THE CONNOISSEUR’S LIBRARY
GENERAL EDITOR: CYRIL DAVENPORT

FINE BOOKS

FINE BOOKS

BY

ALFRED W. POLLARD

NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

LONDON: METHUEN & CO. LTD.
1912

TO
SIR EDWARD MAUNDE THOMPSON, G.C.B.
DIRECTOR AND PRINCIPAL LIBRARIAN OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
1888-1909

PREFACE

If the mere taking of trouble ensured good work, this contribution to the Connoisseur’s Library should be entitled to the modest praise of being “superior to the rest” of its author’s book-makings, since it has been ten years on the stocks and much of it has been written two or three times over, either because the writer’s own information had increased or to take account of the successful researches of others. Yet in the end defeat in one main point has to be acknowledged. The book was begun with a confident determination to cover the whole ground, from the beginnings of printing and printed book-illustration down to our own day, and in the case of printing the survey has been carried through, however sketchily. But the corresponding survey of book-illustration ends, with rather obvious marks of compression and fatigue, about 1780, leaving the story of a hundred and thirty years of very interesting picture-work untold. Pioneering is always so exciting that recognition of the impossibility of carrying out the full plan of the book within the limits either of the present volume or of the author’s working life was not made without sincere regret. The subject, however, of the abandoned chapter was not only very large, but very miscellaneous, and the survey for it would have had to include at least three other countries (France, Germany, and the United States) besides our own. To one section, moreover, that of illustrations in colour, a separate volume of this series has already been devoted. The author would, therefore, fain console himself with the hope that in one or more other volumes a competent account may be given by some other hand of the wood-engravings, etchings, steel-engravings, and lithographs, with which books have been decorated since 1780. The poorness of paper and print with which these modern illustrated books have too often been handicapped has caused collectors to take little interest in them—it even suggested the unworthy excuse for the failure to write the missing chapter that these are not really Fine Books, but only books with fine pictures in them, and so are outside our subject. But both students and collectors have their duties as well as their delights, and in view of the high artistic value of quite a large proportion of these modern illustrations, the preservation of clean and uncropped copies of the books in which they occur and the tribute of careful cataloguing and description are certainly their due.

While the desired completeness has not been attained the ground here covered is still very wide, and for the book as a whole no more can be claimed than that it is a compilation from the best sources—a list of these will be found in the Bibliography—controlled by some personal knowledge, the amount of which naturally varies very much from chapter to chapter. The obligations incurred in writing it have thus been great, and a sad number of these are to fellow-workers and friends—Proctor, John Macfarlane, W. H. Allnutt, Konrad Burger, Dr. Lippmann, Anatole Claudin, and the Prince d’Essling—who have died while the book has been in progress. Among those still happily alive acknowledgment must specially be made to Sir Sidney Colvin for help received from his masterly introduction to the great monograph on Early Engravers and Engraving in England published by the Trustees of the British Museum; to Mr. A. M. Hind for use made of the list of engravers and their works in the same book; to Mr. Campbell Dodgson for dippings into the wealth of information in his Catalogue of German and Flemish Woodcuts in the Print Room of the British Museum (Vols. I and II); to Mr. Gordon Duff for help derived from his three series of Sandars Lectures on English Printing, and to Mr. Evans for information obtained from his American Bibliography. Among other obligations the chief is to the writers (notably Mr. H. R. Plomer) of numerous papers contributed to the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society and to The Library, and these are acknowledged with special pleasure.

A. W. P.

CONTENTS

LIST OF PLATES

FINE BOOKS

CHAPTER I

COLLECTORS AND COLLECTING

From the stray notes which have come down to us about the bibliophiles of the later Roman Empire it is evident that book-collecting in those days had at least some modern features. Owing to the abundance of educated slave-labour books were very cheap, almost as cheap as they are now, and book-collectors could busy themselves about refinements not unlike those in which their successors are now interested. But in the Middle Ages books were by no means cheap, and until quite the close of the fourteenth century there were few libraries in which they could be read. Princes and other very wealthy book-buyers took pleasure in possessing finely written and illuminated manuscripts, but the ruling ideals were mainly literary and scholastic, the aim (the quite right and excellent aim) being to have the best books in as many subjects as possible. After printing had been invented the same ideals continued in force, the only difference being that they could now be carried out on a larger scale. Libraries like those formed in the sixteenth century by Archbishop Cranmer and Lords Arundel and Lumley, or that gathered in France by the historian De Thou, were essentially students’ libraries, and the books themselves and the catalogues of them were often classified so as to show what books had been acquired in all the different departments of human knowledge. Even in the sixteenth century, when these literary ideals were dominant, we find some examples of another kind. In Jean Grolier, for instance, we find the book-lover playing the part, too seldom assumed, of the discriminating patron of contemporary printing and bookbinding. Instead of collecting more old books than he could find time to read, Grolier bought the best of his own day, but of these sometimes as many as four or five copies of the same work that he might have no difficulty in finding one for a friend; and whatever book he bought he had bound and decorated with simple good taste in Venice or at home in France. It would be an excellent thing if more of our modern collectors, instead of taking up antiquarian hobbies, were content to follow Grolier’s example. Books always look best when clad in jackets of their own time, and this in the future will apply to the books of the twentieth century as much as to any others. Moreover, there is more actual binding talent available in England just now than at any previous time, and it is much to be desired that modern Groliers would give it scope, not in pulling about old books, but in binding beautifully those of our own day.

Grolier found a modest imitator in England in the person of Thomas Wotton, but with some at least of the Elizabethan book-lovers the havoc wrought in the old libraries by the commissioners of Henry VIII and Edward VI provoked an antiquarian reaction which led them to devote all their energies to collecting, from the unworthy hands into which they had fallen, such treasures of English literary and bookish art as still remained. Putting aside John Leland who worked (to what extent and with what success is not quite clear) for Henry VIII, Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, was the earliest of these antiquaries, to the great benefit of the libraries of Lambeth Palace and of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, though as to how he came by his books perhaps the less said the better. Parker was soon followed by Sir Robert Cotton, whose success in gathering books and documents illustrating English history was so great that his library was sequestered and very nearly altogether taken from him, on the plea that it contained state papers which no subject had a right to possess. Owing to the carelessness and brutality of the previous generation, Cotton’s opportunities were as great as his zeal in making use of them, and at the cost of his fortune he laid the foundations of a national library. Humbler men imitated him without being able to secure the same permanence for their collections, more especially Humphrey Dyson, a notary, who seems to have acquired early printed books and proclamations, with the same zeal which Cotton devoted to manuscripts. Many of his treasures passed into the hands of Richard Smith, the Secondary of the Poultry Compter, but at his sale they were scattered beyond recall, and the unity of one of the most interesting of English collections was thus unkindly destroyed. Both these men, and some others of whom even less is known, worked with a public aim, and already Sir Thomas Bodley had gone a step further by founding anew the University Library at Oxford on lines which at once gave it a national importance. This it preserved and developed for over a century and a half, and has never since lost, though no national help, unfortunately, has ever been given it, save the right already conceded by the Stationers’ Company, of claiming a copy of any new English book offered for sale.

Bodley’s munificent donation marked an epoch in the history of English book-collecting because its tendency was to make private book-collecting of the kind which was then admired incongruous and even absurd. When there were no public libraries open to scholars, for a great man to maintain a splendid library in his own house and allow students to read in it was worthy of Aristotle’s μεγαλόψυχος, the man who does everything on a scale that befits his dignity. But in proportion as public collections of books and facilities for obtaining access to them are increased, the preservation of a library on a large scale in a private house, where none of the inmates have any desire to use it, becomes an easy and justifiable object of satire. A man without literary instincts who inherits a fine library is indeed in a parlous state, for if he keeps it he is as a dog in the manger, and if he sells it he is held up to opprobrium.

That considerations of this kind were beginning to have weight is shown by the rapidity with which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one private collection after another drifted into public ownership. In some cases there were intermediate stages. Thus Archbishop Usher’s books were not bequeathed to Trinity College, Dublin, but were purchased for it by the subscriptions of the soldiers of Cromwell’s army in Ireland. The manuscripts of Sir Simeon d’Ewes remained in the possession of his family for nearly a century, were then purchased by Harley, and came to the British Museum with Harley’s collection. Stillingfleet’s manuscripts were in the same temporary ownership; his printed books came to Dublin through the public spirit of Archbishop Marsh. So again Bishop Moore’s books were purchased for the University Library at Cambridge by George I. Thus even when a collector was not inspired by, or could not afford to indulge, public motives, respect for his memory or desire to benefit an institution often brought his books to a safe haven. But more often the munificence was personal and direct. For some cause not quite easy to see the flow of benefactions to English libraries has dwindled sadly of late years,[1] so that journalists with short memories write of gifts and bequests to American libraries as if they were unprecedented. Even of late years, however, the foundation of the John Rylands Library, Chancellor Christie’s gifts and bequest to the Victoria University, the Sandars legacy to the University Library, Cambridge, and Mr. Alfred Huth’s bequest to the British Museum of any fifty books it might choose to select from his fine collection, show that the stream is not quite dried up, while for nearly two centuries and a half from the foundation of the Bodleian it ran with splendid freedom. Thus Archbishop Williams gave noble gifts of books to S. John’s College, Cambridge, and to the Chapter House Library at Westminster Abbey; Selden’s books enriched the Bodleian; Laud was a generous benefactor alike to the Bodleian, to S. John’s College, Oxford, and to the library of Lambeth Palace; Sir Kenelm Digby gave both to Bodley and to Harvard; Ralph Sheldon benefited the Heralds’ College; Pepys (through his nephew) bequeathed his collection to Magdalene College, Cambridge; Archbishop Marsh founded a library at Dublin; Richard Rawlinson gave his manuscripts to the Bodleian, and Harley arranged that his should be offered to the nation.

The example of the men who bought under the influence of an intention to bestow their books on some public institution naturally affected others, and was responsible for a good deal of rather haphazard collecting in the eighteenth century. The private modern library was often confused with the antiquarian collection, and the antiquarian collection itself was seldom dominated by any central idea. Yet collectors who devoted themselves to one subject and knew thoroughly well what they were aiming at were already coming into existence, and these also, when their work was done, were inspired by an honourable ambition to preserve it intact, and so the libraries were once more enriched. Thus Garrick, guided by his professional interest, devoted himself to early plays, and bequeathed his collection to the British Museum. Malone bought the books which were useful to him as a student of Elizabethan literature, more especially of Shakespeare, and bequeathed them to the Bodleian, while Capell left his similar collection to Trinity College, Cambridge. The library of Natural History books brought together by Sir Joseph Banks and bequeathed by him to the British Museum is another example of well-defined collecting, though of a different sort. Among men who were not themselves specialists the vogue lay in the direction of first editions of the Greek and Latin classics and of a few Italian and English authors of special merit, together with books illustrating the history of printing down to about the year 1480 or 1485. The early classics seem to have been the indispensable element in any collection of the first rank, and they appear with monotonous regularity in the libraries of George III, of the Rev. Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode, and of Thomas Grenville, which all three passed to the British Museum; in the Spencer Collection, now in the John Rylands Library, Manchester; and in the Sunderland Library, sold at auction in 1881-3. When these prizes were secured the collector seems to have felt himself free to follow his individual taste in supplementary purchases, and the Grenville Library is a fine proof of the broader interests of its possessor. Two notable collectors, Heber, the last of the great book-gluttons, and William Henry Miller, founder of the famous Christie-Miller Library at Britwell, cut themselves free from the cult of the editio princeps, the latter (despite a taste for modern Latin verse) devoting himself to English poetry, while Heber added to this the literatures of France, Italy, and Spain.

Despite the exceptions we have mentioned, in almost all of the collections of the early years of the nineteenth century two different ideals were combined: the student’s ideal of the best books in the best editions, and the antiquary’s ideal of the books by which the history of printing and its kindred arts could be most vividly illustrated. The combination is still common, for one of à Beckett’s comic histories (though I am not prepared to assert that this is a “best book”) still figures as the first entry in many sale catalogues which contain also incunabula assuredly not bought for their literary interest. It is more easy to defend such a medley on the ground of sentiment than of logic. Whoever uses books has reason to be grateful to the men who invented or diffused the art of printing, and may be interested in learning something about them. Yet it can hardly be denied that to collect various kinds of books from an antiquarian, æsthetic, or any other well-defined point of view, not directly literary, is an independent pursuit in its own right, just as to collect old or beautiful china or silver is an independent pursuit, whether or no the china or silver be used for eating or drinking from. It will be said, of course, that on this view books are no better than china (or postage stamps), and there are indeed some strange instances of men who have fallen below their possibilities and have collected books, and not without success, despite a most amazing indifference to their contents. This reduces the joy they can get from their hobby to the bare pleasure of collecting for the sake of collecting, an ignoble delight in indulging acquisitiveness, redeemed to some extent by the higher pleasure of overcoming difficulties and observing the rules of the game. But the ignorant book-collector, until he has educated himself, is like a rose-fancier who cannot distinguish one odour from another. By the time they attract the collector books have become, or are on the road to becoming, so precious that their primary usefulness has to be left dormant. To use them constantly for our daily reading would approach the fault which the Greeks called ὔβρις, the arrogance which makes a man esteem himself so highly that he thinks nothing too good for his own use. But even when this limitation is recognized, for those who can appreciate them they preserve all the associations of their primary use, and it is because these associations are so delightful and so various that the bookman claims that his form of collecting is the best of all.

What then are the associations and qualities which give books value in the eyes of a collector? We may answer the question negatively in the first instance by reducing to their proper importance the two qualities which are popularly supposed to be the most attractive to the book-hunter—rarity and age. If a book is otherwise uninteresting, what is it the better for being rare? In passing it may be noted that unless a book is interesting for other reasons its rarity is necessarily an unknown quantity. Sir Sidney Lee’s Census of the extant copies of the First Folio Shakespeare, a comparatively common book, but of supreme interest for its associations, is a striking example of the zeal with which every discoverable copy of a valuable book is now hunted down. Those whose business it is to gather such information can tell in the case of dozens of books of much less importance exactly how many copies have been discovered and in whose possession they remain. But in the case of a book of little interest the most that can be said is that it is “undescribed,” and it may be “undescribed” not in the least because it is really rare, but because no bibliographer has troubled himself to make a note of it. Were some real point of interest discovered in it the chances are that the attention thus attracted would speedily bring to light other copies, as in the case of the school magazine to which Mr. Kipling was found to have contributed. Of this the first set catalogued sold for over £100, with the result that so many others were unearthed that the price speedily sank to less than as many shillings.

Granted, however, that it could be proved that a dull book is not merely undescribed, but absolutely, what so few works are, unique, in what way does this make it of interest to the collector? A great library might buy it for a trifle out of compassion, or under the idea that its registration in a catalogue might help to piece out a genealogy, or that it might count as another unit in statistics (a poor reason), or justify its purchase in some other haphazard way. But considerations of this kind, such as they are, cannot affect private collectors. A really dull book is merely a nuisance, and whether only one copy of it, or many, can be proved to exist, nobody wants it. If this be so we are justified in saying that, although as soon as a book is found desirable for any other reason its rarity becomes of paramount importance in determining its price, Rarity by itself is of no interest to collectors.

The attractiveness bestowed by Age cannot be treated quite so summarily, because although the same line of argument can be followed, it has to be helped out by an explanation arising from a particular case. No collector would value a dull sermon printed in 1800 any higher than a dull sermon printed in 1900, and if we go back two centuries instead of one, in the case of a book printed in London its value is none the greater for the extra hundred years. If, however, the sermon chanced to have been printed in 1700 in some provincial town, its age would distinctly be an element of value. Down to 1693 printing was only permitted in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and (after the outbreak of the Civil War[2]) at York. When the restraining Act was dropped in 1693 printing made its way, not very rapidly, into one provincial town after another. Hence a dull sermon with a provincial imprint may be dear to the heart of some local antiquary as the first-fruit of the press in his neighbourhood.

If we go back another sixty years from 1700 we reach another typographic zone, as we may call it, within which some slight interest attaches to all examples of English printing, for the end of the year 1640 is the limit of the special catalogues of early books published by the British Museum, the Cambridge University Library, and the John Rylands Library, Manchester. The first and last of these have indexes of printers; in the second the primary arrangement is typographical. Thus all books which are old enough to have been printed before the end of 1640 are thereby invested with some slight interest solely as products of English presses. When we get back to before 1600 we are in the period covered by the different editions of the Typographical Antiquities of Joseph Ames. When we go back another hundred years we are within the fifteenth century; printing has been introduced into England for less than twenty-five years, and the smallest fragment of a book from one of the early presses at work at Westminster, Oxford, St. Albans, or the City of London, is esteemed as of interest and importance.

Thus if we go far enough back Age does add to the interest of a book, but only by bringing it under another influence, that the interest of an English fifteenth century book is due to its importance in the history of printing and not to its antiquity being easily demonstrated by the fact that a contemporary unadorned manuscript of the same work will probably have only a fraction of the value of the printed edition. There are, of course, other cases in which age may be said to have some secondary influence, as in the case of books dealing with social customs, ballads and the like. But here it is still more evident that the social or literary interest is the primary consideration, and that this cannot be created, though it is greatly enhanced, by Age.

Having thus to the best of our ability abated the pride both of Age and Rarity, we come back to our original question as to what are the qualities and associations which give books value in the eyes of a collector.

The only good qualities which a book can possess in its own right are those of strength and beauty of form. Everything else about it is inherent in no single edition, though association of ideas may give greater dignity to one edition than to another. Type, paper, ink, presswork, the arrangement of the page, and also (though not quite in the same way or to the same extent) the illustrations, are all part and parcel of the book itself, and may be combined, at least so bookmen believe, in a really beautiful unity. No doubt as to this students run some risk of losing their sense of proportion. I myself am conscious, for instance, that I have looked at so many fifteenth century woodcuts, as compared with other works of art, that I distinctly overrate them. Mr. Robert Proctor, who knew more about fifteenth century books than any other man has ever known, or is ever likely to know, once said to me in all seriousness, that he did not think he had ever seen an ugly one. Allowing, however, for this very human tendency to set up our own esoteric standard, there yet remains a more generally recognizable beauty of form which some books possess in a higher degree than others, and to collect such beautiful books independently of any other kind of attraction would be no unworthy pursuit. As a matter of fact, bookmen are more inclined to make beauty of form a secondary consideration to which, as to age and rarity, they pay attention, but without adopting it as the basis of their collection.

As a secondary consideration the attention collectors pay to beauty can hardly be exaggerated in respect to the condition of copies, the ratio of an unusually good to an unusually bad copy of the same book, even if the bad copy have no leaves actually wanting, being often as ten to one. The unusually bad copy, indeed, would often have no selling value at all were it not that it may be useful to students and so win a purchaser at a small price. The collector should leave it severely alone, partly because such “working copies” are the rightful perquisite of poor scholars, partly because, as he presumably buys books for his pleasure, he defeats his own object if, except in the case of the very rarest, he buys copies at which he cannot look without regretting that their headlines are cut off or the paper rotten through bad cleaning. Mr. Frederick Locker recorded in his catalogue that his copy of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience had been cut down by a previous owner to the dimensions of the old covers of a washing-book. I think it was his chivalry, his piety toward Blake’s memory, that induced him to rescue it from this dishonour. Had he bought such a poor copy simply because it was cheap, he would have fallen far below his standard as a collector.

Putting on one side beauty of form, the interest of books in the eyes of a collector lies in their associations, historical, personal, or purely literary. For reasons touched on already but which we may now consider more fully, among historical associations those connected with the history of printing fill a very large place. As we have said before, the invention of an art by which books were so greatly cheapened and multiplied was an event of almost unique importance in the social history of Europe, and everything which throws light on the first discovery, on the manner in which it was carried from one country and city to another, and on the methods and lives of the early printers, is of interest, and in its degree and measure, of importance. Moreover, just as foxes are hunted because they show such good sport, so these early books are collected because the study of them combines in a singular degree the charms of scientific and historical discovery, with all sorts of literary, social, and human side-interests. The claim which Henry Bradshaw put forward that antiquarian bibliography must be studied scientifically has been perverted by the unwise into the assertion that bibliography is a Science, or as they are sometimes pleased to put it, an Exact Science, till sensible people are wearied of the silly phrase. But the claim itself is absolutely true, and the gifts which enabled Mr. Proctor to classify, exactly or approximately, any fragment of early printing according to its country, place, printer, and date, if employed on any other field of scientific inquiry would easily have gained him a Fellowship of the Royal Society, besides the European recognition which, in his own small field, was already his before he died.

A large proportion of early printed books are without any indication whatever of their place of origin, printer, or date. The dates are obscured by the quickness or slowness of individual printers in adopting various improvements—sheet-numbering, leaf-numbering, printed capitals, titlepages, methods of imposition, etc.—which thus become uncertain and delusive landmarks. The place of origin is obscured by the existence of almost identical types in different cities and even in different countries. A fortiori the identity of the individual printer may baffle research from types being transferred or copied in all but one or two letters of the fount, which thus become the sole means of differentiating them. As helps the bibliographer has, in the first place, such a classification of the two or three thousand fifteenth century types as he is able to carry in his head. This, in proportion to its completeness, enables him to narrow down the field to be investigated. Some small typographical peculiarity, the way in which the illuminator or rubricator has filled the blank spaces, the note which by good fortune he may have appended in this or some other known copy saying when he finished his work, similar notes by early purchasers which occasionally give the date of their bargain, these and other points may all help forward the happy moment of final identification. Such a hunt as this may sound alarmingly difficult, as if it were all over five-barred gates and inconveniently hedged ditches. But facsimiles and other aids have been greatly multiplied of late years; many a book can be run down and the identification verified in a few minutes, and the possibility of hunting successfully in one’s own library presupposes the purchase of many books giving full information as to their origin. These, while offering the means of identifying other books, will themselves raise no questions, so that the collector’s life need not be unceasingly strenuous.

The side-interests of these old books are very varied. Many of them, at least to eyes trained to perceive it, are of great beauty. Others, although the half century during which printing was in its infancy produced few masterpieces of literature, have real literary interest. More than any other single event the invention of printing hurried on the transition from the medieval world to the modern, but while many printers in Italy nearly ruined themselves by the zeal with which they helped forward the classical renaissance, all over Europe the medieval books which were still read were seized on for the press, so that in the books printed between 1470 and 1490 we are presented with a conspectus or summary of medieval literature. Caxton printed the works of Chaucer and Gower and prose renderings of the old romances. The Italian presses were busy with Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante. The enormous size of the great Speculum or Encyclopædia of Vincent de Beauvais did not deter the printers of France and Germany, and the ponderous tomes of medieval theology and law seem to have found a ready market. Above all, the highest skill available in the best equipped workshops was employed almost ceaselessly in the production of beautiful and often magnificent editions of the service-books of the Church for the use both of priests and laity, and it is hardly possible to dabble much in old books without acquiring an interest in liturgiology.

Owing to this fact, that the early presses were so largely occupied with printing the works of the previous three centuries, there is comparatively little human interest in incunabula on their literary side. Instead of authors we have mostly to deal with editors, an assertive and depreciatory race, always vaunting their own accuracy and zeal and insisting on the incredible blunders by which previous editions had been deformed past recognition. We receive, however, no small compensation in the personal details which many of the early printers give us about themselves. Titlepages, though they occur at haphazard in a few books of the early seventies (and there is one still earlier example), did not become common till about 1490, and even twenty years later we find many books still without them. The information which we now expect to find on a titlepage was given in a paragraph, mostly at the end of the book, to which bibliographers have agreed to give the name “colophon,” from κολοφών, the Greek for a “finishing stroke.” As we have already noted, in many books no information of this kind is given, but when printers, or their proof readers or editors, took the trouble to write a colophon at all, they had no reason to confine themselves to the severe brevity and simplicity of statement which marks the modern titlepage. It was in colophons that editors cast stones at their predecessors, or demanded sympathy for the severity of their own labours, and it is in colophons that we find the expressions of the printer’s piety and pride, his complaints of his troubles with his workmen and rivals, his pleas for encouragement, and occasionally, penned by another hand, the record of how he was struck down by death in the midst of his work. I have never heard of any one making a representative collection of books with interesting colophons, but collecting has taken many worse forms.

