It was then they printed the “Psalmorum Codex” (Collection of Psalms), the earliest book bearing their names, and which fixed, in a manner, for the first time, a date for the new art they had so much improved. The colophon, or inscription at the end of the “Psalmorum Codex,” announces that the book was executed “without the help of the pen, by an ingenious process, in the year of our Lord, 1457.”
This magnificent Psalter, which went through three editions without any considerable alterations being made in it in the space of thirty-three years, is a large in-folio volume of one hundred and seventy-five leaves, printed in red and black characters, imitated from those used in the liturgical manuscripts of the fifteenth century. There exists, however, of the rarest edition of this book but six or seven copies on vellum ([Fig. 396]).
From this period printing, instead of concealing itself, endeavoured, on the contrary, to make itself generally known. But it does not as yet seem to have occurred to any one that it could be applied to the reproduction of other books than Bibles, psalters, and missals, because these were the only books that commanded a quick and extensive sale. Fust and Schœffer then undertook the printing of a voluminous work, which served as a liturgical manual to the whole of Christendom, the celebrated “Rationale Divinorum Officiorum” (“Manual of Divine Offices”), by William Durand, Bishop of Mende, in the thirteenth century. It suffices to glance over this “Rationale,” and to compare it with the coarse “Specula” printed in Holland, to be convinced that in the year 1459 printing had reached the highest degree of perfection. This edition, dated from Mayence (Moguntiæ), was no longer intended for a small number of buyers; it was addressed to the entire Catholic world, and copies of it on vellum and on paper were disseminated so rapidly over the whole of Europe as to cause the belief, thenceforward, that printing was invented at Mayence.
Fig. 396.—Fac-simile of a page of the Psalter of 1459, second edition, or the second copy that was struck off. Printed at Mayence, by J. Fust and P. Schœffer.
The fourth work printed by Fust and Schœffer, and dated 1460, is the collection of the Constitutions of Pope Clement V., known by the name of “Clementines”—a large in-folio in double columns, having superb initial letters painted in gold and colours in the small number of copies still extant.
But Gutenberg, though deprived of his typographic apparatus, had not renounced the art of which he considered himself, and with reason, the principal inventor. He was, above all, anxious to prove himself as capable as his former partners of producing books “without the help of the pen.” He formed a new association, and fitted up a printing-office which, we know by tradition, was actively at work till 1460, the year wherein appeared the “Catholicon” (a kind of encyclopædia of the thirteenth century), by John Balbi, of Genoa, the only important work the printing of which can be attributed to Gutenberg ([Fig. 397]), and which can bear comparison with the editions of Fust and Schœffer. Gutenberg, who had imitated the Dutch “Donati” and “Specula,” doubtless felt a repugnance at appropriating to himself the credit of an invention he had only improved; accordingly, in the long and explicit anonymous inscription placed at the end of the volume, he attributed to God alone the glory of this divine invention, declaring that the “Catholicon” had been printed without the assistance of reed, stylus, or pen, but by a marvellous combination of points, matrices, and letters.
Fig. 397.—Fac-simile of the “Catholicon” at 1460, printed at Mayence by Gutenberg.