Cologne, from its situation on the Rhine, was in a favourable position for receiving information and materials from Mainz, and we find that by 1466, Ulric Zel of Hanau, a clerk of the diocese of Mainz, was settled there as a printer. His first dated book was the Chrysostom Super psalmo quinquagesimo; but some other books were certainly issued before it. The Cicero De Officiis, a quarto with thirty-four lines to the page, is earlier, and is perhaps the first book he issued. It has many signs of being a very early production, and may possibly have been issued before Schœffer’s edition of 1465.
M. Madden, in his Lettres d’un Bibliographe, has argued that a very early school of typography existed at Cologne, in the Monastery of Weidenbach. Though his researches have thrown a great deal of light on various points connected with early printing, and are in some ways of real value, much that he has theorised about Weidenbach requires confirmation. We can hardly be expected to believe, as he would try to persuade us, that Caxton, and Zel, and Jenson, and many other printers whose types belong to different families, could all learn printing at this one place. It would be impossible for men who had learnt to print in the same school to produce such radically different kinds of type, and work in such different methods. The early tentative essays of Zel’s press can be clearly identified, and their order more or less accurately determined, from their typographical characteristics. His earliest books were quartos; and of these the first few have four point holes to the page. These point holes are small holes about an inch from the top and bottom lines, and nearly parallel with the sides of the type, made by the four pins which went through the paper when one side of the page was printed, and served as a guide to place the paper straight when the other side was printed.[13]
[13] The use of four points to obtain a correct register is generally a sure sign of the infancy of a press. Blades says they are to be found in all the books printed in Caxton’s Type 1.
Then, before he settled down to printing his quartos with twenty-seven lines to the page, he experimented with various numbers of lines. We can safely start with the following books in the following order:—
| A. Cicero, De officiis, | 34 lines to the page. |
| Chrysostom, Super psalmo quinquagesimo, 1466, | 33 lines to the page. |
| Gerson, Super materia celebrationis missæ, | 31 lines to the page. |
| Gerson, Alphabetum divini amoris, | 31 lines to the page. |
These form an early group by themselves, and commence on the first leaf; the second group begins with
B. Augustinus, De vita christiana and De singularitate clericorum, 1467, 28 and 27 lines to the page.
Then follows a number of tracts by Gerson and Chrysostom, all having four point holes, and all probably printed before 1470. Zel continued to print throughout the whole of the fifteenth century.
At a very early date there were a number of other printers settled at Cologne, all using types which, though easily distinguishable, are similar in appearance and of the same family; and their books have generally been ascribed to Zel. To many of them it is impossible to put a printer’s name; and certain of them have been divided into groups known by the title of the commonest book in that group which has no edition in another group. For instance, we have a certain number of books printed by the printer of the Historia Sancti Albani; another printer is known as the printer of Dictys (perhaps Arnold ther Hoernen); another as the printer of Augustinus de Fide (perhaps Goiswin Gops), and so on. No doubt, in time, when the Cologne press has been more carefully studied, the identity of some of these printers will be discovered; but at present there are a great many difficulties waiting to be cleared away.
Arnold ther Hoernen, who began to print in or before 1470, was the pioneer of several improvements. The Sermo ad populum, printed in 1470, has a title-page, and the leaves numbered in the centre of the right-hand margin; very soon after he printed a book with headlines. He printed ‘infra sedecim domos,’ and used a small neat device, of which there are two varieties, always confused. John Koelhoff, a native of Lubeck, printed at Cologne from 1472 (?) to 1493, when he died. If the date of 1472 in his Expositio Decalogi of Nider be correct, he was the first printer who used ordinary printed signatures; but the date of the book is questioned. The shapes of the capital letters in Koelhoff’s types are very distinctive; and it is curious to notice that a fount unmistakably copied from them was used by a Venetian printer named John de Colonia. Nicholas Gotz of Sletzstat, who began printing about 1470, though we find no dated book of his before 1474, and who finished in 1480, used a device engraved upon copper in the ‘manière criblée,’ or dotted style. It consists of a coat-of-arms surmounted by a helmet and crest, with his motto, ‘Sola spes mea inte virginis gratia.’ In some books we find the motto printed in a different form—‘Spes mea sola in virginis gratia.’ In 1475 was issued the Sermo de presentacione beatissime virginis Marie, the only book known containing the name of Goiswinus Gops de Euskyrchen. In 1476, Peter Bergman de Olpe and Conrad Winters de Homborch began to print, and were followed in 1477 by Guldenschaff, and in 1479 by Henry Quentell, the last named being the most important printer at Cologne during the latter years of the fifteenth century.