To lend grace to their colophons, or sometimes as a substitute for them, the early printers and publishers often used a woodcut containing their mark, sign, or device. Like the colophon itself, this was printed as a token of the master’s pride in his work and his desire that it might be recognized as his, and many printers’ marks are very decorative and even beautiful. Comparatively neglected until recently, within the last few years the devices used in various countries have been almost exhaustively reproduced in facsimile, thus leaving few chances of fresh discovery.

The mention of devices brings us to a very interesting section of early printed books, and one which has attracted only too much attention of recent years, those decorated with the primitive cuts on wood or metal with which fifteenth century printers endeavoured to imitate the glories of illuminated manuscripts, or to increase the popularity of their books with not too critical readers. Occasionally, as in the metal cuts in the best editions of the French Horae, in the Florentine and Venetian woodcuts of the last ten years of the century, and in the best work of other countries, these early pictures possess real beauty. Often they are badly spoilt by the incompetence of the cutters, who were working without the aid of modern gravers or modern methods of preparing the wood. The early German wood-cutters, whilst their outlines are often less graceful than those of their French and Italian competitors, had a special gift for characterization, and the quality of their work is much more uniform, perhaps because even before the invention of printing with movable types they were an organized craft. But in almost all fifteenth century cuts there is a certain naive simplicity which captivates those who allow themselves to study it, until they are apt, as the present writer has confessed is probably true of himself, to rate it too highly. As is the case with the more ambitious artists in oils of the same periods, wherever there was any demand for book-illustrators a local school with strongly marked characteristics at once appears. The work of the Augsburg cutters can be told at a glance from that executed at Strassburg, and the styles predominant at Venice and Florence, at Milan and Naples are all absolutely distinct. With one or two exceptions we know nothing, until after 1500, of the men who designed or cut these illustrations, and (except in the case of those of the Low Countries) hardly any attempt has been made, or seems possible, to subdivide the work done in any given locality so as to group it under individual masters. Otherwise the problems of fifteenth century book-illustrations are much like the problems of the types with which they harmonize so well, and the collector can either devote himself to representing as fully as possible the work done in any single district, or range at large over the Continent (as regards fifteenth century illustrations England may almost be left out of account) and collect a few good specimens of each school.

It has been made a cause of complaint recently against bibliographers that they know more of the work done at any insignificant fifteenth century press than of the history of printing at any subsequent time. It is not easy to coerce men into taking up any sections of a subject beyond those in which they are interested, and the supposed culprits have at least this much justification for their neglect of the later work that very little of it repays examination. Until 1465, save for some possible Dutch experiments, Germany enjoyed the monopoly of printing. From 1465 to about 1530 she shared the primacy in it with Italy, though during most of this period Italy was slightly ahead; from 1530 to about 1570 France was far in advance of the rest of Europe; after 1570 there was a higher technical level in the Low Countries than elsewhere, and Plantin and the Elzevirs gained individual reputations. But there was very little good taste even in the Low Countries, and from a typographical standpoint the seventeenth century is a Sahara with hardly any oases. From this wilderness the eighteenth century, under the guidance of France and England, timidly felt its way back to a kind of trim neatness, but the positive experiments of Baskerville and the Didots, and in Italy of Bodoni, were not very exciting, and at present are quite out of fashion. In the nineteenth century the work of the Whittinghams in England deserves more attention from collectors than it has received, and throughout the whole period any one working on historical lines, with the desire to illustrate the vicissitudes of the art of printing and not merely its successes, has an ample field. But for positive excellence, after the period of “origins,” the French books of the middle of the sixteenth century offer almost the only hunting ground in which the fastidious collector is likely to find an attractive quarry, and it is no use to try to tell any other tale.

Of the later book illustrations a somewhat better account may be given. Owing to the steady deterioration of paper and presswork, which was the real cause of the typographical decline, woodcuts by the end of the sixteenth century had gone quite out of fashion, the old simple style having been lost and no printer being able to do justice to the finer work on which designers insisted. But copper engravings throve in Germany and the Low Countries, and when the fashion of engraved frontispieces and titles took root in England in the last years of the century it was pursued with considerable success for a couple of generations, while in the eighteenth century the French livres à vignettes attained an extraordinary brilliancy and elegance, and Gravelot and other French engravers bestowed some of their skill on English books.

The use of wood, now worked with the graver and no longer with the knife, was revived in England by Bewick about 1784, and was pursued with varying success for over a century, great technical skill and, at least in the “sixties,” very fine design being marred by the poverty and often the tawdriness of its typographical setting. Despite these drawbacks, the collectors who are bestowing attention on all this wood-engraved work of the nineteenth century will probably reap their reward.

