The number of copies which, according to Du Halde, a Chinese workman can print in a day, is greatly exaggerated. About four thousand, or four hundred an hour, is the utmost that the most expert workman would be able to throw off.
To the above account it may be added, that the blocks, each containing two pages, are frequently engraved on both sides; that the sheets printed are small, and impressed on one side only; and that each sheet when dry is folded back, so as to present the appearance of a leaf impressed on both sides.
The history of printing in China, and the productions of the Chinese press, are subjects which Oriental bibliographers have more or less touched upon. Interesting as they are, there will probably be no occasion to allude to them in these pages more than once again.
But the history of books in Europe, the productions of the early printers in the various countries to which they carried their art, is one to which our subject is most closely allied; and European bibliography is a study to which many men of great ability have devoted themselves during the last three centuries, in Germany, Holland, England, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, and other countries. To their labours all later writers on the subject are under manifold obligations.[8] But in attributing various undated books to one or other of the earliest established presses, guess-work, and the bias of national prejudice, have largely prevailed amongst even the most painstaking of European bibliographers. This unscientific method, long felt to be a reproach to learning and literature, has of late years been attempted to be remedied by a more close and critical examination of the Incunabula, or books printed in the Fifteenth century. “The method of arranging these early books under the countries, towns, and presses at which they were produced,” says Mr. Henry Bradshaw, the Librarian of the University of Cambridge, “is the only one which can really advance our knowledge of the subject. This is comparatively easy with dated books, though there is no safeguard against the misleading nature of an erroneous date. But the study is of little use unless the bibliographer will be content to make such an accurate and methodical study of the types used and habits of printing observable at different presses, as to enable him to observe and be guided by these characteristics in settling the date of a book which bears no date on the surface. We do not want the opinion or dictum of any bibliographer, however experienced; we desire that the types and habits of each printer should be made a special subject of study, and those points brought forward which shew changes or advance from year to year, or where practicable, from month to month. When this is done, we have to say of any dateless or falsely dated book, that it contains such and such characteristics, and we therefore place it at such a point of time, the time we name being merely another expression for the characteristics we notice in the book. In fact each press must be looked upon as a genus, and each book as a species, and our business is to trace the more or less close connection of the different members of the family, according to the characters which they present to our observation.”
The study thus defined is designated Palæotypography; and concerning it Mr. Bradshaw further says, “except Mr. Blades’s monograph of Caxton’s press,[9] the Hague Catalogus[10] and Monumens Typographiques[11] are the only books existing in any literature, so far as I know, which render the study of palæotypography in any way possible upon a proper basis. Germany, Italy, France, and Spain, are at present perfectly impracticable fields of work, and are, I fear, likely to remain so for some time to come.”[12]
Respecting Mr. Bradshaw’s own labours in this field of investigation, Mr. Frederick Müller of Amsterdam, an enthusiastic bibliographer of rare power, bears the following testimony:[13]—“Hardly anybody in England takes an interest in foreign bibliography—the only exception being that excellent bibliographer, Henry Bradshaw, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, who is examining with great enthusiasm the Incunabula Typographica, and who has lately arrived at most surprising and important results in this department.... I do not know which most to admire—the acumen of the conjectures about the places where some of the works were printed, or the clearness with which the writer treats several very difficult subjects.... This method of ascribing a work solely from the appearance of the types used, he carries to the utmost point of application.... Mr. Bradshaw is the first who turns to advantage the excellent lessons of the French and German bibliographers, and through him a new light will probably arise in English bibliography.”
To the researches of Mr. Bradshaw and Mr. Blades, and to the labours of Mr. Ottley[14] and Mr. Humphreys,[15] in their last published works, I am greatly indebted. The interesting information they have accumulated I have freely made use of in the preparation of this volume, although I differ considerably from some of the conclusions which one or other of them has arrived at.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “The multiplication of printed books and the consequent still greater multiplication of readers, created, what may be termed a literary public throughout England, and when the printed copies of a book from Caxton’s press were spread throughout this public, each member of it used a copy that was uniform with the copies used by all the rest. But before printing was known, and while copies of a book could be made in manuscript only, the transcribers were apt to introduce changes of spelling, of syntax, and of phrase, according to the dialect of the part of the country to which each copyist belonged. And the dialects of different parts of England differed then from each other in a far greater degree than any amount of variation which can at present be detected by the most zealous philologist. Moreover, each author wrote in his own dialect, or to speak more correctly, in the pure native English of his own part of England. Hence the diction of an author of those times in many cases appears to us more archaic than the diction of his contemporaries, or even of some of his predecessors. But in proportion as men of letters became familiar in their reading with the nearly uniform English language of printed books, they followed or approached that uniform English in their own writings. The language continued to receive changes by the introduction of new words and phrases, and by the zeal for imitating Latin models, which grew to excess in many of our prose writers not long after the close of the Fifteenth century. Many more modifications of etymology, and some of syntax, took place before the modern English language can be said to have been substantially established throughout the country; but that amount of uniform establishment never could have been effected at all, without the intervention and the extended use of the art of printing.”—Sir Edward S. Creasy’s History of England. 8vo. 1870. vol. ii. pp. 556–7.