VI
COLOPHONS OF AUTHORS AND EDITORS
Booksellers are a much more learned body than they used to be, but few readers of second-hand catalogues can have failed to meet with ascriptions of dates for the printing of books long anterior to the invention of the art, on the ground of colophons which they know at once to have been written by the authors. Where only a few years separate the dates of composition and publication the mistake is easily made and not always easily detected. The retention of the author’s original colophon is, however, common enough for cataloguers to be prepared for it; and there are plenty of cases in which a book possesses two quite distinct colophons, the first by the author, the second by the printer or publisher. Thus, to take a simple example from a famous book, we find at the end of the text of the “Hypnerotomachia” the author’s colophon:
Taruisii cum decorissimis Poliae amore lorulis distineretur misellus Poliphilus. M.cccc.lxvii. Kalendis Maii.
At Treviso, while the wretched Polifilo was confined by love of Polia with glittering nets. May 1, 1467.
That of the printer is thirty-two years later: