Early Printed Books

by E. Gordon Duff

CHAPTER VI.

THE LOW COUNTRIES.

On no subject connected with printing has more been written, and to less purpose, than on the Haarlem invention of printing by Lourens Janszoon Coster. During the fifteenth century much had been said about the invention, accrediting it always to Germany; and it was not till 1499 that a reference was made to an earlier Dutch discovery in the following passage of the Cologne Chronicle:[27]—

‘This highly valuable art was discovered first of all in Germany, at Mentz on the Rhine. And it is a great honour to the German nation that such ingenious men are found among them. And it took place about the year of our Lord 1440; and from this time until the year 1450, the art and what is connected with it was being investigated. And in the year of our Lord 1450 it was a golden year [jubilee], and they began to print, and the first book they printed was the Bible in Latin; it was printed in a large letter, resembling the letter with which at present missals are printed. Although the art [as has been said] was discovered at Mentz, in the manner as it is now generally used, yet the first prefiguration was found in Holland [the Netherlands], in the Donatuses, which were printed there before that time. And from these Donatuses the beginning of the said art was taken, and it was invented in a manner much more masterly and subtile than this, and became more and more ingenious. One named Omnibonus wrote in a preface to the book called Quinctilianus, and in some other books too, that a Walloon from France, named Nicol. Jenson, discovered first of all this masterly art; but that is untrue, for there are those still alive who testify that books were printed at Venice before Nicol. Jenson came there and began to cut and make letters. But the first inventor of printing was a citizen of Mentz, born at Strasburg, and named Junker Johan Gutenberg. From Mentz the art was introduced first of all into Cologne, then into Strasburg, and afterwards into Venice. The origin and progress of the art was told me verbally by the honourable Master Ulrich Zell of Hanau, still printer at Cologne, anno 1499, and by whom the said art came to Cologne.’

[27]The Haarlem Legend, by Dr. Van der Linde, translated by J. H. Hessels. London, 1871, 8vo, p. 8.

This narrative, it will be seen, breaks down, if we examine its accuracy strictly, in several places. To get over this apparent difficulty, we are told that the compiler of the Chronicle took the various parts of his statement from various sources. The statement that printing was invented at Mainz, from Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493; that from 1440 to 1450 it was being investigated, is an addition of his own; that about 1450 people began to print, and that the first book printed was the Bible in Latin, was told him by Ulric Zel, and so on. But evidence which on certain points is inaccurate, cannot be implicitly trusted on other points; and since it is impossible to trust absolutely the statement of the Chronicle, we must seek information from the best source, that is, the earliest productions of the press.

Coster himself was not heard of as a printer till about a hundred years after he was supposed to have printed, when Junius wrote in his Batavia the wonderful legend of the letters cut in beech bark. That a person called Lourens Janszoon lived at Haarlem from 1436 to 1483 seems to be an established fact; but, at the same time, all the entries and notices relating to him show that he was a chandler or innkeeper. Von der Linde very justly, therefore, considers he was not a printer; and this view is certainly reasonable, for we can hardly suppose that a man could have printed all the so-called Costeriana and at the same time have attended to his business so carefully, that all the entries which relate to him speak of him only as an innkeeper, and no mention of any kind is made of him as a printer, though he was, so believers in him assert, the only printer in Holland for thirty years.

Coming to the books themselves, what do we find? The first printed date is 1473, in which year books were issued at both Utrecht and Alost. M. Holtrop mentions that the Hague copy of the Tractatus Gulielmi de Saliceto de salute corporis et animæ and Yliada was bought by a certain Abbat Conrad for the library of his house; and as the Abbat in question was Abbat only from 1471 to 1474, the book cannot have been printed later than 1471-74; and this and the rubricated 1472 in the Darmstadt copy of the Saliceto are at present the only dates which we can use for our purposes.

There are, however, a large number of fragments of books known, printed in a rude type and with the appearance of early printing, all of which are frequently asserted to have been printed before 1473. These books, consisting for the most part of editions of the Donatus or the Doctrinale, are known by the name of Costeriana, as being the supposed productions of Coster. Among them also are the four editions of the Speculum, which we have examined at length in Chapter I. Fragments of at least fifty books or editions are known, which may be separated by their types into eight groups. Concerning the types Mr. Hessels says: ‘Type 2 is inseparably connected with type 1; and as the former is so much like type 3 that some consider these two types identical, nothing would be gained by separating them. Type 4 and 5 occur in one and the same book; and as certain letters of type 5 are identical with some of type 3, they may all be linked together. Type 6 is identical with type 5 except the P, which is larger and of a different form. Types 7 and 8 are linked on to the types 1-6, on account of the great family-likeness between them, they all having that peculiar perpendicular stroke to the cross-bar of the t, and a down stroke or curl attached to the r, which is found in no other types of the Netherlands.’