When wood engraving was killed a few years ago by the extraordinary perfection attained, at a much smaller cost, by the process block, its fate was shared by the line-engraved illustrations which had appeared fitfully throughout the century, and had lingered on in the beautiful work of C. H. Jeens, who died in 1879, and in the use of old plates. As the wood engraving was killed by the half-tone block, so the line engraving disappeared before the photogravure, and the colour processes now being rapidly perfected threaten to reduce all black and white illustrations to unimportance. In so far, however, as the new processes necessitate the use of heavily loaded papers as a condition of their being even tolerably well printed, the least antiquarian of collectors may be forgiven for neglecting the books illustrated by them. Some of them can only be preserved by every plate being backed with sound paper, and a hundred years hence of all this illustrated work, much of it really beautiful, which is now being produced in such quantities, very little will remain. The modern Groliers whom we tried to call forth at the beginning of this chapter will need to be experts both in paper and in leather if they are to leave behind them any permanent record of their good taste. But this is only a crowning proof of how urgently they are needed.

It would be pleasant to glance briefly at some of the more literary considerations which bring books within the collector’s scope. But the scheme of this series restricts the subject of the present volume to books which are prized either for their typographical beauty, their place in the history of printing, or the charm of their illustrations. This is in itself so large a field that no more pages must be wasted on introducing it.

[1] Even Mr. Carnegie will only help to found new libraries, not to make old ones more efficient.

[2] During the Civil War itself presses were also set up temporarily at Newcastle-on-Tyne, at Shrewsbury, and perhaps elsewhere.

CHAPTER II

BLOCK-BOOKS

The collector of the time of George III, whose heart was set on Typographical Antiquities, and who was ambitious enough to wish to begin at the beginning, must have hungered after a block-book. Even in the days of Bagford, at the very outset of the eighteenth century, interest had been aroused in the block-printed editions of the Speculum Humanae Saluationis, so that Bagford himself travelled from Amsterdam to Haarlem on purpose to see a copy of one of the Dutch editions, and set an English wood-cutter to work, with very poor success, to manufacture a bogus specimen of it, wherewith “to oblige the curious.” This, with a similar imitation of a page in the Biblia Pauperum, was intended to illustrate the History of Printing which Bagford had the temerity to plan, although such of his smaller dissertations as have been preserved show conclusively that he was quite incapable of carrying it out.

The interest thus early shown in block-books sprang from an entirely reasonable, but probably incorrect, view of the part which they had played in the development of printing with movable type. It was known that woodcuts without letterpress were printed in Germany quite early in the fifteenth century, the cut of S. Christopher, formerly in the Spencer Collection, now in the John Rylands Library, bearing the date 1423.[3] On the other hand, printing with movable type was practised at Mainz in the fifties, and about 1461 Albrecht Pfister published at Bamberg several books with woodcut illustrations and printed letterpress. In the logical order of development nothing could be more reasonable than the sequence:

Facts, however, do not always arrange themselves with the neatness which commends itself to an a priori historian, and the most recent students of block-books are unable to discover sufficient justification for the early dates which their predecessors assigned to them. On the old theory, in order to put it in front of the invention of printing with movable types, the Biblia Pauperum, which appears to be the oldest of the block-books, was placed about 1430 or 1440, and the Ars Moriendi and the other chief specimens of block-printing were all supposed to have been produced before 1460, the main period of block-printing thus coinciding with the interval between the S. Christopher of 1423 and Pfister’s activity at Bamberg about 1461. Positive evidence in favour of this chronology there was none. It rested solely on the idea, at which bibliographers had jumped, that the block-books were necessary “steps towards the invention of printing,” as they have often been called, and on what seemed the improbability that any one, when the art of printing with movable type had once been invented, would have troubled himself laboriously to cut letterpress on wood.

So far from block-printing being unable to co-exist with printing from movable type, it was not till nearly a century after printing had been invented that block-books finally ceased to be produced. The example generally quoted as the latest[4] is the Opera nova contemplativa per ogni fedel christiano laquale tratta de le figure del testamento vecchio: le quale figure sonno verificate nel testamento nuovo. As its title implies, this, curiously enough, is an adaptation of the Biblia Pauperum, which was thus the last, as it may have been the first, of the block-books. It is undated, but has the name of its publisher, Giovanni Andrea Vavassore, who worked at Venice about 1530.

