venice and Florence
between 1490 and 1500 continued in use for fifteen or twenty years, were
then laid aside, and reappear between 1550 and 1560, certainly the worse
for wear, but yet capable by a lucky chance of yielding quite a fair
impression. The fact that one issue of a block-book can be positively
assigned to 1470 or 1473, thus does not of itself forbid an earlier issue
being placed as far back in the fifteenth century as any one may please
to propose. On the other hand, when a printed book was a popular success
editions succeeded each other with great rapidity, and one centre of
printing vied with another in producing copies of it. The chief reason
for the current disinclination to assume a date earlier than 1450 or 1460
for any extant block-book is the total absence of any evidence demanding
it. If such evidence were forthcoming, there would be no inherent
impossibility to set against it. But in the absence of such evidence
twenty years seems an ample time to allow for the vogue of the
block-books, and (despite the neatness of the a priori theory of
development mentioned at the beginning of this chapter) this fits in
better with the history both of printing and of book-illustration than
any longer period.
The first attempt to describe the extant block-books was made by Carl
Heinrich von Heinecken in 1771, in his _Idee generale d'une collection
d'estampes_. This held the field until the publication in 1858 of Samuel
Legh Sotheby's _Principia Typographica: the block-books issued in
Holland, Flanders and Germany, during the fifteenth century_, a
painstaking and well-illustrated work in three folio volumes. The most
recent and probably the final treatment of the subject is that by Dr. W.
L. Schreiber, in Vol. IV of his _Manuel de l'Amateur de la Gravure sur
bois et sur metal au xv^e siecle_, published in 1902 (facsimiles in
Vols. VII and VIII, 1895-1900). Dr. Schreiber enumerates no fewer than
thirty-three works as existing in the form of block-books, the number of
extant issues and editions of them amounting to over one hundred. Here
it must suffice to offer brief notes on some of the more important.
_BIBLIA PAUPERUM_
A series of forty composite pictures, the central compartment in each
representing a scene from the life of Christ, while on each side of it
is an Old Testament type, and above and below are in each case two
half-figures of prophets. The explanatory letterpress is given in the
two upper corners and also on scrolls. Schreiber distinguishes ten
issues and editions, in addition to an earlier German one of a less
elaborate design and with manuscript text, which belongs to a different
tradition. The earlier of these ten editions appear to have been made in
the Netherlands. An edition with German text was published with the
colophon, "Friederich walther Mauler zu Nordlingen vnd Hans Hurning
habent dis buch mitt einender gemacht," and a second issue of this
(without the colophon) is dated 1470. In the following year another
edition, with copied cuts, was printed with the device of Hans Spoerer.
_ARS MORIENDI_
Twenty-four leaves, two containing a preface, and the remaining
twenty-two eleven pictures and eleven pages of explanatory letterpress
facing them, showing the temptations to which the dying are exposed, and
the good inspirations by which they may be resisted, and, lastly, the
final agony. The early editions are ascribed to the Netherlands or
district of the Rhine; the later to Germany. There are also editions
with German text, one of them signed "hanns Sporer," and dated 1473. A
set of engravings on copper by the Master E. S. (copied by the Master of
S. Erasmus) may be either imitations or the originals of the earliest of
these _Ars Moriendi_ designs. (See Lionel Cust's _The Master E. S. and
the Ars Moriendi_.) The designs were imitated in numerous printed
editions in various countries. In addition to a copy of the edition
usually regarded as the earliest extant, the British Museum possesses
one with the same characteristics, but of a much smaller size (the
blocks measuring 137 by 100 mm. instead of 226 by 162), and from this,
as much less known, a page is here given as an illustration.
_CANTICA CANTICORUM_
Sixteen leaves, each containing two woodcuts, illustrating the Song of
Songs as a parable of the Blessed Virgin. Produced in the Netherlands.
_APOCALYPSIS SANCTI JOHANNIS_
Fifty leaves, or in some editions forty-eight, showing scenes from the
life of S. John and illustrations of the Apocalypse, mostly with two
pictures on each leaf. The early editions are assigned to the
Netherlands, the later to Germany. A copy of the edition regarded as the
fourth, lately sold by Herr Ludwig Rosenthal, bears a manuscript note,
most probably as to the writer, just possibly as to the book, entering
the household of the Landgrave Heinrich of Hesse in 1463.
[Illustration: III. ARS MORIENDI, BLOCKBOOK, C. 1465
INSPIRATIO CONTRA VANAM GLORIAM]
_SPECULUM HUMANAE SALUATIONIS_
Scenes from Bible history, arranged in pairs, within architectural
borders, with explanatory text beneath. No complete xylographic, or
block-printed, edition is known, but twenty leaves printed from blocks
are found in conjunction with forty-four leaves printed from type, and
have not unreasonably been held to prove the previous production of a
complete block-printed edition now lost. In like manner, the fact that
two different types are used in different parts of a Dutch printed
edition has encouraged Dr. Hessels to believe that this "mixed edition"
should be regarded as proving the production of two complete editions,
one in each type. On this theory we have (1) a hypothetical Latin
block-printed edition; (2-4) three Dutch editions, each printed in a
different type; (5) a Latin edition, entirely printed from type; (6) a
Latin edition, printed partly from type, partly from some of the blocks
of No. 1. The copy of this "mixed Latin edition," as it is called, in
the University Library at Munich, is dated in manuscript 1471, and the
hypothetical complete block-printed edition may be as much earlier than
this as any one pleases to imagine. But other bibliographers recognize
only four editions and arrange them differently.
_ANTICHRISTUS_
Thirty-eight leaves, with two pictures on each leaf, illustrating the
Legends relating to the Coming of Antichrist, and the Fifteen Signs
which were to precede the Last Judgment. The text is in German, and the
block-book was executed in Germany, probably about 1470.
_FRANCISCUS DE RETZA. DEFENSORIUM INVIOLATAE CASTITATIS VIRGINIS MARIAE_
Sixteen leaves, mostly with four pictures and four pieces of explanatory
letterpress on each leaf, concerning marvels in the natural world which
were supposed to be equally wonderful with that of the Virgin Birth, and
therefore to render faith in this easier. Unfortunately the marvels are
so very marvellous that they do not inspire belief, e.g. one story
relates how the sun one day drew up the moisture from the earth with
such rapidity that an ox was drawn up with it and subsequently deposited
out of a cloud in another field. One edition was issued by a certain F.
W. in 1470, another at Ratisbon by Johann Eysenhut the following year.
_JOHANN MULLER (JOHANNES REGIOMONTANUS). KALENDER_
Thirty-two leaves, containing lunar tables, tables of the eclipses for
fifty-six years (1475-1530), other astronomical information, and a
figure of the human body with notes of the signs of the zodiac by which
it was influenced. Composed by the famous astronomer, Johann Muller, and
sold by Hans Briefftruck, probably Hans Spoerer, about 1474-5, at
Nuremberg and elsewhere.
_JOHANN HARTLIEB. DIE KUNST CHIROMANTIA_
Forty-four figures of hands, with a titlepage and page of text and a
printed wrapper. Early issues are printed on one side of the paper only,
later on both. The printer appears to have been Jorg Schaff, of
Augsburg, and the date of issue about 1475. The date 1448 found in the
book is that of composition, and it probably circulated in manuscript
for many years before being printed.
_MIRABILIA ROMAE_
A German guide-book for visitors to Rome. Ninety-two leaves, printed
with black ink on both sides of the leaf, with only a few illustrations.
It was perhaps first published to meet the rush of German pilgrims to
Rome at the Jubilee of Pope Sixtus IV, 1475. The blocks were probably
cut in Germany, and the printing done at Rome. Some of the ornaments are
said to have been used in type-printed editions by Stephan Plannck. This
suggests that the book may have been published by his predecessor,
Ulrich Han.
* * * * *
In addition to these block-books of Low Country and German origin,
mention must also be made of a very curious Italian one, a _Passio
domini nostri Jesu Christi_, fully described by the Prince d'Essling.
The copy of this at Berlin contains eighteen leaves, and was probably
executed at Venice about the middle of the fifteenth century. Some of
the blocks were subsequently used (after a scroll at the foot had been
cut off) for an edition of the _Devote Meditatione sopra la Passione del
Nostro Signore_ (attributed to S. Bonaventura), published at Venice in
1487 by Jeronimo di Sancti e Cornelio suo Compagno, and a page from this
is reproduced as a frontispiece to our chapter on Italian Illustrated
Books.
Mention has already been made of the _Opera nova contemplativa_, an
adaptation of the _Biblia Pauperum_, printed as a block-book at Venice
about 1530.
The only extant French block-book, if it can be called one, is that of
the "Nine Worthies" (_Les Neuf Preux_). This consists of three sheets,
the first showing three heathen worthies--Hector, Alexander, and Julius
Caesar; the second, three from the Old Testament--Joshua, David, and
Judas Maccabaeus; the third, three from medieval romance--Arthur,
Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Boulogne. Under each picture are six lines
of verse. These three triple woodcuts, with the woodcut text, are
assigned to about 1455.
No English block-book has yet been discovered, nor is it in the least
likely that one ever existed, though there are a few single woodcuts.
* * * * *
Block-books possess two permanent attractions in addition to their
supposed historical importance in the development of the invention of
printing on which doubt is now cast--the attraction of popular
literature and the attraction of the illustrated book. As we have seen,
it would not have been worth any one's while to cause a block-book to be
laboriously engraved, or cut, unless a large and speedy sale could be
expected for it. The most famous block-books are nearly all of a
religious character, and they prove a widespread desire for simple
instruction as to the incidents of the life of Christ and the events in
the Old Testament history which were regarded as prefigurements of them,
as to the dignity of the Blessed Virgin and the doctrine of the Virgin
Birth, as to the end of the world and the coming of Antichrist, and as
to the spiritual dangers and temptations of the dying and the means by
which they might be resisted. As early specimens of book-illustration
the value of the block-books varies very greatly. The majority of them
are more curious than beautiful, but the pictures of the _Cantica
Canticorum_, the _Speculum Humanae Saluationis_, and the _Ars Moriendi_
have all very great merit. The tall, slender figures in the Song of
Songs have a charm as great as any Dutch book-illustrations of the
fifteenth century; the cuts of the _Speculum_ are full of vigour, while
the serene dignity of the scenes in the _Ars Moriendi_ illustrating the
Inspirations of the Good Angel is as impressive as the grotesque force
used in depicting the diabolic suggestions. If we must grant, as the
weight of authority now bids us, that these woodcuts are copies from the
copper engravings of the Master E. S., it can hardly be disputed that
the wood-cutter was the better artist of the two.
The block-books are a striking example of the difficulty of gleaning
where the earlier collectors have reaped, a difficulty to which we shall
often have to call attention. They vary greatly in positive rarity. Of
the _Biblia Pauperum_ and _Ars Moriendi_, which in their different
issues and editions enjoyed the longest life and early attracted
attention, Dr. Schreiber (if I have counted rightly) was able to
enumerate in the one case as many as eighty-three copies--many of them,
it is true, mere fragments--in the other sixty-one. Of the _Apocalypse_
fifty-seven copies were known to him, of the _Speculum_ twenty-nine, of
the _Antichrist_ thirteen, of the _Defensorium_ twelve, and of the
_Mirabilia Romae_ six. But of these 261 copies and fragments no fewer
than 223 are recorded as being locked up in public libraries and
museums, the ownership of thirteen was doubtful, and only twenty-five
are definitely registered as being in the hands of private collectors,
viz. of the _Apocalypse_, eight copies or fragments; of the _Biblia
Pauperum_, six; of the _Speculum_ and _Ars Moriendi_, four each; of the
_Defensorium_, two; and of the _Cantica Canticorum_, one. The chief
owners known to Dr. Schreiber were the Earl of Pembroke, Baron Edmond
de Rothschild, and Major Holford, to whom must now be added Mr. Pierpont
Morgan and Mr. Perrins. No doubt the copies in public institutions are
much more easily enumerated than those in private hands, and probably
most of the untraced copies are owned by collectors. But when allowance
has been made for this, it remains obvious that this is no field where
an easy harvest can be reaped, and that the average collector may think
himself lucky if he obtains one or two single leaves. The last great
opportunity of acquiring such treasures was at the sale in 1872 of the
wonderful collection formed by T. O. Weigel,[11] at which the British
Museum bought a very fine copy of the first edition of the _Ars
Moriendi_, the first edition, dated 1470, of the _Biblia Pauperum_, in
German, a block-book illustrating the virtues of the hymn _Salve
Regina_, and the compassion of the Blessed Virgin, printed at Regensburg
about 1470, besides fragments and woodcut single sheets. The foundation
of the Museum collection of block-books had been laid by George III,
added to by Mr. Grenville, and completed by a series of purchases from
1838 to this final haul of 1872, since when there have been few
opportunities for new acquisitions. It is now quite adequate for
purposes of study, though not so rich as that of the Bibliotheque
Nationale at Paris.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] The authenticity of a still earlier date, 1418, on a cut of the
Blessed Virgin at Brussels is disputed.
[4] The _Libro di M. Giovanbattista Palatino_, printed at Rome in
1548, is spoken of by Mr. Campbell Dodgson as a "belated specimen" of
a block-book. But this was a writing-book, and hardly counts.
[5] Numerous references in colophons show that the metal mostly used
was brass, e.g. "_Primus in Adriaca formis impressit aenis Vrbe
libros Spira genitus de stirpe Johannes_," and the use of
Chalcographi as a name for printers. But there are one or two
references to printing "_stanneis typis_," with types of tin.
[6] Of the first book printed at Venice only 100 copies were struck
off, but the number was trebled in the case of its immediate
successors. At Rome Sweynheym and Pannartz mostly printed 275 copies,
only in a few instances as many as 300. But at the end of the century
Pynson was printing at least 600 copies of large books and as many as
1000 of small ones.
[7] A very small third group, earlier than either of these, consists
of woodcuts with manuscript text. The most important of these is a
German _Biblia Pauperum_ quite distinct from those started in the
Netherlands.
[8] Some early woodcuts were printed by pressing the block down on
the paper by hand; for the early block-books, however, the usual
method seems to have been to press the paper on to the face of the
block by rubbing it on the back with a burnisher. The paper was thus
quite as strongly indented as if passed through a press, but the
impression is usually less even. The friction on the back of the
paper often gives it a polished appearance. As long as this method
continued in use it was, of course, impossible to print on both sides
of the paper.
[9] It is possible that the earliest specimens of block-printing were
intended not to be bound in books but to be pasted on walls. In the
case of the _Biblia Pauperum_, for instance, the space between the
two woodcuts placed on each sheet is so small in some issues that the
sheets cannot be bound without concealing part of the pictures.
[10] Different issues are distinguished by the signs of wear in the
blocks, or occasionally by their being differently arranged, or with
changes made in the blocks. In a different edition we have to deal
with a new set of blocks.
