Books and Printing; a Treasury for Typophiles

by Unknown

Aroused by the dictionary findings, and discovering those American students of bibliography whom I consulted to be in agreement with me, I wrote to Dr. Pollard, as to a court of final appeal, to inquire if he considered it meticulous to object to the intrusion of this illogical trade definition which some dictionaries and many people are giving us. His answer, which I am allowed to quote, seems definite and wise enough to carry conviction, coming as it does from the admitted authority on the subject: "If a sufficient number of people misuse a word, Dictionaries have to record the wrong use as well as the right, as in the case of hectic and crowds of other words. But the misuse of the word colophon as a synonym for the printer's mark or device, without regard to position, has not yet gone as far as this and should be strenuously resisted. By standard use as well as by etymology, the word means the crowning stroke, or finishing touch, to a book or part of a book, and it must come at the end of the book, or part of a book, rightly to be given this title.

"In cataloguing early books it would not in my judgment be incorrect to enter the printer's device at the end of a book, under the heading colophon."

And now, the unpleasantly controversial side of the matter having been disposed of (if so large an adjective as controversial may be applied to so small a paper), let us devote our little remaining space to the colophons themselves, first turning our attention to Dr. Pollard's book,[5] with his own rendering into English of the unwieldy fifteenth-century Latin.

In the introduction, Dr. Richard Garnett gives a brief sketch of the derivation and earliest uses of the term. He quotes the Greek word colophon, the head or summit of anything, usually used in a figurative sense, the position on a crest of the City of Colophon (whence its name), the first appearance of the word in the seventeenth century, with its secondary classical sense of a "finishing stroke" or a "crowning touch," and goes on to say: "Of the use of the word colophon in the particular significance elucidated in this essay—the end or ultimate paragraph of a book or manuscript—the earliest example quoted in the New English Dictionary is from Warton's History of English Poetry published in 1774. A quarter of a century before this it is found as a term needing no explanation in the first edition of the Typographical Antiquities of Joseph Ames, published in 1749. How much older it is than this cannot lightly be determined. The bibliographical use appears to be unknown to the Greek and Latin lexicographers, medieval as well as classical. Pending further investigation, it seems not unlikely that it may have been developed out of the secondary classical sense already mentioned sometime during the seventeenth century, when the interest in bibliography which was then beginning to be felt would naturally call into existence new terms of art."

While acknowledging the great interest that many authors have found in individual colophons, Dr. Pollard states that his task is the more ambitious, if less entertaining one of making a special study of this feature in fifteenth century books with the object of ascertaining what light it throws on the history of printing, and on the habits of the early printers and publishers. His first conclusion being that colophons are the sign and evidence of the printer's pride in his work, he draws attention to the utter lack of such information as they give in the very earliest books of all, as contrasted with the self-glorification of Fust and Schöffer when, printing independently, they affixed the first known printed colophon to their Psalter of 1457 (in at least one copy accompanied by their device):

The present copy of the Psalms, adorned with beauty of capital letters, and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing, and stamping without any driving of the pen. And to the worship of God has been diligently brought to completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schöffer of Gernsheim, in the year of the Lord 1457, on the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption.

Of Peter Schöffer's later allusion to the shields of his device Dr. Pollard writes: "Needless discussions have been raised as to what was the use and import of printers' devices, and it has even been attempted to connect them with literary copyright, with which they had nothing whatever to do, literary copyright in this decade depending solely on the precarious courtesy of rival firms, or possibly on the rules of their trade-guilds. But here, on the authority of the printer who first used one, we have a clear indication of the reason which made him put his mark on a book—the simple reason that he was proud of his craftsmanship and wished it to be recognized as his. 'By signing it with his shields Peter Schöffer has brought the book to a happy completion.'"

Psalter. Mainz, Fust and Schöffer, 1457. THE FIRST PRINTED COLOPHON.