Explicit Itinerarius a terra Anglie in partes Ierosolimitanas et in ulteriores transmarinas, editus primo in lingua gallicana a domino Iohanne de Mandeuille milite, suo auctore, Anno incarnacionis domini Mccclv. in ciuitate Leodiensi et paulo post in eadem ciuitate translatus in dictam formam latinam. Quod opus ubi inceptum simul et completum sit ipsa elementa, seu singularum seorsum caracteres litterarum quibus impressum, vides venetica, monstrant manifeste.
Here ends the Itinerary from the land of England to the parts of Jerusalem and to those further off beyond the sea, published first in French by Sir John de Mandeville, Knight, its author, in the year of the incarnation of the Lord 1355, in the city of Liège, and shortly after in the same city translated into the said Latin form. And as to where this work has been both begun and completed, its very elements, the characters of the single letters with which it has been printed,—Venetian, as you see,—plainly tell its tale.
A good many literary mistakes, and the investigations needed to correct them, would have been spared if this quite accurate statement of the supremacy of the French Mandeville as compared with the Latin (and also the English) had been generally accepted. What we are here concerned with is the attention called to the fact that it is printed in the Venetian letter. Of course, even before the invention of printing a school of handwriting would have grown up at Venice sufficiently distinct for experts to distinguish it; but this expectation that any buyer of the book would recognize at once where it was printed is interesting, and would be made much more so if a copy of the edition could be found and the press identified. In our next colophon the printer expects his capital letters to serve his readers instead of his name. This is from the first Augsburg edition of the “Catholicon” of Joannes Balbus, about the Mainz edition of which we have already had to speak. The Augsburg colophon runs:
Grammatice partes et vocum proprietates
Verius inuenies hoc codice: si quoque queres
Nomen qui libro scripturam impressit in illo,
Tunc cito comperies per litterulas capitales:
Hinc poteris certe cognomen noscere aperte.
Ex Reutling Zainer hic dicitur esse magister,
Recte presentis artis doctissimus ipsus.