III
COLOPHONS AT VENICE
While to Mainz belongs the supreme credit of having brought printing to the position of a practical art, the city in which it attained its highest perfection and popularity in the fifteenth century was undoubtedly Venice. The output from the Venetian presses represented some forty per cent. of the entire book production of Italy, and its quality was at least as remarkable as its quantity. It is natural, therefore, to turn from Mainz to Venice in our quest for interesting colophons, as wherever printers did good work and took pride in it we may expect to find correspondingly good colophons. Certainly at Venice we have no ground for disappointment in this respect. The Venetian colophons are plentiful and full of information, though chiefly about the publisher’s side of printing. What makes them a little alarming to the pedestrian editor is that so many of the earliest and most interesting specimens are in verse. The books most favored by the first Venetian printers were editions of the Latin classics and Latin translations of the Greek ones. To see these through the press each printer had to retain the services of a corrector, who filled a position half-way between the modern proof-reader’s and editor’s. The printers, not being able to write Latin themselves with any fluency, naturally left their colophons in the hands of their correctors, and these gentlemen preferred to express themselves in verse. The verse, even allowing for the fact that it is generally intended to be scanned by accent rather than quantity, is often of a kind which would get an English school-boy into considerable trouble; and it would be a nice question as to whether Omnibonus Leonicenus and Raphael Zovenzonius, who wrote it for John and Wendelin of Speier; Antonius Cornazanus, who was in the pay of Jenson; or Valdarfer’s corrector, Lodovicus Carbo, should be held the most successful. Just, however, because its poetic ornaments are commonplace, to render this verse into prose seems more than usually unsportsmanlike. Good poetry can stand the test of prose, and the poetaster meddles with it at his peril, as witness the uniform inferiority of metrical renderings of the Psalms to the prose of the Great Bible or Prayer-Book version. But mediocre poetry when turned into prose becomes simply ridiculous, and so the present translator, without reckoning himself as even a “minimus poeta,” has wrestled manfully with these various verse colophons and “reduced” them, as best he could, into English rhymes, since these, poor as they are, misrepresent the originals less than any attempt he could make in prose. Here, then, without more apology, are the colophons from the earliest Venetian books, which fall into an interesting sequence.
The first printer at Venice, it will be remembered, was John of Speier, who obtained a special privilege for his work which would have cramped the whole craft at Venice had not his death removed the difficulty. In his first book, an edition of Cicero’s “Epistolae ad Familiares,” printed in 1469, the colophon is cast into these verses:
Cicero. Epistolae ad Familiares. Venice: John of Speier, 1469.
Primus in Adriaca formis impressit aenis
Vrbe Libros Spira genitus de stirpe Iohannes.