[11] Since this was written the interesting collection formed by Dr.
Schreiber himself has been dispersed.
CHAPTER III
THE INVENTION OF PRINTING--HOLLAND
Up to the year 1465 only one firm of printers evinced any appreciation
of the uses of advertisement. In 1457 Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer,
of Mainz, set their names at the end of the liturgical Psalter which
they were issuing from their press, and stated also the date of its
completion, "In vigilia Assumpcionis," on the vigil of the feast of the
Assumption, i.e. August 14th. Save in the case of a few unimportant
books this preference for publicity remained the settled practice of the
firm until Peter Schoeffer's death early in the sixteenth century, and
later still when it was in the hands of his son Johann. With other
printers at first the tendency was all the other way. Albrecht Pfister
placed his name in one or two of the handful of popular illustrated
books which he printed at Bamberg about 1461. No other book before 1465
contains its printer's name, and both at Strassburg and at Basel the
practice of publishing anonymously continued in fashion throughout the
'seventies--in Strassburg, indeed, for the best part of another decade.
[Illustration: IV. EARLY DUTCH PRESS
ALEXANDER GALLES, DOCTRINALE (3^a)]
While printing continued mainly anonymous chroniclers took no note of
it, but in the ten years which began in 1465 the progress of the art was
rapid and triumphant. Printers, mostly Germans, invaded the chief cities
of Europe, and boasted in their books of having been the first to
practise it in this place or that. Curiosity as to the beginnings of the
invention was thus aroused, and from 1470 onwards we meet with numerous
attempts, not always accurate, to satisfy it. The earliest of these
attempts is in a letter from Guillaume Fichet, a Professor at the
Sorbonne, who was mainly responsible for bringing the first printers to
Paris, to his friend Robert Gaguin. This is contained in one copy of the
second Paris book, the _Orthographia_ of Gasparinus Barzizius, printed
in 1470, Fichet having a fondness for giving individuality to special
copies by additions of this kind. In this letter he speaks of the great
light which he thinks learning will receive from the new kind of bookmen
whom Germany, like another Trojan Horse, has poured forth.
Ferunt enim illic, haut procul a ciuitate Maguncia, Ioannem quendam
fuisse cui cognomen bonemontano, qui primus omnium impressoriam artem
excogitauerit, qua non calamo (ut prisci quidem illi) neque penna (ut
nos fingimus) sed aereis litteris libri finguntur, et quidem expedite,
polite et pulchre. Dignus sane hic uir fuit quem omnes musae, omnes
artes, omnesque eorum linguae qui libris delectantur, diuinis laudibus
ornent, eoque magis dis deabusque anteponant, quo propius ac
presentius litteris ipsis ac studiosis hominibus suffragium tulit. Si
quidem deificantur Liber et alma Ceres, ille quippe dona Liei inuenit
poculaque inuentis acheloia miscuit uuis, haec chaoniam pingui glandem
mutauit arista. Atque (ut poeta utamur altero) prima Ceres unco glebam
dimouit aratro, prima dedit fruges alimenta mitia terris. At
bonemontanus ille, longe gratiora diuinioraque inuenit, quippe qui
litteras eiusmodi exculpsit, quibus quidquid dici, aut cogitari
potest, propediem scribi ac transcribi & posteritatis mandari memoriae
possit.
The good Fichet is absurdly rhetorical, but here in 1470 is a quite
clear statement that, according to report, there (i.e. in Germany), not
far from[12] the city of Mainz, a certain John, surnamed Gutenberg,
first of all men thought out the printing art, by which books are
fashioned not with a reed or pen, but with letters of brass, and thus
deserved better of mankind than either Bacchus or Ceres, since by his
invention whatever can be said or thought can forthwith be written and
transcribed and handed down to posterity.
Four years later in his continuation of the _Chronica Summorum
Pontificum_, begun by Riccobaldus, Joannes Philippi de Lignamine, the
physician of Pope Sixtus IV, who had set up a press of his own at Rome,
wrote as one of the events of the pontificate of Pius II (1458-64), how
"Jakob Gutenberg, a native of Strassburg, and a certain other whose name
was Fust, being skilled in printing letters on parchment with metal
forms, are known each of them to be turning out three hundred sheets a
day at Mainz, a city of Germany, and Johann Mentelin also, at
Strassburg, a city of the same province, being skilled in the same
craft, is known to be printing daily the same number of sheets."[13] A
little later De Lignamine records the arrival at Rome of Sweynheym and
Pannartz, and also of Ulrich Han, and credits them also with printing
three hundred sheets a day. Other references follow in later books
without adding to our knowledge, save by proving the widespread
recognition in the fifteenth century that printing was invented at
Mainz; but there is nothing specially to detain us until the publication
by Johann Koelhoff in 1499 of the Cologne Chronicle--_Die Cronica van
der hilliger Stat Coellen_--in which occurs a famous passage about
printing, which may be translated or paraphrased as follows:--
"This right worthy art was invented first of all in Germany, at Mainz,
on the Rhine. And that is a great honour to the German nation that such
ingenious men are found there. This happened in the year of our Lord
1440, and from that time until 1450 the art and all that pertains to it
was investigated, and in 1450, which was a Golden Year, men began to
print, and the first book that was printed was the Bible in Latin, and
this was printed with a letter as large as that now used in missals.
"Although this art was invented at Mainz, as far as regards the manner
in which it is now commonly used, yet the first prefiguration
(Vurbyldung) was invented in Holland from the Donatuses which were
printed there before that time. And from and out of these the aforesaid
art took its beginning, and was invented in a manner much more masterly
and subtler than this, and the longer it lasted the more full of art it
became.
"A certain Omnibonus wrote in the preface to a Quintilian, and also in
other books, that a Walloon from France, called Nicolaus Jenson, was the
first inventor of this masterly art--a notorious lie, for there are men
still alive who bear witness that books were printed at Venice before
the aforesaid Nicolaus Jenson came there, and began to cut and make
ready his letter. But the first inventor of printing was a Burgher at
Mainz, and was born at Strassburg, and called Yunker Johann Gutenberg.
"From Mainz the art came first of all to Cologne, after that to
Strassburg, and after that to Venice. The beginning and progress of the
art were told me by word of mouth by the Worshipful Master Ulrich Zell
of Hanau, printer at Cologne in this present year 1499, through whom the
art came to Cologne."[14]
Zell, or his interviewer, ignores the books printed anonymously at
Strassburg by Mentelin and Eggestein, and also the handful printed by
Albrecht Pfister at Bamberg; he also is misled by Gutenberg's long
residence at Strassburg into calling him a native of that city; in other
respects, so far as we are able to check this account, it is quite
accurate. It tells us emphatically that "this right worthy art was
invented first of all in Germany, at Mainz, on the Rhine"; and again,
that "the first inventor of printing was a Burgher at Mainz named Junker
Johann 'Gudenburch'"; but between these two unqualified statements is
sandwiched a reference to a prefiguration which took shape in Holland in
_Donatuses_, printed there before the Mainz presses were at work, and
much less masterly and subtle than the books which they produced. He
connects no name with this "Vorbildung," and, unhappily, he gives no
clue as to how it foreshadowed, and was yet distinct from, the real
invention.
Sixty-nine years[15] after the appearance of this carefully balanced
statement, the facts as to Dutch "prefigurations" which had inspired it
moved a Dutch chronicler, Hadrianus Junius, in compiling his _Batavia_
(not published till 1588), to write the well-known passage as to the
invention of printing, which has been summarized as follows:--
There lived, about 1440, at Haarlem, in the market-place opposite the
Town Hall, in a respectable house still in existence, a man named
Lourens Janszoon Coster, i.e. Laurence, son of John Coster. The family
name was derived from the hereditary office of Sacristan, or Coster of
the Church--a post both honourable and lucrative. The town archives
give evidence of this, his name appearing therein many times, and in
the Town Hall are preserved his seal and signature to various
documents. To this man belongs the honour of inventing Printing, an
honour of which he was unjustly robbed, and which afterwards was
ascribed to another. The said Laurence Coster, one day after dinner,
took a walk in the wood near Haarlem. While there, to amuse himself,
he began to cut letters out of some beech-bark. The idea struck him to
ink some of these letters and use them as stamps. This he did to amuse
his grandchildren, cutting them in reverse. He thus formed two or
three sentences on paper. The idea germinated, and soon with the help
of his son-in-law, and by using a thick ink, he began to print whole
pages, and to add lines of print to the block-books, the text of which
was the most difficult part to engrave. Junius had seen such a book,
called _Spieghel onzer Behoudenisse_. It should have been said that
Coster was descended from the noble house of Brederode, and that his
son-in-law was also of noble descent. Coster's first efforts were of
course very rude, and to hide the impression of the letters on the
back, they pasted the leaves, which had one side not printed,
together. His letters at first were made of lead, which he afterwards
changed for tin. Upon his death these letters were melted down and
made into wine-pots, which at the time that Junius wrote were still
preserved in the house of Gerrit Thomaszoon, the grandson of Coster.
Public curiosity was greatly excited by Coster's discovery, and he
gained much profit from his new process. His trade, indeed, so
increased that he was obliged to employ several workmen, one of whom
was named John. Some say this was John Faust, afterwards a partner
with Gutenberg, and others say he was Gutenberg's brother. This man
when he had learnt the art in all its branches, took the opportunity
one Christmas eve, when all good people are accustomed to attend
Church, to break into the rooms used for printing, and to pack up and
steal all the tools and appliances which his master, with so much care
and ingenuity, had made. He went off by Amsterdam and Cologne to
Mainz, where he at once opened a workshop and reaped rich fruit from
this theft, producing several printed books. The accuracy of this
story was attested by a respectable bookbinder, of great age but clear
memory, named Cornelis who had been a fellow-servant with the culprit
in the house of Coster, and indeed had occupied the same bed for
several months, and who could never talk of such baseness without
shedding tears and cursing the thief.
Written nearly a hundred and thirty years after the supposed events
which it narrates, this story is damned by its circumstantiality. It is
thus that legends grow, and it is not difficult to imagine Haarlem
bookmen picking up ideas out of colophons in old books and asking the
"respectable bookbinder of great age" whether it was not thus and thus
that things happened. Many of the details of the story are demonstrably
false; its one strong point is the bookbinder, Cornelis, for a binder of
this name is said to have been employed as early as 1474 and as late as
1514 to bind the account-books of Haarlem Cathedral, and in the two
years named, and also in 1476, to have strengthened his bindings by
pasting inside them fragments of _Donatuses_ printed on vellum in the
type of the _Speculum Humanae Saluationis_. The fragment in the
account-book for 1474 is rubricated, and must thus either have been sold
or prepared for selling, i.e. it is not "printer's waste," but may have
been bought by Cornelis for lining his covers in the ordinary way of
trade. But we have here a possible link between Zell's story of early
Dutch _Donatuses_ and the story of Junius about Coster and his servant
Cornelis, since we find fragments of a _Donatus_ in the possession of
this particular man.
There were plenty of such _Donatuses_ in existence in the Netherlands
about 1470. In 1887 Dr. Hessels, in his _Haarlem the Birthplace of
Printing, not Mentz_, enumerated fragments of twenty different editions,
printed in eight types, of which the type used in the _Speculum Humanae
Saluationis_ (see p. 26) is one, while the other seven are linked to it,
or to each other, in such a way that we may either suppose them to have
all belonged to the same printer, or distribute them among two or more
anonymous firms. Besides these twenty editions of _Donatus_ on the Eight
Parts of Speech, Dr. Hessels enumerated eight editions of the
_Doctrinale_ of Alexander Gallus[16] (another school book popular in the
fifteenth century), three of the Distichs of Dionysius Cato (the work
from which Dame Pertelote quoted to convince Chantecleer of the futility
of dreams), and one or two editions each of a few other works, the
_Facetiae Morales_ of Laurentius Valla (twenty-four leaves), the
_Singularia Juris_ of Ludovicus Pontanus, with a treatise of Pope Pius
II (sixty leaves), and the _De Salute Corporis_ of Gulielmus de Saliceto
with other small works (twenty-four leaves). These latter books offer no
very noticeable features; some of the _Donatus_ fragments, on the other
hand, have printing only on one side of the leaf (whence they are called
by the barbarous term "anopisthographic," "not printed on the back") and
have a very rude and primitive appearance. This may have been caused in
part at least by their having been pasted down, and possibly scraped, by
binders, for almost all of them have been found in bindings; but it
counts for something.
Not one of the books or fragments of which we have been speaking makes
any mention of its printer, or of the place or date at which it was
produced. A copy of one of the later books, the _De Salute Corporis_ of
Gulielmus de Saliceto, was purchased by Conrad du Moulin while abbot of
the Convent of S. James at Lille, a dignity which he held from 1471 to
1474. The earliest Haarlem account-book which contained _Donatus_
fragments was for the year 1474. It is entirely a matter of opinion as
to how much earlier than this any of the extant fragments can be dated.
There is no reason why some of them should not be later.
As to the place or places at which these books were printed, there is no
evidence of any weight. But, as has been already said, the whole series
can be closely or loosely connected with the types used in editions of
the _Speculum Humanae Saluationis_, and in 1481 Jan Veldener, a
wandering printer, while working at Utrecht, introduced into an edition
of the Epistles and Gospels in Dutch two woodcuts, each of which was a
half of one of the double pictures in the _Speculum_. Two years later,
when at Kuilenburg, he printed a quarto edition of the _Speculum_ itself
(Dutch version), in which he used a large number of the original
_Speculum_ blocks, all cut up into halves, so as to fit a small page. As
Veldener (as far as we know) used the _Speculum_ blocks first at
Utrecht, it is supposed that it was at Utrecht that he obtained them. If
the blocks were for sale at Utrecht, this may have been the place at
which the earlier editions of the _Speculum_ were issued, and thus, in
the absence of any evidence which they were willing to recognize in
favour of any other place, Henry Bradshaw and his disciples attributed
the whole series of editions of the _Speculum_, _Donatus_, _Doctrinale_,
etc., to Utrecht, about, or "not after," 1471-1474. Bradshaw himself
clearly indicated that this attribution was purely provisional. He felt
"compelled to leave" the books at Utrecht, so he phrased it, i.e. the
presumption that Veldener found the blocks of the _Speculum_ there
constituted a grain of evidence in favour of Utrecht; and if a balance
is sufficiently sensitive and both scales are empty, a grain thrown into
one will suffice to weigh it down. It would have been better, in the
present writer's opinion, if the grain had been disregarded, and no
attempt made to assign these books and fragments to any particular
place. As it is, Bradshaw's attribution of them to Utrecht has been
repeated without any emphasis on its entirely provisional character,
even without any mention of this at all, and perhaps with a certain
humorous enjoyment of the chance of prejudicing the claims of Haarlem by
an unusually rigorous application of the rules as to bibliographical
evidence.
