With regard to the engravings in the “Poor Man’s Bible,” Ottley says (p. 87,) “the style of these cuts has considerable resemblance to that of the two Van Eycks,” and he considers that the designs in this work, together with those in the Book of Canticles, and the Mirror of Salvation, were, with the exception of the last ten cuts of the latter, the production of the same artist, or at any rate of artists of the same school; all the others being of a different style, and of inferior merit. He regrets his inability to speak with certainty upon their age, but relies upon the following note in Dr. Dibdin’s Bibliotheca Spenceriana, (vol. i. p. 4.)
“Mr. Horn, a gentleman long and well known for his familiar acquaintance with ancient books printed abroad was in possession of a copy of the Biblia Pauperum, of the Ars Moriendi, and of the Apocalypse, all bound in one volume, which volume had upon the exterior of the cover, the following words stamped at the extremity of the binding, towards the edge of the squares:—‘Hic liber Relegatus fuit per Plebanum Ecclesie—Anno Domini 142[8].’ Mr. Horn having broken up the volume and parted with its contents, was enabled to supply me with the foregoing information upon the strength of his memory alone; but he is quite confident of the three following particulars:—1, That the works, contained in this volume, were as have been just mentioned:—2, That the binding was the ancient legitimate one, and that the treatise had not been subsequently introduced into it:—and 3, That the date was 142...odd—but positively anterior to the year 1430.”
This testimony Mr. Ottley considers it ungracious to question; but “with all this,” he says, “I wish that the volume still existed entire, or that, at least, the cover had been preserved.... But, whatever the antiquity of the first block-books, which almost all writers are of opinion preceded the first attempts to print with moveable characters, it is certain, that for many years after the invention of typography, the engravers in wood continued to publish works of this kind.”[113]
The most interesting of these works is the Speculum Humanæ Salvationis, which in one of its four folio editions has the text partly in block, and thus forms a connecting link between Xylographic and Typographic printing. The whole of these four editions are thought by many to have been printed previous to Gutenberg’s first production at Mentz. They are attributed to Coster and his descendants solely on account of the obscure passage in reference to them which occurs in the narrative of Junius; and because of that reference, and their manifest superiority over others of the same class, all those which resemble them in general appearance and style of types, and that have neither initial, date, name or place, to indicate by whom and when and where they were printed, are in like manner claimed as the product of Coster’s Press, by every writer who from the days of Meerman to the present, has advocated the pretensions of Haarlem in opposition to those of Mentz to be the seat of the origin of the Typographic Art.[114]
Of these four editions, the first and third, says Ottley, are those in the Latin language; the second and fourth those in Dutch. The engravings are the same in each; but differences exist in the texts; and it is on the assumption that the text was printed previous to taking the impressions of the cuts, that he deduces the order of the editions from the condition and appearance of the cuts. According to this arrangement, the text of the second edition is printed with the same type that was used in the first, with the exception of two pages containing cuts 45 and 56, the type of which is inferior to that of the rest of the book. In the third edition (the second Latin) twenty pages of the text are engraved on solid blocks. The types of the text of the fourth edition, although similar in appearance to those of the three preceding, are somewhat smaller and coarser.[115]
To account for these differences, Mr. Ottley has framed a theory which exactly fits the narrative given by Junius, viz:—that while the second edition (the first Dutch) was in progress and nearly finished, the original printer died and his types were stolen, which compelled his successor, who was unable to replace the original types, either to use some older discarded ones, or to avail himself of a supply of an inferior description in order to finish it; that while the first Dutch edition was in progress a second Latin one was demanded, to meet which, and to bring both the Dutch and the Latin out as quick as possible, the wood engraver was employed to make fac-similes of the texts of 20 pages; and that for the fourth edition, an old inferior fount was used. And upon this theory he says, (p. 298,) “I am of opinion that the concluding passage of his (Junius’s) narrative, wherein, upon the authority of Nicholas Galius and Quirinus Talesius, he relates the story of the robbery which they had formerly more than once heard from the mouth of Old Cornelius the book-binder, who in his youth had lived in the service of the printer who was robbed, merits to be considered as one of the best attested accounts that we possess respecting the early history of typography.”!
But Messrs. Berjeau, Bernard,[116] Paiele,[117] and Humphreys, who have also made the Speculum a special subject of study, do not admit the assumption that the text was printed before the cuts; they adduce good arguments to shew that the impressions of the cuts might have been, and probably were, rubbed off before the text was printed; and the character of the Gothic framework of the cuts that surmount the pages with solid text, being much plainer than that in those where moveable type is used, affords strong ground for the belief that the edition in which they occur was the first instead of the third; the first, that is, that was issued in a completed form; for there can be no doubt but that the splendid copy owned by the late J. B. Inglis, Esq., was the first as regards the impression of the cuts,—the body of some of the scrolls in that copy having been left untouched by the wood engraver, while in all others it is cut away. This peculiarity it was that led Mr. Ottley to the belief that it was the first completed edition, both as regards cuts and texts; while Mr. Humphreys, with more reason on his side, considers that the edition with the twenty pages of xylographic text was the first. “The execution of the subjects,” he says, (p. 60,) “is not equal to those of some of the pages with the typographic text, and there is no foliage in the architectural spandrils. This may serve to prove that the entirely xylographic pages were older than the typographic ones; and that only a few of the best of them were used in the edition which has typographic texts to most of the illustrations.”[118] The conclusion to which these writers have come, upsets Mr. Ottley’s theory, and renders nugatory his opinion, that Junius’s story of the thief “is one of the best attested accounts that we possess respecting the early history of typography.”
