O thou who never ceasest to praise the devout Mary.
The omission of the third line of the “Catholicon” quatrain, obviously because the word “Catholice” no longer had especial import, makes the construction even more mysterious than in the original, nor is this the only instance we shall find of such mauling.
While the Eltville colophon thus mainly takes its phrasing from that of the “Catholicon,” with a few words from Fust and Schoeffer’s thrown in, the latter firm were themselves not above borrowing a happy phrase, since in the “Liber Sextus Decretalium Bonifacii VIII” not only do we find an antithesis introduced to the “artificiosa adinuentio,” but in some copies, if Maittaire is to be trusted, the praise of Mainz is bodily taken over, so that the full colophon now reads:
Presens huius Sexti Decretalium preclarum opus alma in urbe Maguntina inclyte nacionis germanice, quam dei clemencia tam alti ingenii lumine donoque gratuito ceteris terrarum nacionibus preferre illustrareque dignatus est, non atramento plumali canna neque aerea, sed artificiosa quadam adinuentione imprimendi seu caracterizandi sic effigiatum et ad eusebiam dei industrie est consummatum per Iohannem Fust ciuem et Petrum Schoiffher de Gernsheim. Anno domini M.cccclxv. die uero xvii mensis Decembris.
The present splendid edition of this sixth book of Decretals, 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, has been thus fashioned not by ink for the pen nor by a reed of brass, but by a certain ingenious invention of printing or stamping, and to the worship of God diligently brought to completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schoiffher of Gernsheim, in the year of the Lord 1465, and on the 17th day of December.
By this time even a patient reader may well be weary with this ringing of the changes on the two colophons first printed, respectively, in 1457 and 1460. But, without pushing the suggestion too far, we may at least hazard a guess as to how they came thus to be amalgamated in December, 1465. For it was in this year that Gutenberg, who, when all is said, is the most probable printer for the “Catholicon” and the other books which go with it, became a pensioner of Adolph II, Archbishop of Mainz, and presumably gave up printing. The two small books in the “Catholicon” type (i.e. the “Tractatus racionis et conscientiae” and the “De articulis fidei”) appear in Schoeffer’s catalogue of 1469-70. Whether he bought the stock of them as early as 1465 cannot be proved, but it would seem reasonable to connect his taking over the “Catholicon” colophon in that year with the disappearance of Gutenberg from any kind of rivalry. As between printers in different cities, there was certainly no copyright in colophons any more than there was in books. We shall see presently how, when books of Schoeffer’s were reprinted at Nuremberg and Basel, his colophons, with slight alterations, were taken over with them. But in Germany at this time, between citizens of the same town, trade rights, I fancy, were much more respected than at Venice, for instance, or at Paris, where the editions of Caesaris and Stoll were impudently pirated by two other firms in the very same street. At all events, it is worth noticing that the “Catholicon” printer’s colophon seems to have been taken over by Schoeffer, who bought some of his stock, and by the brothers Bechtermünze, who had the use of his types.
Passing now to other of Schoeffer’s colophons, we find in the edition of the “Officia et Paradoxa” of Cicero of this same year, 1465, a more personal form of the colophon, which gives us an explicit statement that Fust, the capitalist of the business, probably owing to failing health, now left the actual superintendence of the printing to his son-in-law Schoeffer, the quondam scribe. It runs:
Cicero. De Officiis. Mainz: Fust and Schoeffer, 1465.
“Presens Marci tulii clarissimum opus Iohannes Fust Moguntinus ciuis, non atramento plumali, canna neque aerea, sed arte quadam perpulcra, Petri manu pueri mei feliciter effeci finitum, Anno 1465.” This statement, that “I, Johann Fust, citizen of Mainz, completed the book by the labor or instrumentality (manu) of my son Peter,” was repeated in the reprint of February 4, 1466, and thenceforth the name of Fust disappears from the annals of printing.