These four books contain altogether no less than 201 cuts, executed in clumsy outline. One hundred and one of these cuts belong to the Edelstein, a collection of German fables written before 1330. The book which contains them is a small folio of 28 leaves, and with a width of page larger by a fourth than the size of the cuts. To fill this gap, Pfister introduced on the left of the illustration a figure of a man. In the dated copy, in which the cuts are more worn, this figure is the same throughout the book; in the undated there are differences in the man's headgear, and in the book or tablet he is holding, constituting three different variations. In the Buch der vier Historien the cuts number 55, six of which, however, are repeated, making 61 impressions. In the impossibility of obtaining access to the originals, while the Spencer Collection was in the course of removal, the careful copy of one of these, made for Camus in 1799, was chosen for repro
duction as likely to be less familiar than the illustrations from Pfister's other books given by Dibdin in his Bibliotheca Spenceriana. The subject is the solemn sacrifice of a lamb at Bethulia after Judith's murder of Holofernes. The Biblia Pauperum is in three editions, two in German, the third in Latin; each consists of 17 printed leaves, with a large cut formed of five separate blocks illustrating different subjects, but joined together as a whole, on each page.
The last book of Pfister's we have to notice, the Complaint of the Widower against Death, is probably earlier than either of his dated ones. It contains 24 leaves, with five full-page cuts, showing (1) Death on his throne, and the widower and his little son in mourning; (2) Death and the widower, with a pope, a noble, and a monk vainly offering Death gold; (3) two figures of Death (one mounted) pursuing their victims; (4) Death on his throne, with two lower compartments representing monks at a cloister gate, and women walking with a child in a fair garden,—this to symbolise the widower's choice between remarriage and retiring to a monastery; (5) the widower appearing before Christ, who gives the verdict against him, since all mortals must yield their bodies to Death and their souls to God. The cuts in this book are larger and bolder than the other specimens of Pfister's work which we have noticed, but they are rude enough.
After the introduction of woodcut illustrations,
the next innovation with which we have to concern ourselves is the adoption of the title-page. What may be called accidental title-pages are found on both the Latin and the German edition of a Bull of Pope Pius II. printed by Fust and Schoeffer in 1463. After this Arnold ther Hoernen of Cologne appears to have been the first printer lavish enough to devote a whole page to prefixing a title to a book. A facsimile is here given, from which we see that this 'sermon preachable on the feast of the presentation of the most blessed Virgin' was printed in 1470 at the outset of ther Hoernen's career. The printer, however, seems to have understood no better than Schoeffer the commercial advantage of what he was doing, and the next title-page which has to be chronicled is another of the same kind, reading the 'Tractatulus compendiosus per modum dyalogi timidis | ac deuotis viris editus instruens non plus curam | de pullis et carnibus habere suillis quam quo modo | verus deus et homo qui in celis est digne tractetur. | Ostendens insuper etiam salubres manuductiones quibus | minus dispositus abilitetur,' etc. What we may call the business title of this book is much more sensibly set forth in the brief colophon: 'Explicit exhortacio de celebratione misse per modum dyalogi inter pontificem et sacerdotem, Anno Lxxʓ,' &c. Still, here also, the absence of an incipit, and of any following text must be taken as constituting a title-page. Three years later two Augsburg printers, Bernardus 'pictor' and Erhardus
Ratdolt, who had started a partnership in Venice with Petrus Löslein of Langenzenn in Bavaria, produced the first artistic title-page as yet discovered. This appears in all the three editions of a Calendar which they issued in Latin and Italian in 1476, and in German in 1478. The praises of the Calendar are sung in twelve lines of verse, beginning in the Latin edition:—
Aureus hic liber est: non est preciosior ulla
Gemma kalendario quod docet istud opus.
Aureus hic numerus; lune solisque labores
Monstrantur facile: cunctaque signa poli.
Then follows the date, then the names of the three printers in red ink. This letterpress is surrounded by a border in five pieces, the uppermost of which shows a small blank shield (see p. 19), while on the two sides skilfully conventionalised foliage is springing out of two urns. The two gaps between these and the printers' names are filled up by two small blocks of tracery. It is noteworthy that this charming design was employed by printers from Augsburg, the city in which wood-engraving was first seriously employed for the decoration of printed books. But the design itself is distinctly Italian in its spirit, not German.