In the eyes of Dr. Hessels, on the other hand, the legend narrated by
Junius offers a sufficient reason for assigning all these books to
Haarlem, and to Lourens Janszoon Coster as their printer. Dr. Hessels
was even ill-advised enough to point out that, as there are twenty
editions of _Donatus_ in this group of types, we have only to allow an
interval of a year and a half between each to take back the earliest
very close to 1440, the traditional date of the invention of printing.
This is perfectly true, but as no reason can be assigned for fixing on
this particular interval the value of such a calculation is very slight.
One result of all this controversy is that the whole series of books and
fragments have been dubbed "Costeriana," and the convenience of having a
general name for them is so great that it has been generally adopted,
even by those who have no belief in the theory which it implies. All
that is known of Lourens Janszoon Coster is that he resided at Haarlem
from 1436 to 1483, and that contemporary references show him to have
been a chandler and innkeeper, without making any mention of his having
added printing to his other occupations.
It is difficult to claim more for the story told by Junius than that it
represents an unknown quantity of fact with various legendary additions.
It is difficult to dismiss it as less than a legend which must have had
some element of fact as its basis. In so far as it goes beyond the
statements of the Cologne Chronicle, it is supported only by the
evidence that Coster and the venerable bookbinder Cornelis existed, and
that the latter bound the account-books of Haarlem Cathedral. But no
indiscretion of Hadrianus Junius writing in 1568 can affect the credit
of the statements made in the Cologne Chronicle in 1499 on the
authority of Ulrich Zell, and we have now to mention an important piece
of evidence in favour of Zell's accuracy. This is the entry in the
diaries of Jean de Robert, Abbot of Saint Aubert, Cambrai, of the
purchase in 1446 and again in 1451 of a copy of the _Doctrinale_ of
Alexander Gallus, _jete en moule_, a phrase which, while far from
satisfactory as a description of a book printed from movable type,
cannot possibly refer to editions printed from woodblocks, even if these
existed. The _Doctrinale_, which was in verse, was a less popular
school-book than the _Donatus_. It is significant that among the
so-called "Costeriana" there are eight editions of the one against
twenty of the other. Where the _Doctrinale_ was used we may be sure that
the _Donatus_ would be used also, and in greater numbers, so that this
mention of a "mould-casted" _Doctrinale_ as purchased as early as 1446
is a real confirmation of Zell's assertion. We have no sufficient ground
for believing that any of the fragments, either of the one book or the
other, now in existence were produced as early as this. It is of the
nature of school-books to be destroyed, and every improvement in the
process of production would help to drive the earlier experiments out of
existence. But taking Zell's statement and the entries in the Abbot's
diaries together, it seems impossible to deny that there is evidence of
some kind of printing being practised in Holland not long after 1440.
An ingenious theory as to the form which these "prefigurements" may have
taken has lately been suggested, viz. that the earliest types may have
consisted simply of flat pieces of metal, without any shanks to them,
and that they were "set up" by being glued upon wood or stiff paper in
the order required. They would thus be movable, but with a very low
degree of movability, so that we can easily understand why short books
like the _Donatus_ and _Doctrinale_ were continually reprinted without
any attempt being made to produce a large work such as the Bible. It is
curious, however, that in the description of a "ciripagus" by Paulus
Paulirinus, of Prag,[17] "we have a reference" to a Bible having been
printed at Bamberg "super lamellas," a phrase which might very well
refer to types of this kind, though the sentence is usually explained as
referring to either the Latin or German edition of the _Biblia Pauperum_
issued by Albrecht Pfister. I think it just possible myself that the
reference is really to the Latin Bible known as the Thirty-six Line
Bible, which seems certainly to have been sold, if not printed, at
Bamberg a little before 1460, and that Paulirinus, having seen books
printed "super lamellas," supposed (wrongly) that this was printed in
that way. But the statement that it was printed in four weeks is against
this.
Whether the Dutch "Vorbildung" of the Art of Printing subsequently
invented at Mainz took the form of experiments with shankless types, or
fell short of the fully developed art in some other way, does not
greatly concern the collector. It is in the highest degree improbable
that the claim put forward on behalf of the so-called "Costeriana" will
ever be decisively proved or disproved. They are likely to remain as
perpetual pretenders, and as such will always retain a certain interest,
and a specimen of them always be a desirable addition to any collection
which aims at illustrating the history of the invention of printing.
Such a specimen will not be easy to procure, because many of the extant
fragments have been found in public libraries, more especially the Royal
Library at the Hague, and have never left their first homes. On the
other hand, the number of fragments known has been considerably
increased by new finds. Thus there is no reason to regard a specimen as
unattainable.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Dr. Hessels supposes that this phrase indicates the Monastery of
Saint Victor, outside Mainz, with which Gutenberg was connected, and
that the "report," therefore, can be traced to Gutenberg himself. If
so, we have the very important fact that Gutenberg himself claimed to
be the inventor.
[13] Iacobus cognomento Gutenbergo: patria Argentinus, & quidam alter
cui nomen Fustus, imprimendarum litterarum in membranis cum
metallicis formis periti, trecentas cartas quisque eorum per diem
facere innotescunt apud Maguntiam Germanie ciuitatem. Iohannes quoque
Mentelinus nuncupatus apud Argentinam eiusdem prouincie ciuitatem: ac
in eodem artificio peritus totidem cartas per diem imprimere
agnoscitur.... Conradus Suueynem: ac Arnoldus pannarcz Vdalricus
Gallus parte ex alia Teuthones librarii insignes Romam uenientes
primi imprimendorum librorum artem in Italiam introduxere trecentas
cartas per diem imprimentes.
[14] Item dese hoichwyrdige kunst vursz is vonden aller eyrst in
Duytschlant tzo Mentz am Rijne. Ind dat is der duytschscher nacion
eyn groisse eirlicheit dat sulche synrijche mynschen syn dae tzo
vynden. Ind dat is geschiet by den iairen vns heren, anno domini.
MCCCCxl. ind van der zijt an bis men schreue. l. wart vndersoicht die
kunst ind wat dair zo gehoirt. Ind in den iairen vns heren do men
schreyff. MCCCCl. do was eyn gulden iair, do began men tzo drucken
ind was dat eyrste boich dat men druckde die Bybel zo latijn, ind
wart gedruckt mit eynre grouer schrifft. as is die schrifft dae men
nu Mysseboicher mit druckt.
Item wiewail die kunst is vonden tzo Mentz, als vursz vp die wijse,
als dan nu gemeynlich gebruicht wirt, so is doch die eyrste
vurbyldung vonden in Hollant vyss den Donaten, die dae selffst vur
der tzijt gedruckt syn. Ind van ind vyss den is genommen dat begynne
der vursz kunst. ind is vill meysterlicher ind subtilicher vonden dan
die selue manier was, vnd ye langer ye mere kunstlicher wurden.
Item eynre genant Omnebonum der schrijfft in eynre vurrede vp dat
boich Quintilianus genoempt. vnd ouch in anderen meir boicher, dat
eyn Wale vyss Vranckrijch, genant Nicolaus genson haue alre eyrst
dese meysterliche kunst vonden, mer dat is offenbairlich gelogen.
want Sij syn noch jm leuen die dat getzuigen dat men boicher druckte
tzo Venedige ee der vursz Nicolaus genson dar quame, dair he began
schrifft zo snijden vnd bereyden. Mer der eyrste vynder der druckerye
is gewest eyn Burger tzo Mentz. ind was geboren van Straiszburch. ind
hiesch joncker Johan Gudenburch. Item van Mentz is die vursz kunst
komen alre eyrst tzo Coellen. Dairnae tzo Straisburch, ind dairnae
tzo Venedige. Dat begynne ind vortganck der vursz kunst hait myr
muntlich vertzelt d' Eirsame man Meyster Vlrich tzell van Hanauwe.
boich drucker zo Coellen noch zertzijt. anno. MCCCCxcix. durch den
die kunst vursz is zo Coellen komen.
[15] The first trace of the legend is in a reference to Coster as
having "brought the first print into the world in 1446" in a
manuscript pedigree of the Coster family compiled about 1559.
[16] A page from a fragment of one of these in the British Museum
forms the frontispiece to this chapter (Plate IV).
[17] Et tempore mei Pambergae quidam scripsit integrum Bibliam super
lamellas, et in quatuor septimanis totam Bibliam super pargameno
subtili presignavit scriptura.
CHAPTER IV
THE INVENTION OF PRINTING--MAINZ
No contrast could be much greater than that between the so-called
"Costeriana" and the incunabula printed at Mainz. Annually as a small
boy I used to be taken to the Crystal Palace, and there a recognized
part of the programme in each visit was to spend half an hour in
solemnly pedalling backwards and forwards on a semicircular track on a
machine miscalled a velocipede. Perhaps these clumsy toys really
constituted a definite stage in the invention and perfection of the
modern bicycle. On the other hand, whatever may be the historical facts,
there is no reason in the nature of things why the modern bicycle should
not have been invented quite independently of them. The relative
positions of Holland and Germany as regards the invention of printing
are very analogous to those of the old velocipede and the bicycle. Even
if it could be proved decisively that some Dutch fragment of a _Donatus_
was earlier than any experiment made at Mainz or Strassburg, it was at
Mainz that the possibility was first demonstrated of producing by print
books as beautiful as any written by the scribes, and it was from
Germany, not from Holland, that printers carried the art which they had
proved to be practicable to all parts of Europe, including Holland
itself.
[Illustration: V. MAINZ, FUST AND SCHOEFFER, 1459
DURANTI, RATIONALE DIVINORUM OFFICIORUM (1^a)]
In the development of the art of printing at Mainz three men had a
share, though the precise part which each of them played is matter of
conjecture rather than knowledge. The first of the three was Johann
Gutenberg, the Johannes Bonemontanus whom Fichet, as early as 1470,
acclaimed as the first of all men to think out the printing art, whom
the popular verdict has recognized as the inventor, and whom patriotic
German bibliographers delight to invest with every virtue that
distinguishes themselves.
Gutenberg's real name was Gansfleisch, Gutenberg being an addition to
his mother's surname[18] which he assumed for reasons not known to us.
He was born about 1400, and just when he attained manhood his family,
which belonged to the patrician party at Mainz, was banished and sought
refuge at Strassburg. At Strassburg Gutenberg remained till about 1446,
and legal and municipal records, so far as we can trust to their
authenticity, offer us some tantalizing glimpses of his career there.
When the town clerk of Strassburg came to Mainz the exile caused him to
be arrested for a debt due to his family, and the matter had to be
arranged to avoid a quarrel between the two cities. On the other hand,
Gutenberg was himself called to account for unpaid duties on wine, and
was sued for a breach of promise of marriage. In 1437 he was the
defendant in a much more interesting trial. He had admitted two partners
to work an invention with him, and on one of these partners dying his
brother claimed, unsuccessfully, to take his place in the partnership.
The use of the words "presse," "forme," and "trucken" in connection with
this invention leaves it hardly open to doubt that it was concerned with
some kind of printing, and loans which Gutenberg negotiated in 1441 and
1442 were presumably raised for the development of this. About the
middle of the decade he returned to Mainz and there also borrowed money,
presumably again for the same object.
At this point we are confronted with five fragmentary pieces of
printing, all but one of them only recently discovered. The latest of
these, according to German bibliographers, is a fragment of an
astronomical Calendar in German verse for an unspecified year, which
might be 1429, 1448, or 1467, but does not exactly fit any of them; the
earliest is part of a leaf of a _Sibyllenbuch_ (originally known as _Das
Weltgericht_, because the text of this fragment deals with the Last
Judgment). Between these two are placed fragments of three editions of
_Donatus, De octo partibus orationis_, two found recently in copies of
an edition of Herolt's _Sermones de tempore et sanctis_ printed at
Strassburg[19] by Martin Flach in 1488 and now at Berlin, the third one
of the minor treasures of the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, where it
has lain for over a century. Granting that the Calendar was printed for
use in 1448 (it has been argued, on the other hand, that its mention of
movable festivals was intended to be only approximate), and that the
other four pieces can be proved by typographical evidence to have
preceded it, we may suppose the _Sibyllenbuch_ to have been printed by
Gutenberg shortly after his return to Mainz, i.e. about 1445, or shortly
before this at Strassburg.
Soon after the supposed date of the Calendar the second of the three
protagonists in the development of printing at Mainz comes on the scene.
This was Johann Fust, a goldsmith, who in or about August, 1450, lent
Gutenberg eight hundred guilders to enable him to print books, himself,
nominally or truly, borrowing the money from another capitalist, and
thereby gaining the right to charge interest on it without breaking the
canon law. By about December, 1452, the loan was exhausted, and Fust
made a fresh advance of the same amount. The inner history of the next
four years is hid from us, and the undisputed facts which belong to them
have consequently been interpreted in every variety of way that human
ingenuity can devise. These facts are that--
(i) Printing was continued with the fount of type used for the Calendar
attributed to 1448, fragments of more than a dozen different editions of
_Donatus_ printed with it being still extant, also a prognostication,
_Manung widder die Durken_, printed in December, 1454, a Bull of Pope
Calixtus "widder die Turcken" of 1456, a medical Calendar for 1456, and
an undated _Cisianus_, another work of an astronomical character.
(ii) When the pardoners employed by the proctor-general of the King of
Cyprus came to Mainz in the autumn of 1454 to raise money by means of a
papal Indulgence, valid till 30 April of the following year, they were
able to substitute two typographically distinct editions for the
manuscript copies which they had previously used, the text of each of
these Indulgences being printed in a separate fount of beautifully clear
small type, while a larger type was used for a few words. In one of
these Indulgences the larger type belongs, with some differences, to the
same fount as the books named in our last paragraph. This Indulgence has
thirty-one lines, and four issues of it have been distinguished, three
of them dated 1454 (the earliest of these being the earliest dated piece
of printing) and the fourth 1455. In the other Indulgence there are only
thirty lines, the large type is neater, and three issues have been
distinguished, one dated 1454, the other two 1455.
(iii) In November, 1455, an action brought by Fust to recover the 1600
guilders which he had lent Gutenberg, with the arrears of interest,
reached its final stage. In this suit the third of the Mainz
protagonists, Peter Schoeffer, was a witness on the side of Fust, and we
hear also, as servants of Gutenberg, of Heinrich Keffer and Bertolf von
Hanau, who may apparently be identified with printers who worked
subsequently at Nuremberg and Basel. The document which has come down to
us and is now preserved at the University Library at Gottingen is that
recording the oath taken by Fust, as the successful plaintiff, in order
to obtain judgment for the amount of his claim.
(iv) In August, 1456, Heinrich Cremer, vicar of the collegiate church at
Mainz, recorded his completion of the rubrication and binding of a
magnificent printed Bible in two volumes, now preserved in the
Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, the type of which used to be thought
identical with the larger type of the thirty-line Indulgence mentioned
above, but is now considered to be only closely similar.
