As for the individual man, if we would keep any oases green in what may easily become a sandy desert, we must surely treasure every trace of his personality. One large element in the charm of incunabula is the human interest of difficulties overcome, and wherever a craftsman began work by cutting a distinctive type to suit the calligraphic fashion of the neighbourhood, at whatever date he started, his books will still have some interest. When he becomes articulate and tells us of his difficulties, or boasts of how they have been overcome, we may value his work still higher. As the first book printed at Florence, the Commentary of Servius on Virgil needs no added attraction, and yet how much its charm is enhanced by its printers’ addresses to the reader. Here is the second of them roughly Englished:
To the Reader. Bernardino Cennini, by universal allowance a most excellent goldsmith, and Domenico his son, a youth of very good ability, have been the printers. Pietro, son of the aforesaid Bernardo, has acted as corrector, and has made a collation with many very ancient copies. His first anxiety was that nothing by another hand should be ascribed to Servius, that nothing which very old copies showed to be the work of Honoratus should be cut down or omitted. Since it pleases many readers to insert Greek words with their own hand, and in their own fashion, and these in ancient codices are very few, and the accents are very difficult to mark in printing he determined that spaces should be left for the purpose. But since nothing of man’s making is perfect, it must needs be accounted enough if these books (as we earnestly hope) are found exceptionally correct. The work was finished at Florence on October 5, 1472.
It is impossible to read a colophon such as this without feeling ourselves in the very atmosphere of the printing house, with the various members of the printer’s family at work around us. Blank spaces are found in many early books where Greek quotations occurred in the manuscripts from which they were printed. But it was not every printer who took so much trouble as Cennini to justify the omission.
As many as twenty-one years later, when printing in the great towns was becoming merely mechanical, we find the same personal note in a little grammar-book printed at Acqui. Here the colophon tells us:
The Doctrinale of Alexander of Villedieu (God be praised!) comes to a happy end. It has been printed amid enough inconveniences, since of several things belonging to this art the printer, in making a beginning with it, could obtain no proper supply, owing to the plague raging at Genoa, Asti and elsewhere. Now this same work has been corrected by the prior Venturinus, a distinguished grammarian, and that so diligently that whereas previously the Doctrinale in many places seemed by the fault of booksellers too little corrected, now by the application of his care and diligence it will reach men’s hands in the most correct form possible. After this date books will be printed in type of another kind, and elegantly, I trow; for both artificers and a sufficiency of other things of which hitherto the putter forth has been in need he now possesses by the gift of God, Who disposes all things according to the judgement of His will.
Late as he appeared and small as was the town at which he produced his one book—his hopes and promises as to others seem to have come to naught—this man had the true pioneer spirit, and deserves to be remembered for it.
Of a different kind, but no less, is the interest in what is perhaps my own favourite colophon, that recording the death of Gerard Leeu at Antwerp, while engaged in printing an edition of The Chronicles of England for the English market.
Here ben endyd the Cronycles of the Reame of Englond, with their apperteignaunces. Enprentyd in the Duchy of Braband in the towne of Andewarpe In the yere of our Lord M.cccc.xciij. By maistir Gerard de leew a man of grete wysedom in all maner of kunnyng: whych nowe is come from lyfe unto the deth, which is grete harme for many [a] poure man. On whos sowle God almyghty for hys hygh grace haue mercy. Amen.
Leeu had been killed accidentally by one of his workmen in the course of a dispute, and this testimonial to him in the colophon, which reads as if the compositor had slipped it in of his own accord, is very gracious and touching in its simplicity.
Just as the possession of a personal colophon brings a book within a circle of interest to which it otherwise would not have approached, so we may justly value a piece of printing all the more if it chances, through any accident, to throw light on the printer’s methods. I have felt a peculiar affection for an edition of Valerius Maximus, printed by Schoeffer in 1471, ever since I discovered that a change in the form of the punctuation at certain points of the book makes it possible to work out the number of presses on which it was being printed, the order in which the sheets were being set up, and how quickly the type of the worked pages was distributed. The slowness of the presswork in the simple form of press at first used obliged the printers to keep several presses, sometimes as many as six, occupied with different sections of the same book, and the trouble they were given to make the end of one section join neatly to the beginning of the next has left many traces. Any book which thus lets us into the secrets of the early printing offices possesses in a very high degree the charm which should attach to an incunable, if that hardly used word is to retain, as it should, any reference to the infancy of printing. But more will be said as to this aspect of early books in our next chapter.