In our opening chapter it was suggested that if all early books were provided with colophons the work of bibliographers would be much simplified. Some qualifying epithet ought, however, to have been inserted; for there are some colophons which, instead of simplifying the task of assigning to every book its place, printer, and date, greatly aggravate the bibliographer’s troubles. Of deliberately untruthful colophons I can, indeed, only think of a single fifteenth-century example—that in the “Incunabulum of Brescia hitherto ascribed to Florence,” which the late Mr. R. C. Christie tracked down so neatly in the fourth volume of the Bibliographical Society’s Transactions. This occurs in a copy of some of the works of Politian, and reads:
Impressum Florentiae: et accuratissime castigatum opera et impensa Leonardi de Arigis de Gesoriaco Die decimo Augusti M.I.D.
Printed at Florence and most accurately corrected by the work and at the cost of Leonardo dei Arigi of Gesoriaco, on the tenth day of August, 1499.
As a matter of fact, the book, as Mr. Christie showed (and Mr. Proctor accepted his conclusions), was printed with the types of Bernardinus Misinta of Brescia, and the colophon which looks so simple and straightforward deceived bibliographers for some four centuries. Even the increased study of types would by itself hardly have sufficed to detect the fraud, but the fact that it was alluded to, though without mention of the name of the book, in the petition of Aldus to the Venetian Senate (17th October, 1502) put Mr. Christie on the track, and he ran it down with his accustomed neatness and precision. The fraud, of course, was the direct outcome of the first imperfect attempts to give the producers of books a reasonable copyright in them by means of privileges. As Brescia was subject to the Venetian Senate, Misinta, had he put his name in the colophon, could have been punished, and he therefore used a false imprint in order to divert suspicion. When restrictions, right and wrong, multiplied during the sixteenth century, false imprints became increasingly common, and they form a subject by themselves with which we must not here meddle farther. While Misinta’s “Politian” stands by itself, as far as I know, in deliberately trying to mislead purchasers as to its place of imprint, there are quite a considerable number of early books which reprint the colophons of previous editions, and thus tempt the unwary to mistake them for the originals which they copied. Since the decision in the case of Parry v. Moring and another, English publishers and those they employ are likely to be much more careful; but in the years immediately preceding it the carelessness with which one “editor” used the text of his predecessor to print from was often extraordinary, one reprint even including a number of duly initialled and copyright notes from another which had appeared only a year or two earlier. If this could be done in our own day, despite the existence of reviewers and the law courts, we may easily imagine that the smaller printers and publishers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who could not afford to keep their own scholarly “corrector,” simply handed over existing texts to their workmen and printed them as they stood. In most cases, of course, they had the sense to stop when they came to the colophon; but they did not always do so, and, more especially, when the colophon was in verse an unlearned compositor might easily imagine that it formed an essential part of the book. Thus twelve Latin couplets from the Milan edition of the “Confessionale,” of Bartholomaeus de Chaimis, though they end with the clear statement that Christopher Valdarfer of Ratisbon came to the help of the Milanese and printed this book (October, 1474), were reprinted as they stood in several anonymous Strasburg editions, while Creusner at Nuremberg and Schoeffer at Mainz compromised by leaving out the last six lines, which contain Valdarfer’s name.
Occasionally this careless reprinting leads to a book possessing a double colophon, as in the 1478 Naples edition of the “De Officiis” and other works of Cicero, which uses for his “Letters to Atticus” Jenson’s text of 1470. The colophon begins exactly (save for differences in contractions, punctuation, etc.) as in the Jenson edition already quoted (Chapter III):
M. T. C. epistolae ad Atticum Brutum et Q. Fratrem cum ipsius Attici uita foeliciter expliciunt. M.cccc.lxx
Attice, nunc totus Veneta diffunderis urbe,