For this last undoubted date of rubrication, August, 1456, German
bibliographers have lately substituted a reference to a manuscript date,
1453, in another copy of this printed Bible, now preserved in the
Buchgewerbe-Museum at Leipzig, formerly owned by a well-known German
collector of the last century, Herr Klemm. While, however, this date
appears to have been written at a period approximating to that of the
production of the book, its relevance as evidence of the date of
printing is highly disputable, more especially as there appear to be
signs of erasure near it. Its owner, Herr Klemm, preserved a discreet
silence as to its existence, and it is certainly not obligatory at
present to accept it as valid evidence.
In a work which does not pretend to the dignity of a history of printing
it is impossible to discuss, or even to enumerate, the different
theories as to the events of the years 1453-6, which have been
formulated to account for these facts. The edition of the Bible of which
Heinrich Cremer rubricated the copy now at Paris is so fine a book and
so great a landmark in typographical history, that the desire to regard
it as the production of the man who is credited with the invention of
printing, Johann Gutenberg, easily becomes irresistible. To refuse to
call it the Gutenberg Bible may, indeed, appear almost pedantic, though
its old name, the "Mazarine Bible," which it gained from the accident of
the copy in the Mazarine Library at Paris being the first to attract
attention, still survives, and it is also known among bibliographers as
the "Forty-two Line Bible," a safe uncontroversial title based on the
number of lines in most of its columns. Whoever printed it appears to
have been possessed of ample means and to have been a master of detail
and an excellent organizer. Under the minute examination to which it has
been subjected the book has yielded up some of its secrets, and we know
that it was printed simultaneously on six different presses, that the
body of the type was twice reduced, forty-two lines finally occupying
slightly less space than the forty which had at first formed a column,
that after the printing had begun it was resolved to increase the size
of the edition, and that there is some reason to think that eventually a
hundred and fifty copies were printed on paper and thirty on vellum,[20]
and that the paper was ordered in large quantities and not in small
parcels as it could be paid for. To the present writer it appears that
if Gutenberg had possessed the financial means, the patience and the
organizing power needed to push through this heavy piece of work in the
way described, it is difficult to perceive any reason why the capitalist
Fust should have quarrelled with him, or to imagine how Gutenberg
exposed himself to such an action as that which Fust successfully
carried against him. On the supposition that the Bible was completed in
or soon after 1453 the difficulty becomes almost insuperable, for it is
inconceivable that if Gutenberg had produced the book within a few
months of receiving his second loan from Fust he should not, by the
autumn of 1455, have paid his creditor a single guilder, either for
principal or interest. After his quarrel with Fust, Gutenberg apparently
had dealings with two other men, with Albrecht Pfister who is found in
possession of a later casting of the heavier fount of type in which the
Astrological Calendar attributed to 1448 had been printed, and with a
Dr. Homery. He ended his days as a pensioner at the court of the
Archbishop of Mainz, while Fust, with the aid of Peter Schoeffer, whom
he made his son-in-law, developed a great business. The inventor who
lacks organizing power and whose invention never thrives till it has
passed into other hands is no unfamiliar figure, and such a conception
of Gutenberg perhaps accords better with the known facts of his career
than that of a living incarnation of heroism and business ability such
as his German eulogists love to depict. According to a theory developed
by the present writer in an article in _The Library_ for January, 1907
(Second Series, Vol. VIII), though no originality is claimed for it, the
key to the situation lies in the assertion[21] made on behalf of Peter
Schoeffer that his skill in engraving had enabled him to attain results
denied to the two Johns, Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust.
According to this theory, it was Schoeffer who engraved the two founts
of small type used in the two sets of Indulgences of 1454-5, and thus
demonstrated that the new art could be applied to produce every kind of
book and document which had previously circulated in manuscript. Fust
gave him his daughter Christina in marriage, and Johann Schoeffer, the
offspring of the alliance, distinctly tells us that this was in reward
for his services. From the first, or almost the first, the firm adopted
a policy of advertisement which other printers were slow to imitate, the
partners giving their names in their earliest colophons and making no
secret of the fact that they were using an "adinuentio artificiosa
imprimendi ac caracterizandi" which enabled them to dispense with the
pen. In 1460, in the _Catholicon_ of that year, the work of an anonymous
printer to which we shall have to recur (see p. 51 _sqq._), the
invention is distinctly claimed for Mainz, and from 1467 this claim was
taken over by Peter Schoeffer, who in the colophons of his subsequent
books again and again celebrated Mainz as the city singled out by divine
favour to give the art to the world. The fact that for nearly forty
years (1460-99) these statements remained unchallenged, and passed into
the contemporary history of the time, is the strongest evidence in
favour of the substantial invention of the art at Mainz that can be
conceived. A single reference in 1499[22] to prefigurations of a humbler
kind in _Donatuses_ printed in Holland and the presentation of a rival
theory in 1568 cannot deprive of its due weight the evidence that during
all the years when the facts were easily ascertainable judgment in
favour of Mainz was allowed to go by default. But the Fust and Schoeffer
colophons tell us more than this, for while they make no mention of
Gutenberg they never claim the invention of printing as their own
achievement. It is clear that Fust could not claim this himself, and
while he was alive his son-in-law did not think fit to put forward, or
allow to be put forward, any claim on his own behalf. It was only in
1468, when both Gutenberg and Fust were dead, that Schoeffer's
"corrector," or reader, Magister Franciscus, was permitted to assert on
his behalf, in the _Justinian_ of that year, that though two Johns had
the better in the race he, like his namesake S. Peter, had entered first
into the sepulchre, i.e. the inner mysteries of printing. The claim,
thus irreverently put forward, is deprived of much of its weight by the
moment at which it was made; nevertheless it can hardly have been
baseless.
The desire to credit Gutenberg with some really handsome and important
piece of printing has caused his name to be connected with two other
large folios, a Latin Bible, of thirty-six lines to a column, printed in
a variety of the type used for the _Sibyllenbuch_ and the _Kalendar_ of
"1448," and a Latin Dictionary known by the name _Catholicon_, the work
of a thirteenth century writer, Joannes Balbus, of Genoa. The type of
the Thirty-six Line Bible passed into the hands of Albrecht Pfister, of
Bamberg, who printed a number of popular German books with it in 1461
and 1462. There is considerable evidence, moreover, that a large number
of copies of the Bible itself were sold at Bamberg about 1460. The
greater part of the text appears to have been set up from a copy of the
Forty-two Line Bible. Where, when, and by whom it was printed we can
only guess, but the place was more probably Bamberg than Mainz, and as
the type is believed to have been originally Gutenberg's, and there is
evidence that Pfister, when he began printing the popular books of
1461-2, was quite inexperienced, Gutenberg has certainly a better claim
to have printed this volume than any one else who can be suggested. The
Thirty-six Line Bible is a much rarer book than the Forty-two Line, but
copies are known to exist at the British Museum, John Rylands Library,
Bibliotheque Nationale, and Musee Plantin, and at Greifswald, Jena,
Leipzig, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Wolfenbuttel. A copy is also said to be
in private hands in Great Britain, but has not been registered. None has
been sold in recent times. Besides the more complete copies mentioned
above, various fragments have been preserved and some of these are on
vellum. The vellum fragment of leaf 204 now in the British Museum was at
one time used as a book-cover.
The _Catholicon_ is printed in a small type, not very cleanly cut. It
was issued without printer's name, but with a long colophon, which has
been translated:
By the help of the Most High, at Whose will the tongues of infants
become eloquent, and who oft-times reveals to the lowly that which He
hides from the wise, this noble book Catholicon, in the year of the
Lord's Incarnation 1460, in the bounteous city of Mainz of the
renowned German nation, which the clemency of God has deigned with so
lofty a light of genius and free gift to prefer and render illustrious
above all other nations of the earth, without help of reed, stilus, or
pen, but by the wondrous agreement, proportion and harmony of punches
and types has been printed and brought to an end.
Upon this follow four Latin verses in honour of the Holy Trinity and the
Virgin Mary and the words "Deo Gracias." We can imagine an inventor who,
despite his invention, remained profoundly unsuccessful, writing the
opening words of this colophon, and it is not easy to see their
appropriateness to any one else. It is thus highly probable that
Gutenberg set up this book and refused to follow Fust and Schoeffer in
their advertising ways. He may even have had a special reason for this,
for among the forty-one copies registered (almost all in great
libraries) two groups may be distinguished, one embracing the copies on
vellum and the majority of the paper copies, the other the rest of the
paper copies. The groups are distinguished by various differences, of
which the most important is that in the one case the workmen used four
and in the other two pins to keep the paper in its place while being
printed. An attractive explanation of all this would be that while
Gutenberg set up the book and was allowed to print for himself a certain
number of copies, there was a richer partner in the enterprise whose
pressmen pulled the greater part of the edition. But Dr. Zedler, who has
brought together all the available information about the book in his
monograph _Das Mainzer Catholicon_, has a different explanation.
In the same type as the _Catholicon_ are two small tracts of little
interest, the _Summa de articulis fidei_ of Thomas Aquinas, and the
_Dialogus_ of Matthaeus de Cracovia; also an Indulgence of Pope Pius II.
In 1467 the type is found in the hands of Heinrich Bechtermunze at
Eltvil, who died while printing a vocabulary. This was completed by his
brother Nicholas, who also printed three later editions of it.
During the years which precede 1457, Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer,
the one a goldsmith, the other a clerk in minor orders of the diocese of
Mainz, are involved in the obscurity and uncertainty which surround
Gutenberg's career. Reasons have been offered for believing that it was
Schoeffer who designed the small neat types used in the Mainz
Indulgences of 1454-5, and that he with his skill and Fust with his
money pushed the Forty-two Line Bible to a successful completion. If
they printed this, they no doubt printed also a liturgical psalter in
the same type, of which a fragment is preserved at the Bibliotheque
Nationale at Paris. But we do not touch firm ground until we come to the
famous Psalter of 1457, the colophon of which leaves us in no doubt as
to its typographical authorship. This runs:
Presens psalmorum[23] codex venustate capitalium decoratus
Rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus Adinuentione artificiosa
imprimendi ac caracterizandi absque calami ulla exaracione sic
effigiatus, Et ad eusebiam dei industrie est consummatus, Per Iohannem
fust ciuem maguntinum, Et Petrum Schoffer de Gernszheim Anno domini
Millesimo .cccc.lvij. In vigilia Assumpcionis.
The present book of the Psalms, decorated with beautiful capitals and
sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an
ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any ploughing of
a pen, And to the worship of God has been diligently brought to
completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schoeffer of
Gernsheim, in the year of the Lord, 1457, on the vigil of the
Assumption.
Thus in the Psalter of 1457 we have the first example of a book
informing us when and by whom it was manufactured; it also illustrates
in a very remarkable way the determination of the new partners to
produce a volume which should fully rival the best shop-made
manuscripts. The effort to print rubrics had already been made in the
Forty-two Line Bible, but the red printing was abandoned in that
instance as too troublesome. Now it was revived with complete success,
and with the printed rubrics came also printed capitals or initial
letters in two colours, red and blue, and several different sizes. A
good discussion of the manner in which these were printed will be found
in the _Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Printed Books exhibited at the
Historical Music Loan Exhibition_ (1886) by Mr. W. H. J. Weale. In an
article in the first volume of _Bibliographica_ Mr. Russell Martineau
showed that part of the edition was printed twice. When Mr. Martineau
wrote nine copies were known, all on vellum, viz. (i) five of an issue
of 143 leaves containing the Psalms and Canticles only, these being at
the British Museum, Royal Library Windsor, John Rylands Library,
Bibliotheque Nationale Paris, and Royal Library Darmstadt; (ii) four of
an issue of 175 leaves, containing also the Vigils of the Dead, these
being at the Bibliotheque Nationale Paris, University Library Berlin,
Royal Library Dresden, and Imperial Library Vienna. To these must now be
added a copy of the larger issue, wanting five leaves, presented in 1465
by Rene d'Anjou to the Franciscans of La Baumette-les-Angiers and now in
the municipal library at Angers. The distribution of the Psalms in this
1457 edition is that of the general "Roman use," but blank spaces were
left for the insertion of the characteristic differences of the use of
any particular diocese.
Two years later (29 August, 1459) Fust and Schoeffer produced another
Psalter, in the same types and with the same capitals, with twenty-three
instead of twenty lines to a page. This was stated in the colophon to
have been printed "ad laudem dei ac honorem sancti Jacobi," and was thus
apparently commissioned by the Benedictine monastery of S. James at
Mainz. Its arrangement is that generally in use at the time in German
monasteries. Thirteen copies of this edition are preserved, all on
vellum, viz. four in England (British Museum, Bodleian, John Rylands
Library, and the Earl of Leicester's library at Holkham), two at Paris,
one at the Hague, five in Germany, and one in Mr. Morgan's collection at
New York. This last was bought by Mr. Quaritch at the sale of the
library of Sir John Thorold for L4950.
Between the production of these two Psalters Fust and Schoeffer printed
in the same types on twelve leaves of vellum the Canon of the Mass only,
obviously that it might be bought by churches which owned Missals
otherwise in good condition, but with these much-fingered leaves badly
worn. The unique copy of this edition of the Canon was discovered at the
Bodleian Library in a Mainz Missal of 1493 and identified by Mr. Gordon
Duff. It is described by Mr. Duff in his _Early Printed Books_, and by
Dr. Falk and Herr Wallau in Part III of the Publications of the
Gutenberg Gesellschaft, with facsimiles of ten pages.
In October, 1459, Fust and Schoeffer took an important step forward by
printing in small type the _Rationale Diuinorum Officiorum_ of Gulielmus
Duranti, a large work explaining the meaning of the various services of
the Church and the ceremonies used in them. The text is printed in
double columns with sixty-three lines in each column, and the type
measures 91 mm. to twenty lines. A copy at Munich is printed partly on
paper, partly on vellum. All the other forty-two copies described by Mr.
De Ricci are entirely on vellum. The book has also one large and two
smaller capitals printed in two colours, and the first of these has been
reproduced as a frontispiece to this chapter, together with a piece of
the neat small type which, by demonstrating the possibility of cheap
printing, set up a real landmark.
In 1460 Fust and Schoeffer gave another proof of their skill in their
edition of the _Constitutions_ of Pope Clement V with the commentary of
Joannes Andreae. The text of the Constitutions is printed in two columns
in the centre of each page in a type measuring 118 mm. to twenty lines,
with the commentary completely surrounding it in the 91 type used in the
_Duranti_. Headings and colophon are printed in red, and the general
effect is extremely rich and handsome. All the fourteen copies known to
Mr. De Ricci are printed on vellum.
