THE BROTHERS OF COMMON LIFE.
[Full text]
ALBERTUS PAFFRAEJ.
| JACOB JACOBZOON VAN DER MEER. |
So far as Gouda is concerned, Gheraert or Gerard Leeu and early printing are synonymous. He was a native of this place, and established himself here as a printer in 1477 and continued up to 1484, when he removed his presses to Antwerp, where he was printing until the year of his death, 1493. His “Dialogus Creaturarum,” the first edition of which appeared in 1480, had run into over a dozen editions, in Latin or Dutch, by the first year of the sixteenth century. Whilst at Gouda Leeu used several marks, of which the smaller, given on [p. 39], was printed in red and black; at Antwerp he used a much more ambitious example, consisting of the arms of the Castle of Antwerp: a battlement and a turreted gate, with two smaller ones on either side; the two large flags bear the arms of the German Empire and of the Archduke Maximilian of Austria. Nicolas Leeu, who was printing at Antwerp in 1487–8, was possibly the brother of the more famous typographer, and his Mark consists of the lion (a pun on his surname, which is equivalent to lion) in a Gothic window holding two shields, with the arms of Antwerp on the left and the monogram of Gheraert Leeu on the right. Like Leeu and so many of the other early Dutch printers, the first Delft typographer, Jacob Jacobzoon Van der Meer, 1477–87, employed the arms of the town in which he printed on his Mark, the right shield in the present instance carrying three water-lily leaves. In 1477 he issued an edition of the Dutch Bible, and three years later the first edition of the Psalter, “Die Duytsche Souter,” which had been omitted from the Bible. The only other Delft printer to whom we need refer is Christian Snellaert, 1495–7, the only book to which he has placed both his name and his Mark being “Theobaldus Physiologus de naturis duodecim animalium,” 1495. His most remarkable production, however, is a “Missale secundum Ordinarium Trajactense,” issued about 1497; this Mark, given on [p. 35], was also used by Henri Eckert van Hombergh, who was printing at Antwerp from 1500 to 1519: the shield carries the arms of Antwerp; in the arms of Snellaert this shield is blank, and this constitutes the only difference between the two Marks.
GERARD LEEU.