Early Printed Books

by E. Gordon Duff

[12] This indulgence had been noticed by Bernard, De l’Origine de l’Imprimerie, vol. ii. pp. 108, 109.

The next important printer at Strasburg is George Husner, who began in 1476 and printed up till 1498. His types may be recognised by the capital H, which is Roman, and has a boss on the lower side of the cross-bar. John Gruninger, who began in 1483, issued some beautifully illustrated books, the most celebrated being the Horace, Terence, and Boethius, and Brandt’s Ship of Fools. He and another later Strasburg printer, Knoblochzer, share with Conrad Zeninger of Nuremberg the doubtful honour of being the most careless printers in the fifteenth century.

Albrecht Pfister was printing at Bamberg as early as 1461, and his first dated book, Boner’s Edelstein, was issued on 4th February of that year. He used but one type, a discarded fount from Mainz which had been used in printing the thirty-six line Bible and the other books of that group. By many he is credited with being the printer of the thirty-six line Bible,—a theory which a short examination of the workmanship of his signed books would go far to upset. Pfister seems to have been more of a wood engraver than a printer, relying rather on the attractive nature of his illustrations than on the elegance of his printing. We can attribute to him with certainty nine books, with one exception all written in German, and with two exceptions all illustrated with woodcuts. Mr. Hessels is of opinion that certain of these books ought to be placed, on account of their workmanship, before the Boner of 1461; as, for instance, the Quarrel of a Widower with Death, in which the lines are very uneven. There are certain peculiarities noticeable in Pfister’s method of work which occur also in the Manung widder die Durke, a prognostication for 1455, preserved in the Royal Library, Munich, and in the Cisianus zu dutsche at Cambridge, the most marked being the filling up of blank spaces with an ornament of stops. The curious rhyming form of these calendars, and the dialect of German in which they are written, resemble exactly the rhyming colophon put by Pfister to the Boner’s Edelstein. In all three cases the ends of the lines are not marked, but the works are printed as prose.

Paulus Paulirinus of Prague, in his description of a ‘ciripagus’ wrote: ‘Et tempore mei Pambergæ quidam sculpsit integram Bibliam super lamellas, et in quatuor septimanis totam Bibliam super pargameno subtili presignavit scriptura.’ Some writers have suggested that these words refer to the thirty-six line Bible; but a ‘Bible cut on thin plates’ can only be a block-book, and probably an edition of the Biblia Pauperum. Paul of Prague composed a large part of his book before 1463, when no other printer besides Pfister was at work at Bamberg, and these words probably apply to either the Latin or German edition of the Biblia Pauperum which Pfister issued.

We have no information as to when or where Pfister began to print, and the extraordinary rarity of his books prevents much connected work upon them. There is no doubt that he came into possession of the type of the thirty-six line Bible, and in this type a number of books were printed. The earliest of these books is probably the Manung Widder die Durke, which, since it was a prognostication for 1455, was presumably printed in 1454. This book, as far as it is possible to judge, was manifestly printed after the thirty-six line Bible, and by a different printer. In it we first find the peculiar lozenge-shaped ornament of stops which continues through the series of books in this type. The calendar of 1457 in the Bibliothèque Nationale, probably printed in 1456, is the next piece in the series to which an approximate date can be given. Of this calendar, originally printed on a single sheet, only the upper half remains, found in 1804 at Mainz, where it had been used as a cover for some ecclesiastical papers. It bears the following inscription: ‘Prebendarum. Registrum capituli ecclesie Sancti Gengolffi intra muros Moguntiæ receptorum et distributorum anno LVII., per Johan: Kess, vicarium ecclesie predicte.’ Thus, at the end of the year 1457 or beginning of 1458, it was treated at Mainz as waste-paper. With this calendar may be classed the Cisianus zu dutsche at Cambridge, a rhyming calendar in German.

There are, then, the series of nine or ten books, usually all given to Pfister, though only two bear his name; and of these some are after and some can be placed before 1461. The typographical peculiarities of Pfister’s signed books are the same as those of the early calendars, and point to his having also produced them. This brings us at once into the obvious difficulties, for we should have Pfister printing as early as 1454, while Gutenberg was still in partnership with Fust. The knowledge about Pfister’s press is too meagre to allow any of these difficulties to be cleared up, though something may yet result from a more careful examination of the books themselves. The only examples in England of books printed by Pfister (with the exception of the Cisianus) are in the Spencer Library. There are there four books and a fragment of a fifth.

The conjecture put forward by M. Dziatako, that Gutenberg may have printed the thirty-six line Bible in partnership with some other printer, as, for example, Pfister, would certainly, if any proof in its favour could be adduced, simplify matters very much. We should then have all the books in a natural sequence, from the Bible to the latest books of Pfister, and we could account for the printing of the Manung in 1454, while Gutenberg was still in partnership with Fust and Schœffer for the production of the forty-two line Bible. The workmanship of the thirty-six line Bible is in some points different from the later books, all of which were probably the work of Pfister, who, according to this theory, must have been at work at Mainz as early as 1454. The contract between Gutenberg and Fust did not necessarily bind the former to print only with Fust, so that he may also have worked with Pfister, and taught him the art.

Pfister’s last dated book, The Histories of Joseph, Daniel, Judith, and Esther, was printed in 1462, not long after the day of St. Walburga (May 1).

After this time we hear of no book printed at Bamberg till 1481, when John Sensenschmidt printed the Missale Ordinis S. Benedicti, commonly known as the Bamberg Missal.