In 1461 printing was put to a new use by the publication of a series of
eight placards (one in two editions) relative to the struggle between
the rival archbishops of Mainz--a papal bull deposing Diether von
Isenburg, the Emperor's confirmation of this, papal briefs as to the
election of Adolf von Nassau, a petition of Diether's to the Pope, and
the manifestos of the two archbishops. All these, and also a bull of the
same year as to a crusade against the Turks, are printed in the neat 91
type, and though we may be struck by the difficulty of reading the long
lines unrelieved by any headings, these publications must have been a
great advertisement for the new art.
In 1462 the archiepiscopal struggle led to Mainz being sacked, but on 14
August there was completed there perhaps the finest of all the early
Bibles, printed throughout in the 118 type, with headings in red and
numerous two-line capitals and chapter-numbers in red and blue, though
spaces were left for others to be supplied by hand. Three different
colophons to this book have been described, and examples of all of these
are in the British Museum. Of the sixty-one extant copies registered by
Mr. De Ricci at least thirty-six are printed on vellum. The Lamoignon
copy bequeathed to the Museum by Mr. Cracherode has good painted
capitals added by hand and is a singularly fine book.
The Bible of 1462 marks the close of the great period of printing at
Mainz. Whether six, seven, or nine years separate it from the Forty-two
Line Bible the time had been splendidly employed. The capacity of the
new art had been demonstrated to the full, and taken as a group these
early Fust and Schoeffer incunabula have never on their own lines been
surpassed. The disaster of the sack of Mainz and perhaps the financial
strain involved in the production of the Bible almost reduced their
press to silence until 1465, and it was during these years that their
workmen are said to have left them and begun carrying the art into other
towns and countries.[24] When the partners resumed active work in 1465
they struck out a new line in their _De Officiis_ and _Paradoxa_ of
Cicero, but attained no special excellence in such small folios and
quartos. Fust died about this time, and Schoeffer, left to himself,
displayed no further originality. The Bible of 1472, save for the
absence of printed capitals, is a close copy of that of 1462. The
Clementine Constitutions of 1460 were reprinted, and similar editions
were issued of the Institutes and Codex of Justinian, Decretals of Pope
Gregory IX, etc. For his miscellaneous books Schoeffer seems rather to
have followed the lead of other printers at Strassburg and Rome than to
have set new fashions himself. In 1483 he printed a Breslau Missal, and
this was followed by two reprints and editions for the use of Cracow,
Meissen, Gnesen, and Mainz itself. He also printed the _Hortus
Sanitatis_ in 1485, and in 1490 the first of several Psalters in the
style of the editions of 1457 and 1459. In 1503 he was succeeded by his
son Johann.
About 1476-80 a few unimportant books were issued at Mainz by an
anonymous printer known as the "Printer of the Darmstadt
Prognostication," from the fact that the first copy of the
Prognostication in question to attract notice was that in the Darmstadt
library. The books of this press attained undeserved notoriety from the
forged dates inserted in many of them about 1800, in order to connect
them with Gutenberg.
The work of three other printers, Johann Neumeister, Erhard Reuwich, and
Jacob Meidenbach is chiefly important in the history of
book-illustration, and will be found mentioned in Chapter VII. The only
other Mainz printer in the fifteenth century was Peter von Friedberg,
who is chiefly notable as having printed a little series of works by
Johannes Trithemius (Tritheim or Trittenheim), the erudite Abbot of
Spanheim.
After about 1472 Mainz was easily surpassed as a centre of printing by
Strassburg, Cologne, Augsburg, and Nuremberg. But if no book had been
printed there after the sack of the city ten years earlier, its fame as
long as civilization lasts would still be imperishable.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Her maiden name was Elsa Wyrich, but she lived at the Hof zum
Gutenberg at Mainz, and the name Gutenberg thus came into the family.
[19] It will be noted that this connection with Strassburg offers
just a grain of evidence in favour of the _Donatuses_ having been
printed there rather than at Mainz.
[20] According to the excellent _Catalogue raisonne des premieres
impressions de Mayence_ of Mr. Seymour de Ricci, eleven copies on
vellum and thirty on paper can now be located, but some of these have
only one of the two volumes. The vellum copy belonging to Mr. Robert
Hoe sold in 1911 for $50,000.
[21] In the verses by Magister Franciscus in the _Justinian_ of 1468,
subsequently twice reprinted.
[22] In the Cologne Chronicle. See _supra_, p. 34.
[23] Misprinted _spalmorum_.
[24] It seems reasonable to believe that Ulrich Zell, the first
printer at Cologne, who was a clerk of the diocese of Mainz, and
Sweynheym and Pannartz, who introduced printing into Italy, owed
their training to Fust and Schoeffer.
CHAPTER V
OTHER INCUNABULA
In August, 1462, the struggle between its rival Archbishops led to Mainz
being sacked. Very little more printing was done there until 1465, and
we need not doubt the tradition that journeymen trained by Gutenberg and
Fust and Schoeffer, finding no work for them at Mainz, carried such
experience as they had gained to other towns and countries, where they
appear, after a few years spent in manufacturing presses and types, in
all the glory of "prototypographers."
But even before 1462 two other cities possessed the art--Bamberg and
Strassburg. At Bamberg it was practised possibly by Gutenberg, who may
have printed there the Thirty-six Line Bible about 1457, certainly by
Albrecht Pfister, who is found in possession of the type of this Bible,
and may himself have had copies for sale. The books he himself printed
at Bamberg are nine in number,[25] and three or four bound volumes seem
to have preserved all the remnants of them that we possess, and all of
these have found their way to public libraries.
The large and stately folios produced by the early Strassburg printers
have naturally resisted the ravages of time better than the Bamberg
popular books. Certainly clumsier than the contemporary Mainz books,
they yet have a dignity and character of their own which command
respect. The first Strassburg printer, Johann Mentelin, was at work
there in or before 1460, and was helped during his life and succeeded
after his death (1477) by his son-in-law, Adolf Rusch, who never put his
name to a book, and most of whose impressions pass under the name of
"the R-printer," from the peculiar form of that letter found in one of
his types. Mentelin himself did not place his name at the end of a book
till he had been at work more than a dozen years; Heinrich Eggestein,
who began work about 1464, was equally reticent, and throughout the
'seventies and 'eighties a large proportion of the books printed at
Strassburg were anonymous. Heinrich Knoblochtzer, who started about
1476, combines some of the charm of the earlier printers with greater
literary interest and the attraction of illustrations and ornamental
capitals and borders. Of him we shall have to speak in a later chapter.
But after 1485 the bulk of Strassburg printing was dull and commercial.
In the fifteenth century Basel was not yet, as it became in 1501, a
member of the Swiss Confederacy, and typographically its relations with
Mainz, Strassburg, Nuremberg and other German towns were very close. In
what year printing began there is not known. There is no dated book from
a Basel press until as late as 1474, but the date of purchase, 1468, in
a book (S. Gregory's _Moralia in Job_), printed by Berthold Ruppel, of
Hanau, takes us back six years, and it is possible that Ruppel was at
work even before this. He is identified with reasonable certainty with
one of the servants of Gutenberg mentioned in connection with the
lawsuit ended in 1455, and he printed Latin Bibles and other large works
such as appealed to the ambition of the German prototypographers.
[Illustration: VI. COLOGNE, ULRICH ZELL, 1465-66
CICERO. DE OFFICIIS (7^b)]
The second and more interesting Basel printer, Michael Wenssler, seems
to have taken Schoeffer as his model, and reprinted many of Schoeffer's
editions, following the wording of his colophons and investing them
with the same glories of red ink. Whereas, however, from about 1476
Schoeffer's activity was much less conspicuous, Wenssler for the next
ten years poured out edition after edition of all the heaviest legal and
theological works, until he must have overstocked the market. Then he
devoted himself almost exclusively to liturgical printing, but his
affairs became hopelessly involved, and in 1491 he fled from his
creditors at Basel, and became a wandering printer, finding commissions
at Cluny and Macon, and then settling for a time at Lyon. Many of the
early printers in Italy made this mistake of flooding the market with a
single class of book, but Wenssler is almost the only notable example in
Germany of this lack of business instinct.
Travelling along the Rhine from Mainz in the opposite direction we come
to Cologne, and here Ulrich Zell, like Berthold Ruppel, a native of
Hanau, but who calls himself in his books a "clerk of the diocese of
Mainz," enrolled his name on the register of the University in June,
1464, doubtless for the sake of the business privileges which the Senate
had it in its power to confer. The first dated book from his press, S.
John Chrysostom, _Super psalmo quinquagesimo_ (Psalm li., according to
our English reckoning), was issued in 1466, but before this appeared he
had almost certainly produced an edition of the _De Officiis_ (see the
frontispiece to this chapter, Plate VI), the most popular of Cicero's
works in Germany, which Fust and Schoeffer had printed in 1465 and
reprinted the next year. Avoiding the great folios on which the early
printers of Mainz, Strassburg, and Basel staked their capital, Zell's
main work was the multiplication of minor theological treatises likely
to be of practical use to priests. Of these he issued countless editions
in small quarto, along with a comparatively few small folios, in which,
however, his skill as a printer is seen to better advantage. He
continued in active work until 1494, gave, as we have seen (Chapter
III.), his version of the origin of printing to the compiler of the
Cologne Chronicle published in 1499, and was still alive as late as
1507.
Zell's earliest rival at Cologne was Arnold ther Hoernen, who printed
from 1470 to 1482. He may very likely have been self-taught, for his
early work is very uneven, but he developed into an excellent craftsman.
He is the first notable example of a printer getting into touch with a
contemporary author, and regularly printing all his works, the author in
this case being Werner Rolewinck, a Carthusian of Cologne, who wrote
sermons and historical works, including the _Fasciculus Temporum_, an
epitome of history, which found much favour all over Europe. Ther
Hoernen used to be credited with the honour of having printed the first
book with a titlepage, the _Sermo ad populum predicabilis In festo
presentacionis Beatissime Marie semper virginis_ of 1470. Schoeffer,
however, had preceded him by some seven years by devoting a separate
page to the title of each of his editions of a Bull of Pius II (see p.
93), and as neither printer continued the practice these isolated
instances must be taken as accidental. In the same book, ther Hoernen
for the first time placed printed numbers on the leaves, but this
improvement also was not followed up. The third Cologne typographer,
Johann Koelhoff the Elder, was the first (in 1472) to place printed
"signatures" on the quires of a book, so as to show the binder the order
in which they were to be arranged. Hitherto the quires had been marked
by hand, and this improvement was not suffered to drop for a time like
the others, but quickly spread all over Europe.
At Augsburg Gunther Zainer completed his first book, an edition of the
Latin Meditations on the Life of Christ taken from the works of S.
Bonaventura, on the 13th March, 1468. Though he followed this with three
heavy books which had found favour at Mainz and Strassburg, Zainer had
the wisdom to strike out a line for himself. Augsburg had long been the
chief centre of the craftsmen who cut and printed the woodcuts of
saints, for which there seems to have been a large sale in Germany, and
also the pictures used for playing-cards. The cutters were at first
inclined to regard the idea of book-illustrations with suspicion, as
likely to interfere with their existing business. It was decided,
however, by the local Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, an ecclesiastic with
typographical tastes, that illustrated books might be printed so long as
members of the wood-cutters' guild were employed in making the blocks.
With this as a working agreement, illustrated books greatly prospered at
Augsburg, not only Gunther Zainer, but Johann Bamler and Anton Sorg (a
very prolific printer), turning them out with much success throughout
the 'seventies.
At Nuremberg printing was introduced in 1470 by Johan Sensenschmidt, who
for a short time had as his partner Heinrich Kefer, of Mainz, another of
Gutenberg's servants. Much more important, however, was the firm of
Anton Koberger, who began work the next year, and speedily developed the
largest business of any printer in Germany. Koberger was able to deal
successfully in all the heavy books, which after 1480 other firms found
it wiser to leave alone, and seems to have employed Adolf Rusch at
Strassburg and perhaps other printers elsewhere, to print for him. He
also printed towards the end of the century some very notable
illustrated books. Next to Koberger, Friedrich Creussner, who started in
1473, had the largest business in Nuremberg, and Georg Stuchs made
himself a reputation as a missal printer, a special department from
which Koberger held aloof.
At Speier, after two anonymous firms had worked in 1471 and 1472 without
much success, Peter Drach (1477) developed an important business. At Ulm
Johann Zainer, a kinsman of Gunther Zainer, of Augsburg, began in 1473
by printing illustrated books, which were subsequently taken up in the
'eighties by Leonhard Holle, Conrad Dinckmut, and Johann Reger, while
Zainer himself became a miscellaneous printer. At Lubeck Lucas Brandis
produced a universal history called the _Rudimentum Nouitiorum_ in 1475
and a fine _Josephus_, important liturgical work being subsequently done
by Bartholomaeus Ghotan, Matthaeus Brandiss and Stephan Arndes, similar
work being also produced at Magdeburg partly by some of these Lubeck
printers. Fine liturgical work was also done at Wurzburg by Georg
Reyser, who may previously have printed anonymously at Speier, and who
started his kinsman Michel in a similar business at Eichstatt. At
Leipzig, where Marcus Brandis printed one or two books in 1481, and the
following years, a sudden development took place about 1490, and a flood
of small educational works was poured out by some half a dozen printers,
of whom Conrad Kachelofen and Martin Landsberg were the most prolific.
Presses were also set up in numerous other places, so that by the end of
the century at least fifty German cities, towns and villages had seen a
printer at work. In many of these the art took no root, and in some the
printer was only employed for a short time to print one or more books
for a particular purpose. But the total output of incunabula in Germany
was very large, and leaving out of count the fugitive single sheets, the
scanty remnants of which can bear no relation to the thousands which
must have been produced, out of about 25,000 different books and
editions printed in the fifteenth century registered as extant at the
time of writing probably nearly a third were produced in Germany. If, as
is likely, a large proportion of the eleven thousand undescribed
incunabula (among which, however, there must be many duplicates and
triplicates) reported to have been discovered by the agents of the
German Royal Commission for a General Catalogue of Incunabula are
German, this rough estimate must be largely increased, and it may be
proved that Germany was as prolific as Italy itself.
Considerable as was this output of German printing at home, it was
probably nearly equalled by the work done by German printers in the
other countries of Europe to which they hastened to carry the new art.
