Early Printed Books

by E. Gordon Duff

It is impossible to assign any date for the commencement of the thirty-six line Bible. Fust had clearly nothing to do with it, and the type may have been made and some sheets printed before the partnership for printing the forty-two line Bible was entered into in 1450. The largeness of the type and consequent lesser number of lines to the page points to an early date, for the tendency was always to increase the number of lines to the page and economise paper. Thus we find that when the first gathering of the forty-two line Bible had been printed, which has only forty lines to the page, the type was recast, so as to have the same face of letter on a smaller body; and with this type the page was made to contain forty-two lines to the page.

The workmanship and the appearance of the type would also lead us to suppose that the thirty-six line Bible was printed earlier than the Manung widder die Durcke, which, being an ephemeral publication applicable only to the year 1455, must presumably have been printed in 1454.

We can therefore probably put both Bibles earlier than 1454.

The first book with a printed date is the well-known Psalmorum Codex of 1457, printed by Schœffer. Of this book nine copies are known, and all vary slightly from each other.[7] Only two types are used throughout the Psalter, but both are very large. Mr. Weale, on account of the variations observable in the letters, insists that the book was printed from cut and not cast type; but he gives no reason for this opinion; and when we consider that books had already been produced from cast type, it is impossible to understand why Schœffer should have resorted to so laborious a method. The dissimilarity of some letters is not so strong a proof of their having been cut, as the similarity of the greater number is of their having been cast. Bradshaw, who was of this opinion, had also noted some curious shrinkages in the type, resulting from the way the matrices for the type were formed.

[7] For a very full account of this book see the Catalogue of MSS. and Printed Books exhibited at the Historical Music Loan Exhibition, by W. H. James Weale, London, 1886, 8vo, pp. 27-45.

The most striking thing about the Psalter are the wonderful capital letters; and how these were printed has always been a vexed question. In the editions of 1457 and 1459 they are in two colours, the letter in one colour and the surrounding ornamentation in another. Though it is impossible to determine exactly how they were produced, there is at any rate something to be settled on the question. In one case, in the edition of 1515, in which these initials were still used, the exterior ornament has been printed, but the letter itself and the interior ornament have not. This shows at any rate that the letter and the ornament were not on one block, and that the exterior and interior ornaments were on different blocks; and is also in favour of the suggestion put forward by Fischer, that the ornament and the letter, though on different blocks, were not printed at the same time. In support of his theory, Fischer mentioned a case of the letter overlapping the ornament in a copy of the edition of 1459, and such a slip could not have occurred had the letter and ornament been printed from inset blocks in the method new known as the Congreve process.

It has also been argued by some writers, among whom is William Blades, that the letter was not printed in colour, but that the design was merely impressed in blank upon the paper or vellum, and afterwards filled in with colour by the illuminator. This is shown, it is said, by some portions of lines here and there in the ornamentation remaining uncoloured, a result surely due to imperfect inking rather than to a careless illuminator. It is hardly probable that the rubricator would begin a line and leave the end uncoloured while it was plainly traced for him; but, on the other hand, it is just such a fault as would, and often did, occur in printing an elaborate and involved ornament. No doubt in some cases the capitals, like the letters of the text, were touched up by the rubricator; and this is, as a rule, most noticeable when the ornament or letter is in blue. The blue ink used had a green tinge, and in some cases looked almost grey, and was therefore very often touched up with a brighter colour. Mr. Weale is of opinion that these letters were not set up and printed with the rest of the book, but were ‘printed, subsequently to the typography, not by a pull of the press, but by the blow of a mallet on the superimposed block.’

It was probably about 1458, between the times of printing the two editions of the Psalter, that Schœffer printed the book called in his catalogue of 1469-70, Canon misse cum prefacionibus et imparatoriis suis. This was the Canon of the Mass, printed by itself for inserting in copies of the Missal. This particular part, being the most used, was often worn out before the rest of the book; and we know from early catalogues[8] that it was the custom of printers to print this special part on vellum. While the printing of a complete Missal would have been a doubtful speculation, the printing of this one part, unvarying in the different uses, required no great outlay, and was almost certain to be profitable. Two copies only are known, and these are of different editions. One is in the Bodleian, and was bound up with an imperfect copy of the Mainz Missal of 1493. The other is in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg, in a copy of the Breslau Missal of 1483.

[8] In a catalogue issued by Ratdolt about 1491 we read: ... ‘videlicet unum missarum (?) in papiro bene corporatum et illigatum cum canone pergameneo non ultra tres florenos minus quarta: sed cum canone papireo duos florenos cum dimidio fore comparandum.’

The Bodleian copy consists of twelve leaves, printed on vellum in the large type of the Psalter, and ornamented with the same beautiful initials. The capital T of the Te igitur, commencing the Canon, is as large as the well-known B of the Psalter, and even more beautiful in execution. Besides the ordinary coloured capitals which occur also in the Psalter, there is a monogram composed of the letters V.D., standing for Vere dignum.