As a printer Froben was distinguished by the singular beauty of his roman type, the perfection of his presswork, and the artistic decoration of his books. In this last respect he was much indebted to the genius of Hans Holbein, whom he discovered as a young wood-engraver seeking work as Basel. With that keen eye for unrecognized genius which marked his career he employed Holbein to design borders and initials for his books. Later, with an equally sagacious and generous spirit, perceiving that the young artist was too great a man to spend his days in a printing office, he procured for him through Sir Thomas More an introduction to the court of Henry VIII, where he won fame and fortune as a portrait painter. I narrate the incident because it illustrates a very attractive and amiable aspect of some of these men of the Renaissance, an uncalculating and generous desire to help gifted men to find their true place in the world where they might do their largest work. This, in an age when competition and jealous rivalry in public and in private life was as common as it is now, may give pause to the cynic and joy to the lover of human kindness.
ANTON KOBERGER
(No printer's mark known)
We are in a different world when we turn to the fourth of our five representative printers, Anton Koberger, of Nuremberg. During the forty years of his career as a publisher, between 1473 and 1513, he issued 236 separate works, most of them in several volumes, and of the whole lot none show any taint of reforming zeal. Koberger was a loyal Catholic, and his published books were largely theological and all strictly orthodox in nature. He is distinguished in two respects from the other German printers of his time, the time between the death of Gutenberg and the rise of Martin Luther. In the first place his work showed great typographical excellence, with many fonts of handsome Gothic type and a lavish use of woodcut illustrations. In the second place, his publishing business was far better organized, far more extensive in its selling and distributing machinery, than that of any other printer in Europe. We learn that he had agents not only in every German city, but in the very headquarters of his greatest competitors at Paris, Venice, and Rome, and in such more distant places as Vienna, Buda-Pesth, and Warsaw. The twenty-four presses in his own Nuremberg establishment were not sufficient for his enormous business, and he let out printing jobs on contract or commission to printers at Strasburg, Basel, and elsewhere. The true German spirit of discipline appears in a contemporary account of his printing plant at Nuremberg. He had more than a hundred workmen there, including not only compositors, pressmen, and proof-readers, but binders, engravers, and illuminators. All these were fed by their employer in a common dining-hall apart from the works, and we are told that they marched between the two buildings three times a day with military precision.
Koberger employed for a time the services of Albrecht Dürer, the famous engraver, not only for the illustration of books but also for expert oversight of the typographical form. Typography in its golden age was rightly regarded not as a mere mechanical trade but as an art of design, a design in black upon white, in which the just proportion of columns and margins and titles and initials was quite as important as the illustrations. Perhaps Koberger found Dürer too independent or too expensive for his taste, for we find him in his later illustrated works employing engravers more prolific than expert. Such were Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, who drew and engraved the two thousand illustrations in the famous Nuremberg Chronicle published by Koberger in 1493. This remarkable work was compiled by Doctor Hartman Schedel, of Nuremberg. It is a history of the world from the creation down to 1493, with a supplement containing a full illustrated account of the end of the world, the Millennium, and the last judgment. This is by no means all. There is combined with this outline of history, not less ambitious though perhaps not more eccentric than H. G. Wells's latest book, a gazetteer of the world in general and of Europe in particular, a portrait gallery of all distinguished men from Adam and Methuselah down to the reigning emperor, kings, and pope of 1493, with many intimate studies of the devil, and a large variety of rather substantial and Teutonic angels. Every city in Europe is shown in a front elevation in which the perspective reminds one of Japanese art, and the castle-towers and bridges and river-boats all bear a strong family resemblance. The book is full of curious material, quite apart from the quaint illustrations. In the midst of grave affairs of state we run across a plague of locusts, an eclipse of the sun, or a pair of lovers who died for love. Scandalous anecdotes of kings and priests jostle the fiercest denunciations of heretics and reformers. A page is devoted to the heresies of Wyclif and Huss. Anti-Semitism runs rampant through its pages. Various detailed accounts are given of the torture and murder of Christian boys by Jews, followed by the capture and burning alive of the conspirators. Superstition and intolerance stand side by side with a naive mystical piety and engaging stories of the saints and martyrs. Of all the vast transformation in human thought that was then taking form in Italy, of all the forward-looking signs of the times, there is little trace. From 1493 to the last dim ages of the expiring world, the downfall of Antichrist and the setting up of the final kingdom of heaven upon earth, seemed but a little way to Hartman Schedel, when he wrote with much complacence the colophon to this strange volume. He left three blank leaves between 1493 and the Day of Judgment whereon the reader might record what remained of human history. It is indeed rather the last voice of the middle ages than the first voice of the Renaissance that speaks to us out of these clear, black, handsome pages that were pulled damp from the press four hundred and twenty-eight years ago on the fourth of last June. At first reading one is moved to mirth, then to wonder, then perhaps to disgust, but last of all to the haunting melancholy of Omar the tent-maker when he sings
"When you and I behind the veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the world shall last."
As to worthy Hartman Schedel, God rest his soul, one wonders whether he has yet learned that Columbus discovered America. He had not yet heard of it when he finished his book, though Columbus had returned to Spain three months before. O most lame and impotent conclusion! But the fifteenth century, though it had an infinite childlike curiosity, had no nose for news. Nuremberg nodded peacefully on while a new world loomed up beyond the seas, and studied Michael Wolgemut's picture of Noah building the ark while Columbus was fitting out the Santa Maria for a second voyage. Such is mankind, blind and deaf to the greatest things. We know not the great hour when it strikes. We are indeed most enthralled by the echoing chimes of the romantic past when the future sounds its faint far-off reveille upon our unheeding ears. The multitude understands noon and night; only the wise man understands the morning.