Turning first to Italian incunabula we find that the first book printed
in Italy has perished utterly. The cruel little Latin grammar which
passed under the name of _Donatus_ had, as we have seen, been frequently
printed in Holland and by the first Mainz printers, and there are
several later instances of an edition of it being produced as soon as a
press was set up, merely to show the printer's types. This was done by
Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, the two Germans who began printing
at the monastery of Saint Scholastica at Subiaco, some forty miles from
Rome, in 1465, or perhaps in the previous year. Being a school-book, the
_Donatus_ was thumbed to pieces, so that no copy now survives, and it is
only known from the printer's allusion to it as the book "_unde
imprimendi initium sumpsimus_" in a list of their publications drawn up
in 1472. Of the three other books printed by them at Subiaco, Cicero's
_De Oratore_ has no printed date, but a copy described by Signor
Fumagalli bears a manuscript note dated Pridie Kal. Octobres M.cccclxv.,
i.e. 30 September, 1465, the authenticity of which has, however, been
challenged, though probably without good reason. The two others both
bear printed dates, the works of _Lactantius_, that of 29 October, 1465,
and S. Augustine's _De Ciuitate Dei_, 12 June, 1467. Probably even
before this last book was completed the printers were already moving
some of their material to Rome, where they found shelter in the palace
of Pietro de' Massimi, for their edition of the _Epistulae Familiares_
of Cicero was completed there in the same year, probably in or before
November. Even so it is not certain that this was the first book printed
at Rome, for Ulrich Han, a native of Vienna and citizen of Ingolstadt,
whose later work, like that of Michael Wenssler at Basel, shows a
tendency to imitate Schoeffer, completed an edition of the
_Meditationes de vita Christi_ of Cardinal Turrecremata on the last day
of the same year, and Mr. Proctor (after the publication of his _Index_)
assigned to Han's press and to an even earlier date than the
_Meditationes_ a bulky edition of the Epistles of S. Jerome, which must
certainly have taken a year to print.
The career of Sweynheym and Pannartz in partnership at Rome lasted but
little over six years, their latest book bearing the date 31 December,
1473. Already in March, 1472, they were in difficulties, and printed a
letter to Pope Sixtus IV begging for some pecuniary aid. They had
printed, they said, no fewer than 11,475 volumes, and gave a list of the
different books and of the numbers printed of each. Four of these
editions were of 300 copies, the rest of 275, and we can see from the
list that there had been three editions of the _Lactantius_ and _De
Ciuitate Dei_ and two each of Cicero's _Epistulae Familiares_, _De
Oratore_, and _Opera Philosophica_, and also of Virgil, so that clearly
some of their books had shown a profit. But the list is entirely made up
of Latin classics, "profane" and theological, and by March, 1472,
printing had been introduced into at least ten other Italian cities
(Venice, Foligno, Trevi, Ferrara, Milan, Florence, Treviso, Bologna,
Naples, and Savigliano), and in most, if not all of these, the one idea
of the first printers was to produce as many Latin classics as possible,
as though no other firm in Italy were doing the same thing. Unable to
obtain help from the Pope, Sweynheym and Pannartz dissolved partnership,
the former devoting himself to engraving maps for an edition of
Ptolemy's _Geographia_, which he did not live to see (it was printed by
Arnold Bucking in 1478), while Pannartz resumed business on a somewhat
smaller scale on his own account, and died in 1476.
At Venice, the first printer, Johann of Speier, seems to have had some
foreboding of what might happen, and thoughtfully protected himself
against competition by procuring from the Senate an exclusive privilege
for printing at Venice during the space of five years. This might
seriously have retarded the development of the press at Venice. Johann,
however, after printing two editions of Cicero's _Epistulae ad
familiares_ and Pliny's _Historia naturalis_ in 1469, was carried off by
death while working on his fourth book, S. Augustine's _De Ciuitate
Dei_, in 1470, and his brother Wendelin, or Vindelinus, who took over
the business, had no privilege to protect him from competition.
In 1470, the way thus being left clear, a Frenchman, Nicolas Jenson, set
up the second press in Venice, and by the beauty of his fine Roman type
speedily attained a reputation which has lasted to this day. Another
fine printer, Christopher Valdarfer, produced his first book in the same
year. In 1471 three other firms (an Italian priest, Clemente of Padua,
and two Germans, Adam of Ammergau and Franz Renner of Heilbronn) began
publishing, and in 1472 yet seven more (three Germans and four
Italians). But the pace was impossible, and by this time men were
rapidly falling out. As we have seen, Sweynheym and Pannartz, after
their ineffectual attempt to obtain a subsidy from the Pope, dissolved
their partnership at Rome after 1473, and Ulrich Han in 1471 had taken a
moneyed partner, with whose aid he weathered the storm. At Venice
Wendelin, after producing thirty-one books in the previous two years,
reduced his output to six in 1473, and soon after seems to have ceased
to work for himself. Jenson's numbers sank from twenty-eight in 1471-2
to six in 1473-4. Valdarfer gave up after 1471, and is subsequently
found at Milan. Other Venetian printers also dropped out, and only two
new firms began work in 1473.
At Florence after the first printer Bernardo Cennini and his sons had
produced a Virgil in 1471, and Johann Petri of Mainz Boccaccio's
_Philocolo_ and Petrarch's _Trionfi_ in 1472, printing ceased for some
years. Presses started at Foligno, Trevi, and Savigliano came to a
speedy end. At Treviso, where Gerardus Lisa had published four books in
1471, there was, according to Mr. Proctor, a gap from December in that
year till the same month in 1474, though Dr. Copinger quotes one book
each for the intervening years. Only one book was published at Ferrara
in 1473. What happened at Naples is hard to say, since Sixtus
Riessinger, the first printer there, issued many books without dates. At
Bologna trade seems to have been stationary. At Milan, where both
Antonius Larotus in 1471 and Philippus de Lavagna in 1472 had begun with
extreme caution, there was healthy progress, and these two firms
continued issuing editions of the classics, and with the great falling
off of competition may have found it profitable to do so. But of the
reality of the crisis in the Italian book trade in 1472-3, although
little is said of it in histories of printing, there can be no doubt.
When it was over there were symptoms of a similar over-production of
some of the great legal commentaries. But this danger was avoided. There
was a steady increase in the range of the literature published, and the
bourgeois book-buyer was remembered as well as the aristocratic student.
Soon there came a great extension, not only of the home but of the
foreign market, and Italy settled down to supply the world with books, a
task for which Venice, both from its geographical position and its
well-established commercial relations, was peculiarly fitted. But it is
the books printed before 1474 that form the real Italian incunabula. In
the subsequent work within the limits of the fifteenth century Rome took
no very important part. Ulrich Han continued to print till 1478. Joannes
Philippi de Lignamine, Papal Physician and native of Sicily, produced
some exceptionally interesting books between 1470 and 1476, and again in
1481-4, and Georg Lauer, who worked from 1470 to 1481, and completed an
edition of S. Jerome's Letters, left unfinished by Pannartz at the time
of his death, showed himself a good craftsman. The later printers,
especially Stephan Plannck and Eucharius Silber, had some good types,
but produced few notable books, the bulk of the Roman output after 1480
being editions in small quarto of official documents and speeches at the
Papal Court.
To devise any summary description of fifteenth century printing at
Venice is wellnigh impossible. Some 150 firms were at work there; at a
low estimate some four thousand extant books and editions must be
credited to them, and these embraced almost every kind of literature for
which readers could be found in the fifteenth century, and many
varieties of craftsmanship. From a decorative point of view, the firm of
Erhard Ratdolt did exceptionally good work, and it is also remarkable
for specializing mainly on astronomy, mathematics, and history.
Liturgical printing began somewhat late (there seems to have been a
prejudice against printed service books in Italy, and I can remember
none printed at Rome); in the fifteenth century Johann Hammann or Herzog
and Johann Emerich were its chief exponents. Franz Renner produced
chiefly Latin theology, a department much less predominant at Venice
than in Germany. Several firms, e.g. Jacques Le Rouge, Baptista de
Tortis, Andreas Torresanus (father-in-law of Aldus and a very fine
printer), and Georgius Arrivabene devoted themselves like Jenson first
mainly to Latin classics and then to law; others, such as Filippo di
Pietro mingled Latin and Italian classics. Filippo's kinsman, Gabriele
di Pietro, was one of the earliest vernacular printers. Many firms, such
as that of Bonetus Locatellus, who seems to have had a University
connection, and printed all kinds of learned Latin books, despised the
vernacular altogether. The brothers Giovanni and Gregorio dei Gregorii
were perhaps the most prolific and miscellaneous printers in both Latin
and Italian. Johannes Tacuinus, a learned printer towards the end of the
century, is notable for adorning his books with pictorial capitals,
mostly of boys at play. Aldus Manutius will be spoken of in a later
chapter.
While all this activity was displayed at Venice other cities were not
idle. At Milan upwards of eight hundred incunabula were produced,
mostly by its earliest printer, Antonius Zarotus, and two Germans,
Leonhard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenzeler. Ferrara seems to have been able
to support only one press at a time, and at Florence it was some years
before printing flourished, but in the last quarter of the century many
interesting books were printed there, both learned and vernacular, as to
the illustrations in which much will have to be said later on. Some of
the early Treviso books from the press of Gerard Lisa are distinctly
pretty. Bologna produced about three hundred incunabula. Naples probably
not so many, but of much better quality. Altogether well over ten
thousand Italian incunabula must still be extant, and these were
produced at no fewer than seventy different places, though many of these
were of no typographical importance, and only find their way into
histories of printing from having sheltered a wandering printer for a
few weeks as he was on his way from one large town to another.
In France also the earliest books were addressed to students of the
classics, though they were produced on a much more limited scale. There
the first printers, three Germans, had been invited to set up their
presses at Paris in the Sorbonne by two of its professors, Guillaume
Fichet and Jean Heynlin, of Stein, better known in his own day as
Johannes de Lapide. Between the summer of 1470 and the autumn of 1472
eighteen works were printed at the Sorbonne, mostly of the kind which
would be of use to its students. Among them was Sallust, three works of
Cicero, Virgil's Bucolics and Georgics, the Satires of Juvenal and
Persius, Terence, some text books, the _Speculum Humanae Vitae_ of
Bishop Roderic of Zamora, and the Orations of Fichet's patron, Cardinal
Bessarion. In August, 1472, the Cardinal arrived in France on a
fruitless mission to rouse the king to a crusade against the Turks. He
was rebuffed and ordered to leave France. Fichet accompanied him, and
never returned to Paris. As early as the previous March Heynlin seems to
have been called away, and now the imported German printers, Michael
Freiburger, Ulrich Gering, and Martin Crantz, were left wholly to their
own devices. Thus abandoned they printed four books of a less special
character, for which they sought princely instead of scholarly
patronage, and then in April, 1473, moved from the Sorbonne and set up
for themselves at the sign of the Soleil d'Or in the Rue S. Jacques.
Here they printed still in Latin, but a much more popular class of
books, and soon had to contend with two rival firms, that of Pieter de
Keysere and Johann Stol, and the printers at the sign of the "Soufflet
Vert" or Green Bellows. The finest of the subsequent printers was Jean
Dupre, who used excellent capitals and issued many illustrated books,
but three prolific printers, Antoine Caillaut, Gui Marchand, and Pierre
Levet, along with many dull books issued some very interesting ones.
Towards the end of the century an enterprising publisher, Antoine
Verard, kept many of the Paris printers busy, and Paris became noted
typographically for its fine illustrated editions of the Hours of the
Blessed Virgin, issued by Verard, Dupre, Pigouchet (and his publisher,
Simon Vostre), and Thielman Kerver. But these with the publications of
Verard belong to another chapter.
At Lyon printing was introduced by the enterprise of one of its
citizens, Barthelemi Buyer, who engaged Guillaume Leroy (a native of
Liege) to print for him, and subsequently employed other printers as
well. The first Lyon book was a little volume of popular religious
treatises, containing among other things the _De miseria humanae
conditionis_ of Pope Innocent III. It was completed 17 September, 1473.
Until nearly 1490 the books printed at Lyon were mainly popular in
character with a considerable proportion of French books, many of them
illustrated. From 1490 onwards learned Latin books occur more
frequently, and printing rapidly became as general or miscellaneous as
at Paris itself, although only a single attempt was made,
unsuccessfully, to rival the Paris _Horae_. The two cities between them
probably produced more than three-fourths of the three thousand
incunabula, which at a rough guess may be attributed to French presses,
the share of Paris being about twice as great as that of Lyon. According
to the stereotyped phrase, printing was introduced into no fewer than
thirty-seven other French towns during the fifteenth century, but as a
rule the printers were but birds of passage, and it was only at Poitiers
(1479) and Rouen (1487) that it took root and flourished continuously,
though on but a small scale. In other towns the struggle to maintain a
press continued for several years, as at Toulouse, or was abandoned
after the fulfilment of a single commission.
In Holland the first books which bear the name of their printer and date
and place of imprint are those produced at Utrecht by Nicolaus Ketelaer
and Gerardus Leempt, who began work in 1473. It is tolerably certain,
however, that some of the so-called "Costeriana" (see Chap. II) preceded
this date, and they are at least as likely to have been printed at
Haarlem as at Utrecht, there being no decisive evidence in favour of
either place. No namable printer appears at Haarlem until the end of
1483, when Jacob Bellaert set up a short-lived press there. For some
seven years (1477-84) excellent work was done at Gouda by Gerard Leeu,
who then moved to Antwerp. At Delft, where a fine Bible was printed by
Jacob Jacobszoen and Mauricius Yemantszoen in 1477, printing was kept up
continuously by Jacobszoen, Christian Snellaert, and Hendrik Eckert till
the end of the century, though there seems to have been only work enough
for one firm at a time. At Zwolle, Pieter van Os, who began work in
1479, was able to maintain himself, with a brief interval about 1482,
till past the magic date 1500. Lastly, at Deventer, where Richardus
Pafraet started in the same year, an output was speedily attained
greater than in any other Dutch town, and for the latter years of the
century a rival firm, that of Jacobus de Breda, shared Pafraet's
prosperity. The great majority of the Deventer books, however, belong
to the minor literature of ecclesiasticism and education, and are far
from exciting.
The beginnings of printing are much more interesting in the Southern
Netherlands, which correspond roughly to what we now call Belgium. Here
also the first positive date is 1473, the year in which Johann of
Paderborn in Westphalia, best known to English collectors as John of
Westphalia, printed three books at Alost. A fourth followed in May,
1474, but by the following December John had removed to Louvain, a
University town, where he remained doing excellent and abundant work
till nearly the end of the century. At Louvain he had found another
printer, Jan Veldener, already in the field, and seems to have hustled
him away not very honourably. Veldener, however, was not ruined, but is
subsequently found at Utrecht and Kuilenburg, and again for a short time
at Louvain.
At Bruges the first printers were Colard Mansion and William Caxton,
names well known to English book-lovers, though not all the labours of
Mr. William Blades and Mr. Gordon Duff have made it quite clear which of
the two was the leader. Only two English books were printed, the
_Recuyell of the Histories of Troy_ and _The Game and Play of the
Chess_, when Caxton returned to England and set up his presses in the
Almonry at Westminster. Whether he had any pecuniary interest in the
French _Recueil_ and the _Quatre Dernieres Choses_, and whether
printings at Bruges began with the _Recuyell_, or, as Mr. Proctor
contended, with the French Boccaccio _De la ruine des nobles hommes et
femmes_ of 1476, are points of controversy. From 1477 till his flight
from Bruges to avoid arrest for debt in 1484, Mansion worked steadily by
himself, and the total output of his press amounts to twenty-five French
works and two in Latin.
