Fine Books

by Alfred W. Pollard

“A certain Omnibonus wrote in the preface to a Quintilian, and also in other books, that a Walloon from France, called Nicolaus Jenson, was the first inventor of this masterly art—a notorious lie, for there are men still alive who bear witness that books were printed at Venice before the aforesaid Nicolaus Jenson came there, and began to cut and make ready his letter. But the first inventor of printing was a Burgher at Mainz, and was born at Strassburg, and called Yunker Johann Gutenberg.

“From Mainz the art came first of all to Cologne, after that to Strassburg, and after that to Venice. The beginning and progress of the art were told me by word of mouth by the Worshipful Master Ulrich Zell of Hanau, printer at Cologne in this present year 1499, through whom the art came to Cologne.”[14]

Zell, or his interviewer, ignores the books printed anonymously at Strassburg by Mentelin and Eggestein, and also the handful printed by Albrecht Pfister at Bamberg; he also is misled by Gutenberg’s long residence at Strassburg into calling him a native of that city; in other respects, so far as we are able to check this account, it is quite accurate. It tells us emphatically that “this right worthy art was invented first of all in Germany, at Mainz, on the Rhine”; and again, that “the first inventor of printing was a Burgher at Mainz named Junker Johann ‘Gudenburch’”; but between these two unqualified statements is sandwiched a reference to a prefiguration which took shape in Holland in Donatuses, printed there before the Mainz presses were at work, and much less masterly and subtle than the books which they produced. He connects no name with this “Vorbildung,” and, unhappily, he gives no clue as to how it foreshadowed, and was yet distinct from, the real invention.

Sixty-nine years[15] after the appearance of this carefully balanced statement, the facts as to Dutch “prefigurations” which had inspired it moved a Dutch chronicler, Hadrianus Junius, in compiling his Batavia (not published till 1588), to write the well-known passage as to the invention of printing, which has been summarized as follows:—

There lived, about 1440, at Haarlem, in the market-place opposite the Town Hall, in a respectable house still in existence, a man named Lourens Janszoon Coster, i.e. Laurence, son of John Coster. The family name was derived from the hereditary office of Sacristan, or Coster of the Church—a post both honourable and lucrative. The town archives give evidence of this, his name appearing therein many times, and in the Town Hall are preserved his seal and signature to various documents. To this man belongs the honour of inventing Printing, an honour of which he was unjustly robbed, and which afterwards was ascribed to another. The said Laurence Coster, one day after dinner, took a walk in the wood near Haarlem. While there, to amuse himself, he began to cut letters out of some beech-bark. The idea struck him to ink some of these letters and use them as stamps. This he did to amuse his grandchildren, cutting them in reverse. He thus formed two or three sentences on paper. The idea germinated, and soon with the help of his son-in-law, and by using a thick ink, he began to print whole pages, and to add lines of print to the block-books, the text of which was the most difficult part to engrave. Junius had seen such a book, called Spieghel onzer Behoudenisse. It should have been said that Coster was descended from the noble house of Brederode, and that his son-in-law was also of noble descent. Coster’s first efforts were of course very rude, and to hide the impression of the letters on the back, they pasted the leaves, which had one side not printed, together. His letters at first were made of lead, which he afterwards changed for tin. Upon his death these letters were melted down and made into wine-pots, which at the time that Junius wrote were still preserved in the house of Gerrit Thomaszoon, the grandson of Coster. Public curiosity was greatly excited by Coster’s discovery, and he gained much profit from his new process. His trade, indeed, so increased that he was obliged to employ several workmen, one of whom was named John. Some say this was John Faust, afterwards a partner with Gutenberg, and others say he was Gutenberg’s brother. This man when he had learnt the art in all its branches, took the opportunity one Christmas eve, when all good people are accustomed to attend Church, to break into the rooms used for printing, and to pack up and steal all the tools and appliances which his master, with so much care and ingenuity, had made. He went off by Amsterdam and Cologne to Mainz, where he at once opened a workshop and reaped rich fruit from this theft, producing several printed books. The accuracy of this story was attested by a respectable bookbinder, of great age but clear memory, named Cornelis who had been a fellow-servant with the culprit in the house of Coster, and indeed had occupied the same bed for several months, and who could never talk of such baseness without shedding tears and cursing the thief.

