Another Fleming, of the name of Matthew or Matthaeus, printed the Manipulus Curatorum of Guido de Monte Rotherii at Saragossa in October, 1475, and five other presses were established there before 1500, that of Paul Hurus being the most prolific. At Tortosa a single book (the Rudimenta Grammaticae of Perottus) was printed by Nicolaus Spindeler and Pedro Brun early in 1477, and in August of the same year Antonio Martinez, Alonso del Puerto, and Bartolome Segura completed the first fully dated book (the Sacramental of Sanchez de Vercial) at Seville, where printing subsequently throve as much as anywhere in Spain. The following year Spindeler and Brun, having moved from Tortosa, introduced printing into Barcelona, a date MCCCCLXVIII in a treatise by Bartholomaeus Mates, Pro condendis orationibus, being obviously a misprint, though to what it should be corrected cannot positively be shown.[26]
At Salamanca printing was introduced as early as 1481, and continued more actively after 1492, mainly for the production of educational works. At Burgos Friedrich Biel, who had been trained under Michael Wenssler at Basel, began printing in 1485, and a native of the place, Juan de Burgos, brought out his first book in 1490, both of these firms doing excellent work. Altogether, twenty-four towns and places in Spain possessed presses during the fifteenth century, but in many cases only for a short time.
The outline of the story of printing in England during the fifteenth century may be very quickly sketched, fuller treatment being reserved for a later chapter. At Michaelmas, 1476, Caxton rented premises in the Almonry from the Abbot of Westminster, and here he stayed till his death in 1491, printing, as far as we know, about a hundred books and documents. In 1478 a press was set up at Oxford, presumably by Theodoric Rood of Cologne, whose name, however, does not appear in any book until 1481. By 1485 Rood had been joined by an English stationer, Thomas Hunte, but in 1486 or the following year the press was closed after printing, as far as we know, only seventeen books.
The few books printed at Oxford were all more or less scholastic in character, and six out of eight works printed by Caxton’s second rival (apparently a friendly one), the Schoolmaster-Printer at St. Albans, belonged to the same class, his two more popular books being Caxton’s Chronicles of England, with a new appendix, and the famous Book of St. Albans. Of these eight works, the earliest bearing a date was issued in 1480, the latest in 1486.
A more formidable competitor to Caxton than either the Oxford or the St. Albans printer began work in the City of London in 1480. This was John Lettou, i.e. John the Lithuanian, who, as Mr. Gordon Duff notes, used type identical save in a single letter with a fount used at Rome in 1478 by Johann Bulle of Bremen. Lettou appears to have been financed in the first instance by a Londoner, William Wilcock. In 1482 he was joined by William Machlinia (presumably a native of Malines), and after five law books had been printed in partnership, Lettou dropped out, and Machlinia continued working by himself, possibly until as late as 1490 or 1491, when his stock seems to have been taken over by Richard Pynson, a Norman, from Rouen. On Caxton’s death in 1491 his business passed into the hands of his foreman, Wynkyn de Worde, a native of Lorraine. The only other press started in the fifteenth century was that of Julyan Notary, who worked at first with two partners, I.B. and I.H. Of these I.B. was certainly Jean Barbier, and I.H. probably Jean Huvin of Rouen. We have no information as to the nationality of Notary, but if, as seems probable, he was a Frenchman, printing in England for some twenty years after Caxton’s death was wholly in the hands of foreigners.
Meagre and bare of details as is this sketch of the beginnings of printing in the chief countries of Europe, it should yet suffice to prove that the purely arbitrary date 1500 and the slang word incunabula, used to invest all fifteenth century impressions with a mystic value, are misleading nuisances. By the time that printing reached England it was beginning to pass into its commercial stage in Germany and Italy. In both of these countries, and in a less degree in France, scores and hundreds of books were printed during the last fifteen years of the century which have little more connection with the invention of printing, or the story of its diffusion, than English or Spanish books a century later. From the point of view of the history of literature and thought there is much to be gained from the collection in large libraries of all books printed before 1501. From the point of view of the history of printing every decade of book-production has its interest, and the decade 1490 to 1500 among the rest. Incidentally it may be noted that in respect of book-illustration this particular decade in Italy is one of exceptional interest. But books of the third generation of German or Italian printers, men like Flach, for instance, at Strassburg, or Plannck at Rome, should not be collected under the idea that they are in any true sense of the word incunabula.
What constitutes a true incunable cannot be defined in a sentence. We must consider the country or city as well as the book, the individual man as well as the art of which he was perhaps a belated exponent. The same piece of printing may have much more value and interest if we can prove that it was produced in one place rather than another. After the publication of his Index, Mr. Proctor satisfied himself that some anonymous books in roman type which he had classed as the work of an unidentified press at Naples were really among the earliest specimens of Palmart’s typography in Spain, and one does not need to be a Spaniard to appreciate the distinction thus added to them. If sentiment is to count for anything we must admit the interest of the first books printed in any country which possesses an important history and literature—if only because we may legitimately be curious to know on what books a printer, with all the extant literature to choose from, ventured his capital as likely in that particular country and time to bring him the quickest and most profitable return. That the first large book in Germany was a Bible, the first books in Italy Latin classics, the first produced for the English market one that we must call an historical romance, cannot be regarded as merely insignificant. Nor are the differences in the types and appearance of the page unimportant, for these also help to illustrate national characteristics.
If this is true of the early books printed in any country, it is also true in only slightly less degree of those which first appeared in any great city which afterwards became a centre of printing. Strassburg, Cologne, and Nuremberg, Rome, Venice, and Florence, Paris and Lyon, Antwerp and London (if we may be permitted for once to ignore the separate existence of Westminster), each has its own individuality, and in each case it is interesting to see with what wares, and in what form, the first printers endeavoured to open its purse-strings. But when we come to towns and townlets some distinction seems needed. I may be misled by secret sympathy with that often scholarly, too often impecunious figure, the local antiquary. To him the first book printed in his native townlet, though by a printer merely stopping on his way between one great city and another, must needs be of interest, and it is hard that its price should be forced beyond his reach by the competition between dealers keen to do business with a rich collector to whom the book will have none of the fragrance it would possess for him. Typographical itinerancy, this printing by the roadside, as we may almost call it, must needs be illustrated in great collections, like any other habit of the early printers. But the ordinary private collector can surely dispense with buying books because they have been printed in places which have no associations for him, of which perhaps he has never heard.