At Brussels the Brothers of the Common Life, who worked also as printers
in other places, published numerous popular Latin works between 1476
and 1487, about which time their press seems to have stopped. But the
removal of Gerard Leeu's business from Gouda to Antwerp in 1484 soon
gave that town a typographical importance which (except for a few years
at the end of the century) it long maintained.
The true incunabula of the Netherlands are, of course, the "Costeriana."
Whatever view we may take of their date and birthplace, they were
undoubtedly home products, with a strongly marked individuality.
Ketelaer and Leempt, however, at Utrecht, Veldener at Louvain and
elsewhere, Caxton and Mansion at Bruges, were real pioneers. In a sense
this is true also of John of Westphalia and Gerard Leeu, notably of the
former, who had learnt his art in Italy and by the type which he had
brought thence raised the standard of printing in his new home. It is,
indeed, almost exclusively at Deventer that we get the dull commercial
work which has nothing primitive or individual about it, and thus,
perhaps because their grand total is so much smaller than in the case of
Germany, Italy, or even France, the special interest of incunabula
attaches to rather a high proportion of the early books of the
Netherlands.
If this be true of the Netherlands, it is even truer of the two
countries with which we have still to deal in this rapid survey, Spain
and England. Of Spanish incunabula about seven hundred are now
registered; of English, three hundred is a fairly liberal estimate of
the grand total still extant. Within the limits of the fifteenth century
neither country reached the purely mechanical stage of book production
to which so many German and Italian books belong after about 1485. In
England, indeed, this stage was hardly reached until the general
downfall of good printing towards the end of the sixteenth century.
The first book printed in Spain was a thin volume of poems in honour of
the Blessed Virgin, written by Bernardo Fenollar and others on the
occasion of a congress held at Valentia in March, 1474. It offers no
information itself on any bibliographical point, but it was presumably
printed not long after the congress, at Valentia where the congress was
held, and by Lambertus Palmart (or Palmaert), who on 18 August, 1477,
completed there the third part of the _Summa_ of S. Thomas Aquinas and
duly described it as "impressa Valentie per magistrum Lambertum Palmart
Alemanum, anno M.CCCC.LXXVII, die vero xviii. mensis Augusti." Palmart
is supposed to have been a Fleming (a nationality to which the
description _Alemannus_ is often applied), but nothing is known of him.
He printed a work called _Comprehensorium_ and the _Bellum Jugurthinum_
of Sallust in February and July, 1475, without putting his name to them,
and these with the Fenollar and other anonymous books now attributed to
him are in roman type. In 1478 he completed a Catalan Bible in
conjunction with a native Spaniard, Alonzo Fernandez de Cordoba, and
thereafter worked by himself until 1490, using gothic types in these
later books. Seven other firms worked at Valentia during the fifteenth
century, but none of these attained much importance.
Another Fleming, of the name of Matthew or Matthaeus, printed the
_Manipulus Curatorum_ of Guido de Monte Rotherii at Saragossa in
October, 1475, and five other presses were established there before
1500, that of Paul Hurus being the most prolific. At Tortosa a single
book (the _Rudimenta Grammaticae_ of Perottus) was printed by Nicolaus
Spindeler and Pedro Brun early in 1477, and in August of the same year
Antonio Martinez, Alonso del Puerto, and Bartolome Segura completed the
first fully dated book (the _Sacramental_ of Sanchez de Vercial) at
Seville, where printing subsequently throve as much as anywhere in
Spain. The following year Spindeler and Brun, having moved from Tortosa,
introduced printing into Barcelona, a date MCCCCLXVIII in a treatise by
Bartholomaeus Mates, _Pro condendis orationibus_, being obviously a
misprint, though to what it should be corrected cannot positively be
shown.[26]
At Salamanca printing was introduced as early as 1481, and continued
more actively after 1492, mainly for the production of educational
works. At Burgos Friedrich Biel, who had been trained under Michael
Wenssler at Basel, began printing in 1485, and a native of the place,
Juan de Burgos, brought out his first book in 1490, both of these firms
doing excellent work. Altogether, twenty-four towns and places in Spain
possessed presses during the fifteenth century, but in many cases only
for a short time.
The outline of the story of printing in England during the fifteenth
century may be very quickly sketched, fuller treatment being reserved
for a later chapter. At Michaelmas, 1476, Caxton rented premises in the
Almonry from the Abbot of Westminster, and here he stayed till his death
in 1491, printing, as far as we know, about a hundred books and
documents. In 1478 a press was set up at Oxford, presumably by Theodoric
Rood of Cologne, whose name, however, does not appear in any book until
1481. By 1485 Rood had been joined by an English stationer, Thomas
Hunte, but in 1486 or the following year the press was closed after
printing, as far as we know, only seventeen books.
The few books printed at Oxford were all more or less scholastic in
character, and six out of eight works printed by Caxton's second rival
(apparently a friendly one), the Schoolmaster-Printer at St. Albans,
belonged to the same class, his two more popular books being Caxton's
_Chronicles of England,_ with a new appendix, and the famous _Book of
St. Albans_. Of these eight works, the earliest bearing a date was
issued in 1480, the latest in 1486.
A more formidable competitor to Caxton than either the Oxford or the St.
Albans printer began work in the City of London in 1480. This was John
Lettou, i.e. John the Lithuanian, who, as Mr. Gordon Duff notes, used
type identical save in a single letter with a fount used at Rome in 1478
by Johann Bulle of Bremen. Lettou appears to have been financed in the
first instance by a Londoner, William Wilcock. In 1482 he was joined by
William Machlinia (presumably a native of Malines), and after five law
books had been printed in partnership, Lettou dropped out, and Machlinia
continued working by himself, possibly until as late as 1490 or 1491,
when his stock seems to have been taken over by Richard Pynson, a
Norman, from Rouen. On Caxton's death in 1491 his business passed into
the hands of his foreman, Wynkyn de Worde, a native of Lorraine. The
only other press started in the fifteenth century was that of Julyan
Notary, who worked at first with two partners, I.B. and I.H. Of these
I.B. was certainly Jean Barbier, and I.H. probably Jean Huvin of Rouen.
We have no information as to the nationality of Notary, but if, as seems
probable, he was a Frenchman, printing in England for some twenty years
after Caxton's death was wholly in the hands of foreigners.
* * * * *
Meagre and bare of details as is this sketch of the beginnings of
printing in the chief countries of Europe, it should yet suffice to
prove that the purely arbitrary date 1500 and the slang word
_incunabula_, used to invest all fifteenth century impressions with a
mystic value, are misleading nuisances. By the time that printing
reached England it was beginning to pass into its commercial stage in
Germany and Italy. In both of these countries, and in a less degree in
France, scores and hundreds of books were printed during the last
fifteen years of the century which have little more connection with the
invention of printing, or the story of its diffusion, than English or
Spanish books a century later. From the point of view of the history of
literature and thought there is much to be gained from the collection in
large libraries of all books printed before 1501. From the point of view
of the history of printing every decade of book-production has its
interest, and the decade 1490 to 1500 among the rest. Incidentally it
may be noted that in respect of book-illustration this particular decade
in Italy is one of exceptional interest. But books of the third
generation of German or Italian printers, men like Flach, for instance,
at Strassburg, or Plannck at Rome, should not be collected under the
idea that they are in any true sense of the word incunabula.
What constitutes a true incunable cannot be defined in a sentence. We
must consider the country or city as well as the book, the individual
man as well as the art of which he was perhaps a belated exponent. The
same piece of printing may have much more value and interest if we can
prove that it was produced in one place rather than another. After the
publication of his _Index_, Mr. Proctor satisfied himself that some
anonymous books in roman type which he had classed as the work of an
unidentified press at Naples were really among the earliest specimens of
Palmart's typography in Spain, and one does not need to be a Spaniard to
appreciate the distinction thus added to them. If sentiment is to count
for anything we must admit the interest of the first books printed in
any country which possesses an important history and literature--if only
because we may legitimately be curious to know on what books a printer,
with all the extant literature to choose from, ventured his capital as
likely in that particular country and time to bring him the quickest and
most profitable return. That the first large book in Germany was a
Bible, the first books in Italy Latin classics, the first produced for
the English market one that we must call an historical romance, cannot
be regarded as merely insignificant. Nor are the differences in the
types and appearance of the page unimportant, for these also help to
illustrate national characteristics.
If this is true of the early books printed in any country, it is also
true in only slightly less degree of those which first appeared in any
great city which afterwards became a centre of printing. Strassburg,
Cologne, and Nuremberg, Rome, Venice, and Florence, Paris and Lyon,
Antwerp and London (if we may be permitted for once to ignore the
separate existence of Westminster), each has its own individuality, and
in each case it is interesting to see with what wares, and in what form,
the first printers endeavoured to open its purse-strings. But when we
come to towns and townlets some distinction seems needed. I may be
misled by secret sympathy with that often scholarly, too often
impecunious figure, the local antiquary. To him the first book printed
in his native townlet, though by a printer merely stopping on his way
between one great city and another, must needs be of interest, and it is
hard that its price should be forced beyond his reach by the competition
between dealers keen to do business with a rich collector to whom the
book will have none of the fragrance it would possess for him.
Typographical itinerancy, this printing by the roadside, as we may
almost call it, must needs be illustrated in great collections, like any
other habit of the early printers. But the ordinary private collector
can surely dispense with buying books because they have been printed in
places which have no associations for him, of which perhaps he has never
heard.
As for the individual man, if we would keep any oases green in what may
easily become a sandy desert, we must surely treasure every trace of his
personality. One large element in the charm of incunabula is the human
interest of difficulties overcome, and wherever a craftsman began work
by cutting a distinctive type to suit the calligraphic fashion of the
neighbourhood, at whatever date he started, his books will still have
some interest. When he becomes articulate and tells us of his
difficulties, or boasts of how they have been overcome, we may value his
work still higher. As the first book printed at Florence, the Commentary
of Servius on Virgil needs no added attraction, and yet how much its
charm is enhanced by its printers' addresses to the reader. Here is the
second of them roughly Englished:
To the Reader. Bernardino Cennini, by universal allowance a most
excellent goldsmith, and Domenico his son, a youth of very good
ability, have been the printers. Pietro, son of the aforesaid
Bernardo, has acted as corrector, and has made a collation with many
very ancient copies. His first anxiety was that nothing by another
hand should be ascribed to Servius, that nothing which very old copies
showed to be the work of Honoratus should be cut down or omitted.
Since it pleases many readers to insert Greek words with their own
hand, and in their own fashion, and these in ancient codices are very
few, and the accents are very difficult to mark in printing he
determined that spaces should be left for the purpose. But since
nothing of man's making is perfect, it must needs be accounted enough
if these books (as we earnestly hope) are found exceptionally correct.
The work was finished at Florence on October 5, 1472.
It is impossible to read a colophon such as this without feeling
ourselves in the very atmosphere of the printing house, with the various
members of the printer's family at work around us. Blank spaces are
found in many early books where Greek quotations occurred in the
manuscripts from which they were printed. But it was not every printer
who took so much trouble as Cennini to justify the omission.
As many as twenty-one years later, when printing in the great towns was
becoming merely mechanical, we find the same personal note in a little
grammar-book printed at Acqui. Here the colophon tells us:
The Doctrinale of Alexander of Villedieu (God be praised!) comes to a
happy end. It has been printed amid enough inconveniences, since of
several things belonging to this art the printer, in making a
beginning with it, could obtain no proper supply, owing to the plague
raging at Genoa, Asti and elsewhere. Now this same work has been
corrected by the prior Venturinus, a distinguished grammarian, and
that so diligently that whereas previously the Doctrinale in many
places seemed by the fault of booksellers too little corrected, now by
the application of his care and diligence it will reach men's hands in
the most correct form possible. After this date books will be printed
in type of another kind, and elegantly, I trow; for both artificers
and a sufficiency of other things of which hitherto the putter forth
has been in need he now possesses by the gift of God, Who disposes all
things according to the judgement of His will.
Late as he appeared and small as was the town at which he produced his
one book--his hopes and promises as to others seem to have come to
naught--this man had the true pioneer spirit, and deserves to be
remembered for it.
Of a different kind, but no less, is the interest in what is perhaps my
own favourite colophon, that recording the death of Gerard Leeu at
Antwerp, while engaged in printing an edition of _The Chronicles of
England_ for the English market.
Here ben endyd the Cronycles of the Reame of Englond, with their
apperteignaunces. Enprentyd in the Duchy of Braband in the towne of
Andewarpe In the yere of our Lord M.cccc.xciij. By maistir Gerard de
leew a man of grete wysedom in all maner of kunnyng: whych nowe is
come from lyfe unto the deth, which is grete harme for many [a] poure
man. On whos sowle God almyghty for hys hygh grace haue mercy. Amen.
Leeu had been killed accidentally by one of his workmen in the course of
a dispute, and this testimonial to him in the colophon, which reads as
if the compositor had slipped it in of his own accord, is very gracious
and touching in its simplicity.
Just as the possession of a personal colophon brings a book within a
circle of interest to which it otherwise would not have approached, so
we may justly value a piece of printing all the more if it chances,
through any accident, to throw light on the printer's methods. I have
felt a peculiar affection for an edition of Valerius Maximus, printed by
Schoeffer in 1471, ever since I discovered that a change in the form of
the punctuation at certain points of the book makes it possible to work
out the number of presses on which it was being printed, the order in
which the sheets were being set up, and how quickly the type of the
worked pages was distributed. The slowness of the presswork in the
simple form of press at first used obliged the printers to keep several
presses, sometimes as many as six, occupied with different sections of
the same book, and the trouble they were given to make the end of one
section join neatly to the beginning of the next has left many traces.
Any book which thus lets us into the secrets of the early printing
offices possesses in a very high degree the charm which should attach to
an incunable, if that hardly used word is to retain, as it should, any
reference to the infancy of printing. But more will be said as to this
aspect of early books in our next chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] Two editions of Boner's _Edelstein_, both illustrated with over
a hundred woodcuts, one dated 14th February, 1461 (copy at
Wolfenbuttel), the other undated (Royal Library, Berlin); _Die
Historij von Joseph, Danielis, Judith, Hester,_ dated in rhyming
verse 1462 "nat lang nach Sand Walpurgentag" (Rylands Library and
Bibliotheque Nationale); the _Belial seu Consolatio peccatorum_ of
Jacobus de Theramo (Rylands and Germanisches Museum, Nuremberg); two
issues of a German _Biblia Pauperum_ with thirty-four woodcuts (both
at the Bibliotheque Nationale, the first also at Rylands and
Wolfenbuttel); the same work in Latin (Rylands); lastly two editions
of a poem called _Rechtstreit des Menschen mit dem Tode_ (both at
Wolfenbuttel, the second also at the Bibliotheque Nationale).
