For John, a man whom few in skill surpass,
Has shown that books may best be writ with brass.
Speier befriends Venice: twice in four months has he
Printed this Cicero, in hundreds three.
1469.
The puzzle here is to determine how many copies there were of the second edition. Mr. Horatio Brown, in “The Venetian Printing Press” (p. 10), courageously asserts that “the second edition of the Epistulae consisted of six hundred copies, published in two issues of three hundred each; and that the whole six hundred took four months to print.” This is clearly inadmissible, as everything we know of fifteenth-century printing forbids us to suppose that John of Speier kept the whole book standing in type and printed off a second “issue” when he found there was a demand for it. The fourth month must be reckoned from the date of the first edition, and we have to choose, as to the number of copies in the second, between supposing that the three hundred, the “tercentenum opus,” refers to this alone, and that the poet did not intend to make any statement about the number of the first edition at all, or else that the second edition consisted of two hundred copies, and that these, with the hundred of the first, made up a total of three hundred. In either case his language is ambiguous, as the language of poets is apt to be when they try to put arithmetic into verse.
I have followed Mr. Proctor in making the second edition of Cicero’s letters precede the Pliny, but—as, in common with many other students of old books, I am made to feel daily—to be no longer able to go to him for information is a sore hindrance. I should have thought myself that the Pliny, a much larger book, was begun simultaneously with the first edition of Cicero, and that Wendelin’s colophon to the “De Civitate Dei” obliged us to link the Pliny with the first rather than the second edition. Perhaps, however, this arithmetic in verse is once more a little loose. Certainly the Pliny colophon, which is free from figures, is all the better poetry for that reason. It is the book here that speaks:
