Comes Austin’s holy manual from his press.
Curiously enough, a year before Joannes de Sidriano issued the first book at Pavia, printing had been inaugurated at Mantua with another work by the same not very illustrious author—Gambiglioni’s “Tractatus Maleficiorum.” In this Petrus Adam de Michaelibus writes:
Petrus Adam Mantus opus hoc impressit in urbe.
Illic nullus eo scripserat aere prius.
Petrus Adam printed this work in the town of Mantua. None had written there on brass before him.
All these claims seem sufficiently well established, but that of Filippo of Lavagna in the “De medicina” of Avicenna (translated by Master Gerard of Cremona) is much less tenable. Here he says distinctly at the end of Book II:
Mediolani die xii februarii 1473 per Magistrum Filippum de Lauagnia huius artis stampandi in hac urbe primum latorem atque inventorem.
At Milan, on the 12th day of February, 1473, by Maestro Filippo of Lavagna, the first bearer and inventor of the art of stamping in this town.
We know that Antonio Zaroto had printed at Milan a “Festus de Verborum significationibus” on the 3d August, 1471, while the earliest date credited to Lavagna is that of his edition of the “Epistolae ad Familiares” of Cicero, 25th March, 1472. It is true that the pretty colophon to his “Miraculi de la Vergene Maria” tells another tale:
Dentro de Milano e doue stato impronta