[26] In its colophon the book is said to have been "a docto viro
Bertolommeo Mates conditus et per P. Johannem Matoses Christi
ministrum presbiterumque castigatus et emendatus sub impensis
Guillermi ros et mira arte impressa per Johannem Gherlinc alamanum."
Gherlinc is only heard of again in 1494, and then not at Barcelona.
CHAPTER VI
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING
One great cause of changes of fashion in book-collecting is that after
any particular class of book has been hotly competed for by one
generation of book-lovers, all the best prizes gradually get locked up
in great public or private collections, and come so seldom into the
market that new collectors prefer to take up some other department
rather than one in which it is impossible for them to attain any
striking success. The first-fruits of printing, if reckoned strictly
chronologically, are probably as nearly exhausted as any class of book
which can be named. No matter how rich a man may be, the chances of his
ever obtaining a copy of the Thirty-six Line Bible, the 1457 Psalter, or
the first book printed at Venice, are infinitesimally small. Other
incunabula, if not hopelessly out of reach even of the very rich, are
only likely to be acquired after many years of waiting and a heavy
expenditure when the moment of possible acquisition arrives. Many of the
books hitherto here mentioned belong to this class. And yet, from what
may be called the logical as opposed to the chronological standpoint,
incunabula little, if at all, less interesting are still to be obtained
at quite small prices by any one who knows for what to look. Any
collector who sets himself to illustrate the evolution of the printed
book from its manuscript predecessors, and the ways of the early
printers, will find that he has undertaken no impossible task, though
one which will need considerable pursuit and good taste and judgment in
the selection of appropriate specimens.
[Illustration: VII. VENICE, JENSON, 1470
CICERO. RHETORICA (41^a)]
Roughly speaking, it took about a century for printed books to shake
off the influence of manuscript and establish their own traditions. The
earliest books had no titlepage, no head-title, no running title, no
pagination, and no printed chapter-headings, also no printed initials or
illustrations, blank spaces being left often for the one and
occasionally for the other to be supplied by hand. At the time when
printing was invented the book trade in many large cities had attained a
high degree of organization, so that the work of the calligrapher or
scribe was clearly distinguished from that of the luminer or
illuminator, and even from that of the rubricator (rubrisher). Take, for
instance, this Bury St. Edmunds bill of 1467 for a Psalter, preserved
among the Paston Letters:
For viij hole vynets, prise the vynet xij^d viij^s
Item for xxj demi-vynets ... prise the demi-vynett
iiij^d vij^s
Item for Psalmes letters xv^c and di' ... the prise of
C. iiij^d vj^s ij^d
Item for p'ms letters lxiij^c ... prise of c. j^d v^s iij^d
Item for wrytynge of a quare and demi ... prise the quayr
xx^d ij^s vj^d
Item for wrytenge of a calender xij^d
Item for iij quayres of velym, prise the quayr xx^d v^s
Item for notynge of v quayres and ij leves, prise of the
quayr viij^d iii^s vij^d
Item for capital drawynge iij^c and di', the prise iij^d
Item for floryshynge of capytallis, v^c v^d
Item for byndynge of the boke xij^s
------------
li^s ij^d
------------
It is possible that the work in this case was all done by one man,
though it is equally possible that several were engaged on it, under the
direction of a master-scrivener, but in either case the fact that
vignettes and demi-vignettes, psalter letters (i.e. the small red
letters at the beginning of each verse of a psalm, sometimes called
versals), the mysterious "p'ms letters" (possibly the dabs of colour
bestowed on small initials), the writing of the text, the writing of
the calendar, the musical notation, and the drawing and flourishing the
capitals, were all charged separately, at so much a piece or so much a
hundred, shows how distinct each operation was kept. Partly, no doubt,
from policy, so as not to rouse the wrath of more than one industry at a
time, partly to save themselves trouble and expense, the earliest
printers, with few exceptions, set themselves to supplant only the
calligrapher, and sold their books with all the blanks and spaces, which
the most modest or perfunctory scribe could have left to be filled by
his kindred craftsmen.
No better starting-point for a typographical collection could be desired
than fine copies of two well-printed books in which the printer has
confined himself severely to reproducing the text, leaving all headings,
capitals, and ornaments to be supplied by hand. In one (as in the page
from a book of Jenson's, which forms the illustration to this chapter,
Plate VII) the blanks should remain blanks (as more especially in early
books printed in Italy they often did remain), in the other they should
have been filled in with red ink or colours by a rubricator. The owner
of two such volumes is really as much at the fountain-head as the
possessor of the Mainz Indulgences of 1454, or any still earlier
document that may yet be found.[27] This is the logical beginning, and
the logic of history is quite as interesting as the chronology.
From the starting-point of the book of which the printer printed nothing
but the text the collector can advance in many different directions.
There was no regular and unbroken progress in the development of the
modern form of book, nor does it matter greatly that the examples of any
particular improvement should be either absolutely or nearly the
earliest. The main thing is that they should be good illustrations of
the special feature for which they are acquired. The problem how to
dispense with the aid of a rubricator had to be faced by countless
printers in many different towns, for rubricating by hand must have
added very considerably to the cost of a book. The obvious thing to do
was to print in red all the headings, chapter-numbers, etc., which the
rubricator used to add in that colour. But this was both expensive and
troublesome, as it involved two printings and the placing of the paper
in exactly the same position in the press in each. Caxton and one or two
other early printers tried to avoid this double printing and difficulty
of registration by putting on both red and black ink at the same
time--very probably, where they came close together, they were rubbed on
with a finger--but this so often resulted in smudges and lines half of
one colour, half of another, that it was soon abandoned. Double printing
was mostly soon abandoned also, except by the most expert men. It was
tried and abandoned by the printer of the Forty-two Line Bible, though
subsequently Fust and Schoeffer completely mastered it. Between 1472 and
1474 it was tried and abandoned by almost every printer in Strassburg.
The difficulty was generally[28] overcome by substituting, for red ink
used with type of the same size or face as the text, type of a larger
size or heavier face, which could be printed in black ink with the text
and yet stand out sufficiently clearly from it to catch the eye.
The need for this differentiation accelerated the tendency to reduce the
size of types, which was doubtless in the first place dictated by a
desire for economy. The earlier German text-types for ordinary books
very commonly measure about 6 mm. a line. To enable small differences to
be shown they are quoted in the British Museum Catalogue of Incunabula
by the measurements of twenty lines, and many of the early Mainz and
Strassburg types range closely round the number 120. These large
text-types are often the only ones used in a book, notes or other
accompaniments of the text being clumsily indicated by brackets or
spaces. The better printers, however, gradually imitated Fust and
Schoeffer, and along with their 120 text-types used smaller commentary
types measuring about 4 to 4(1/2) mm. a line, or from 80 to 90 mm. for
twenty lines. In the great folio commentaries on the Canon and Civil Law
a very fine effect is produced by two short columns of text in large
type being placed two-thirds way up the page and then completely
surrounded by the commentary in smaller type, also in double columns.
But the economy of using the smaller type for the text of books without
commentary was quickly perceived, and along with 4 to 4(1/2) mm. small
text-types, heavy and often rather fantastic types of just twice this
size (8 to 9 mm. a line, 160 to 180 mm. to twenty lines) came into use
for headings, and the opening words of books and chapters. The same
course was followed with respect to headlines, when it was desired to
add these to a book without the aid of a scribe. Eggestein printed one
book with headlines in red, but the same heavy type which was used for
chapter headings was soon used for headlines, and also, with very ugly
effect, for numbering the leaves.
In considering what specimens of printing to collect Englishmen who have
been accustomed for more than two centuries to nothing but roman types
may well be bewildered, as they look through any volume of facsimiles,
by the extraordinary variety of the founts. The main reasons for this
variety may be sought (1) in the dependence of the first printers on the
styles of writing which they found in vogue at the time, and in the
countries and towns where they made their ventures; and (2) in the
different styles considered appropriate to different classes of
books--Latin and vernacular, liturgical and secular, etc. Even now, when
bookhands can hardly be said to exist, the varieties of handwriting are
endless, and there are strongly marked differences between those of one
country and another. In the fifteenth century, when there was less
intercommunication between distant countries, the differences were even
greater. As to this, however, it is possible to make some distinctions.
The unifying effect of the Church is seen in the smaller range of
variations in the books for liturgical use, and the fellowship of
scholars exercised at least some influence in the same direction. In
Italy, the home of ancient learning, the aristocratic bookhand was the
fine round minuscules which had been evolved, by a conscious antiquarian
revival, from the bookhand of the twelfth century, itself a revival of
the Carlovingian bookhand of the eighth and ninth. Sweynheym and
Pannartz, being Germans, failed in the first instance to realize the
hopelessness of seeking scholarly favour with any other kind of
character, and their Subiaco books are printed in a light and pleasing
gothic much admired by William Morris, and used by Mr. St. John Hornby
for his splendid Ashendene Dante. When they started afresh at Rome in
1467 they gave up their gothic fount and used instead a fine roman
character noticeable for its use of the long _[s]_ at the end of words,
a peculiarity often found in Italian manuscripts of this period. The
early printers at Venice made no false start, but all used roman
characters from the outset, Venetian gothic type making its first
appearance in 1472. That gothic type was used at all in Italy was due
partly to the difficulty found in cutting very small roman type, so that
gothic was used for economy, partly to the advantages of the heavy
gothic face when a contrast was needed between text and commentary.
In Germany roman types were tried by Adolf Rusch (the R-printer) at
Strassburg about 1464, and by both Gunther Zainer at Augsburg and Johann
Zainer at Ulm, but met with no favour until in the last years of the
century they were reintroduced for the books written or edited by
Brant, Locher, Wimpheling, Peter Schott, and the other harbingers of the
new learning. In the Netherlands John of Westphalia started with a round
but rather thin roman type brought from Italy. In France the scholarly
ideals of the patrons of the first Paris press were reflected in the use
for the books printed at the Sorbonne of a beautiful roman type, only
injured by the excessive prominence of the serifs. In Spain also the
first books, those printed at Valentia by Lambert Palmart, were in
roman; but in both countries gothic types long commanded the favour of
the general reader, while in England their supremacy was unchallenged
for a third of a century, no book entirely in roman type appearing until
1508.
As regards the aesthetic value of the different roman types in use during
the fifteenth century, the superiority of the Italian is so marked that,
with the exception of the first French type, the rest, from this point
of view, may be neglected. Almost all the roman types used in Italy
until late in the 'seventies are either beautiful or at least
interesting, and it is remarkable that some of the most beautiful are
found in small places like Cagli, Mondovi, Viterbo, and Aquila, or in
the hands of obscure printers, such as the self-taught priest Clemente
of Padua, who worked at Venice in 1471. The pre-eminence of Jenson's
fount is indisputable, though he often did it injustice by his poor
presswork. But those used by John and Wendelin of Speier, and at a later
date by Antonio Miscomini, were also good, as also were several of the
founts used at Rome and Milan. At Naples and Bologna, on the other hand,
some quite early roman founts are curiously hard and heavy.
After about 1480 roman types in Italy enter on a second stage. They no
longer have the appearance of being founded directly on handwriting.
Doubtless the typecutters were so used to their work that they no longer
needed models, but designed new types according to their own ideas.
Naturally the letters are more uniform and regular than in the earlier
founts, but naturally also they have less charm, and the ordinary
close-set Venetian type of the end of the century is singularly dull.
Even the large roman type used by Aldus to print the _Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili_ is no real exception, as the letters are narrow for their
height. A far finer fount is the large text type used by the Silbers at
Rome, on both sides of 1500. This is well proportioned and beautifully
round, and it is surprising that it has not yet been imitated by any
modern typecutter.
When we pass from roman to gothic types there is a bewildering field
from which to choose. Here again dull commercialism gained the upper
hand about 1480, and towards the end of the century an ugly upright
text-type of 80 mm. to twenty lines, with a fantastic headline type of
twice its size, or a little more, found its way all over Germany. But
types with a twenty-line measurement ranging round 120 mm., such as
those of Peter Schoeffer or the Printer of Henricus Ariminensis, are
often extraordinarily handsome. Both of Schoeffer's earlier small types
and the small type of Ulrich Zell at Cologne are engagingly neat, and at
the opposite end there is the magnificently round gothic used by Ulrich
Han at Rome.
Most of the finest gothic types were used for Latin books of law and
theology, the peculiar appropriateness of roman type being considered to
be confined to works appealing to classical scholars. In Germany, for
some time, not much distinction was observed, but there was a tendency
in classical books to use an f and long [s] starting from the level of
the line, whereas in most vernacular books the tails of these letters
came below the line, giving a strangely different appearance to the
type. In the 'nineties a distinctively cursive type called Schwabacher,
usually measuring 93 mm. to twenty lines, makes its appearance all over
Germany. In Italy, both at Naples and by Ulrich Han at Rome, a very
small text type, which is certainly cursive in its affinities, was used
at the very outset, but found no favour. The typical vernacular French
types are also very often on a slope. The small cursive type cut for
Aldus in 1501 by Francesco da Bologna was thus not quite so great a
revolution as is sometimes represented. Its clearness in proportion to
its size, its extreme compactness, and the handiness of the small
octavos with which it was at first specially connected, gained for it a
great success, and it gradually, though only gradually, usurped the name
of italic, the upright Italian bookhand being distinguished from it as
roman. Few treatises on printing or the development of books give any
idea of the immense popularity of italics during the sixteenth century.
About 1570 they seemed to have established themselves as the fashionable
vernacular type both in Italy and France, and even in England whole
books were printed in them. In Switzerland also and Germany they gained
some hold; but gradually the tide turned, the upright bookhand regained
its predominance, and italics now survive chiefly for emphasis and
quotations--in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were often
used for proper names--giving to the page on which they occur an
unpleasantly spotty appearance. Their occasional use in prefaces and
dedicatory letters is much more appropriate.
The completion of books at first by a colophon, afterwards by a
titlepage, may be illustrated in the same way as that by which we have
traced the evolution of the text from incompleteness to completeness and
the development of different classes of types. At least one printer,
Johann Mentelin of Strassburg, seems to have considered the addition of
colophons as the proper business of the rubricator. While printed
colophons in his books are exceptionally rare, several copies have come
down to us in which full colophons have been added by hand, e.g. in a
vellum copy of the _Speculum Morale_ in the Bibliotheque Nationale,
after praise of the book, we read:
Impressumque in inclyta vrbe Argentinensium ac nitide terse
emendateque resertum per honorandum dominum Dominum Iohannem Mentelin
artis impressorie magistrum famosissimum. Anno a partu virgini
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