The weight which is attached to Mr. Ottley’s deliverances on the subjects upon which he has written, (and particularly in regard to the Speculum, to which four chapters of his work are devoted,) makes it necessary to consider with care whatever he advances upon matters wherein he is largely quoted as an authority by those who have not had similar opportunities for examining the documents upon which he bases his conclusions; and as he does not scruple to denounce those as sophists whose arguments run counter to his own, and to triumphantly expose any slips or inconsistencies which he can detect in the writings of those to whom he opposes himself, it will be well to see whether he is himself free from the failings he so ruthlessly exposes in others. On the question of the separable types which were used in the various editions of the Speculum, I shall therefore give his argument entire. He first says—“this type appears to have been formed upon the exact model of the genuine black letter, commonly used from an early period in Holland, and which is of almost constant occurrence in old Dutch manuscript Missals, and other books of prayer. It is similar, in the forms and joinings of the letters, and in the contractions used in it, to what we often find in the most highly embellished books of devotion of the fourteenth century ... this broad-faced type, this genuine black-letter, is a characteristic of early Dutch typography. This, indeed, is now so generally acknowledged by Bibliographers, that it is unnecessary to insist upon it further; as every judge of old printing will at once declare, upon looking at the Speculum, that the type it is printed with, is Dutch type.” To all which a ready assent may be given. He proceeds as follows:—
“Any person at all conversant with printing, upon first viewing the Speculum, naturally determines that, except the twenty pages of block-printing, so often noticed, in one of the Latin editions, it was printed with cast metal types. Upon an attentive examination of a page, however, he discovers small, but yet, sometimes, very evident variations of form in different specimens of the same letter, which it appears difficult to account for: he finds, perhaps, by measurement, that the same word, although spelt exactly in the same manner, does not always occupy the same space; he is induced perhaps, to hesitate as to the correctness of his first judgment, and to suspect that the type was prepared by the painful and tedious operation of cutting each individual character on a separate piece of metal by the hand.
“If he embrace the latter opinion, he finds, in the work before him, ample cause to admire the invincible patience, the skill, and the exactness of the artist, who could succeed, not only in giving to the sculptured characters that general uniformity of appearance, which at first occasioned him to consider them as cast type; but even so strict a resemblance between perhaps a dozen specimens of the same letter in the first six lines of a page, as to baffle the exertions of the most correct eye to detect any sensible difference between them, except such as must necessarily occur even in the ordinary method of printing with cast type; either in consequence of one letter happening to have been more used and worse than another, more charged with printing ink, or from an irregularity not unfrequent in ordinary presswork, forced deeper into the paper than the rest.”
Having been “conversant with printing” for more than forty years, during thirty-two of which I have been constantly engaged in superintending the passing of works through the press, and in the general management of extensive private and public printing establishments, and having besides a practical knowledge of the arts of wood-engraving, stereotyping, and type-founding, I must own, that the impression made on my mind upon examining the fac-similes of the Speculum given in Wetter’s, Ottley’s, and Humphreys’ books, was, that the separable types used in printing that work were cut in wood, and were not made of cast metal; and the longer I have studied the subject, the more satisfied I am, that Meerman was right in rejecting the opinion of Enschedé,[119] who was strenuously opposed to the idea of wooden types having been used. The eye that has been trained to trace out and instantly detect the most minute differences in the shapes of letters of different founts of the same sized types, from the largest of those ordinarily used in book-work to the smallest employed in newspapers,—to mark out for correction n’s and p’s and q’s that have been turned upside down in order to serve for u’s and d’s and b’s, and vice versâ, as well as to reverse turned s’s and o’s—all common enough occurrences with careless compositors, and which only practised eyes can detect;—the eye of a “reader” who has had only a few years’ experience of such work cannot but note the multitudinous differences, the variations in shape externally and internally, of specimens of the same letters which occur in every line of the fac-simile pages of the Speculum given in the books quoted; and which cannot be accounted for by one being more worn than another, or more or less charged with ink, or more deeply pressed into the paper than the rest. Such imperfections are of a totally different character, and produce appearances altogether dissimilar to those which distinguish the different specimens of the same letters in the same lines of the Speculum one from the other. Looked at through a magnifying glass, these differences are of course much more easily discernible, and as they are of precisely the same kind that are found in the letters in the solid xylographic blocks, the conviction finally forces itself upon the mind, that such types could not have been cast, but must have been cut, and cut in wood. In an examination of this nature, the letters of a single page, or at the most those of the two pages of a single sheet, are all that can be attended to; for in their early efforts, the oldest printers usually printed but one small folio page, and seldom if ever more than two such pages at a time; and when as many copies as were wanted were struck off, the types were broken up for the next page, or two, and so on until the work in hand was completed. The types therefore that were used in the two pages first printed would constantly recur in all the following pages; and it is principally owing to this recurrence of particular letters bearing on their faces some special peculiarity, that the fact is detected that such ancient books as the Speculum are printed with moveable letters. Mr. Ottley goes on:—