Written nearly a hundred and thirty years after the supposed events which it narrates, this story is damned by its circumstantiality. It is thus that legends grow, and it is not difficult to imagine Haarlem bookmen picking up ideas out of colophons in old books and asking the “respectable bookbinder of great age” whether it was not thus and thus that things happened. Many of the details of the story are demonstrably false; its one strong point is the bookbinder, Cornelis, for a binder of this name is said to have been employed as early as 1474 and as late as 1514 to bind the account-books of Haarlem Cathedral, and in the two years named, and also in 1476, to have strengthened his bindings by pasting inside them fragments of Donatuses printed on vellum in the type of the Speculum Humanae Saluationis. The fragment in the account-book for 1474 is rubricated, and must thus either have been sold or prepared for selling, i.e. it is not “printer’s waste,” but may have been bought by Cornelis for lining his covers in the ordinary way of trade. But we have here a possible link between Zell’s story of early Dutch Donatuses and the story of Junius about Coster and his servant Cornelis, since we find fragments of a Donatus in the possession of this particular man.

There were plenty of such Donatuses in existence in the Netherlands about 1470. In 1887 Dr. Hessels, in his Haarlem the Birthplace of Printing, not Mentz, enumerated fragments of twenty different editions, printed in eight types, of which the type used in the Speculum Humanae Saluationis (see p. 26) is one, while the other seven are linked to it, or to each other, in such a way that we may either suppose them to have all belonged to the same printer, or distribute them among two or more anonymous firms. Besides these twenty editions of Donatus on the Eight Parts of Speech, Dr. Hessels enumerated eight editions of the Doctrinale of Alexander Gallus[16] (another school book popular in the fifteenth century), three of the Distichs of Dionysius Cato (the work from which Dame Pertelote quoted to convince Chantecleer of the futility of dreams), and one or two editions each of a few other works, the Facetiae Morales of Laurentius Valla (twenty-four leaves), the Singularia Juris of Ludovicus Pontanus, with a treatise of Pope Pius II (sixty leaves), and the De Salute Corporis of Gulielmus de Saliceto with other small works (twenty-four leaves). These latter books offer no very noticeable features; some of the Donatus fragments, on the other hand, have printing only on one side of the leaf (whence they are called by the barbarous term “anopisthographic,” “not printed on the back”) and have a very rude and primitive appearance. This may have been caused in part at least by their having been pasted down, and possibly scraped, by binders, for almost all of them have been found in bindings; but it counts for something.

Not one of the books or fragments of which we have been speaking makes any mention of its printer, or of the place or date at which it was produced. A copy of one of the later books, the De Salute Corporis of Gulielmus de Saliceto, was purchased by Conrad du Moulin while abbot of the Convent of S. James at Lille, a dignity which he held from 1471 to 1474. The earliest Haarlem account-book which contained Donatus fragments was for the year 1474. It is entirely a matter of opinion as to how much earlier than this any of the extant fragments can be dated. There is no reason why some of them should not be later.

As to the place or places at which these books were printed, there is no evidence of any weight. But, as has been already said, the whole series can be closely or loosely connected with the types used in editions of the Speculum Humanae Saluationis, and in 1481 Jan Veldener, a wandering printer, while working at Utrecht, introduced into an edition of the Epistles and Gospels in Dutch two woodcuts, each of which was a half of one of the double pictures in the Speculum. Two years later, when at Kuilenburg, he printed a quarto edition of the Speculum itself (Dutch version), in which he used a large number of the original Speculum blocks, all cut up into halves, so as to fit a small page. As Veldener (as far as we know) used the Speculum blocks first at Utrecht, it is supposed that it was at Utrecht that he obtained them. If the blocks were for sale at Utrecht, this may have been the place at which the earlier editions of the Speculum were issued, and thus, in the absence of any evidence which they were willing to recognize in favour of any other place, Henry Bradshaw and his disciples attributed the whole series of editions of the Speculum, Donatus, Doctrinale, etc., to Utrecht, about, or “not after,” 1471-1474. Bradshaw himself clearly indicated that this attribution was purely provisional. He felt “compelled to leave” the books at Utrecht, so he phrased it, i.e. the presumption that Veldener found the blocks of the Speculum there constituted a grain of evidence in favour of Utrecht; and if a balance is sufficiently sensitive and both scales are empty, a grain thrown into one will suffice to weigh it down. It would have been better, in the present writer’s opinion, if the grain had been disregarded, and no attempt made to assign these books and fragments to any particular place. As it is, Bradshaw’s attribution of them to Utrecht has been repeated without any emphasis on its entirely provisional character, even without any mention of this at all, and perhaps with a certain humorous enjoyment of the chance of prejudicing the claims of Haarlem by an unusually rigorous application of the rules as to bibliographical evidence.