The Opera nova contemplativa was from one point of view a mere survival, but Vavassore is not likely to have produced it solely to cause twentieth century antiquaries surprise. He must have had a business reason for having recourse to block-printing, nor is that reason very hard to find. From the frequency with which the early printers changed and recast their types, and the short intervals at which popular books printed with types were set up afresh, it is clear (1) that the type-metal[5] employed was much softer and less durable than that now in use, and that only small impressions[6] could be taken from the same setting up; (2) that only a small amount of type was cast at a time, and that type was quickly distributed and used again, never kept standing on the chance that another edition would be wanted. Now when we come to the illustrations in printed books, we find the same woodblocks used for five or six successive editions, and then, in many cases, enjoying a second lease of life as job-blocks, used at haphazard by inferior printers. It is clear, therefore, that while it was a much more difficult and laborious business to cut the letterpress of a book on blocks of wood than to set it up with movable types, when the blocks were once made much more work could be got out of them. In a word, in the case of a small book for which there was a steady demand, a printer might be tempted to have it cut as a block-book for the same reasons as might cause a modern publisher to have it stereotyped. The labour of cutting the letterpress on wood was much greater than that now involved in stereotyping, and the result clumsier. Hence it was only to short books intended for unexacting purchasers that the process was applied and with two or three exceptions it was used only for illustrated books with a small amount of text. But within this restricted field it had its own commercial possibilities, and there is thus nothing surprising in its coexistence with printing from movable type.

When the theory that block-books were “Steps towards the Invention of Printing” is thus opposed by the rival theory that they were forerunners of stereotyped plates, we are left free to consider, uncoerced by supposed necessities, such evidence as exists as to the dates of the specimens of block-printing still extant. Putting aside the late Italian block-book as a mere survival, we find two[7] broadly distinguished groups, one earlier, the dates of members of which can only be conjectured, the other later, several of which can only be definitely connected with the years 1470 to 1473. The characteristics of the earlier group are that they are printed (1) with a watery brown ink; (2) always on one side of the paper only; (3) without mechanical pressure;[8] (4) two consecutive pages at a time, so that they cannot be arranged in quires, but must be folded and stitched separately, and the book thus formed[9] begins and ends with a blank page and has a pair of blank pages between each pair of printed ones. This arrangement in some extant copies has been altered by modern binders, who have divided the sheets, mounted each leaf on a guard, and then gathered them, at their own will, into quires. The inconvenient intervention of the blank pages has also sometimes been wrestled with (at an early date) by gluing the leaves together, so that all the leaves, except the first and last, are double, and the printed pages follow each other without interruption. These expedients, however, are easily detected, and the original principle of arrangement is free from doubt.

In the later block-books, on the other hand, we note one or more of the following characteristics: (1) the use of the thick black ink (really a kind of paint) employed in ordinary printing; (2) printing on both sides of the paper; (3) marks of pressure, showing that the paper has been passed through a printing-press; (4) the arrangement of the blocks in such a way as to permit the sheets to be gathered into quires.

In the case of the more popular block-books which went through many issues and editions[10] we can trace the gradual substitution of later characteristics for earlier ones. At what intervals of time these changes were made we have bibliographically no adequate grounds even for guessing. Analogies from books printed with movable types may be quoted on both sides. On the one hand, we find the blocks for book-illustrations enjoying an amazingly long life. Thus blocks cut at Venice and Florence between 1490 and 1500 continued in use for fifteen or twenty years, were then laid aside, and reappear between 1550 and 1560, certainly the worse for wear, but yet capable by a lucky chance of yielding quite a fair impression. The fact that one issue of a block-book can be positively assigned to 1470 or 1473, thus does not of itself forbid an earlier issue being placed as far back in the fifteenth century as any one may please to propose. On the other hand, when a printed book was a popular success editions succeeded each other with great rapidity, and one centre of printing vied with another in producing copies of it. The chief reason for the current disinclination to assume a date earlier than 1450 or 1460 for any extant block-book is the total absence of any evidence demanding it. If such evidence were forthcoming, there would be no inherent impossibility to set against it. But in the absence of such evidence twenty years seems an ample time to allow for the vogue of the block-books, and (despite the neatness of the a priori theory of development mentioned at the beginning of this chapter) this fits in better with the history both of printing and of book-illustration than any longer period.

The first attempt to describe the extant block-books was made by Carl Heinrich von Heinecken in 1771, in his Idée générale d’une collection d’estampes. This held the field until the publication in 1858 of Samuel Legh Sotheby’s Principia Typographica: the block-books issued in Holland, Flanders and Germany, during the fifteenth century, a painstaking and well-illustrated work in three folio volumes. The most recent and probably the final treatment of the subject is that by Dr. W. L. Schreiber, in Vol. IV of his Manuel de l’Amateur de la Gravure sur bois et sur métal au xve siècle, published in 1902 (facsimiles in Vols. VII and VIII, 1895-1900). Dr. Schreiber enumerates no fewer than thirty-three works as existing in the form of block-books, the number of extant issues and editions of them amounting to over one hundred. Here it must suffice to offer brief notes on some of the more important.

BIBLIA PAUPERUM

A series of forty composite pictures, the central compartment in each representing a scene from the life of Christ, while on each side of it is an Old Testament type, and above and below are in each case two half-figures of prophets. The explanatory letterpress is given in the two upper corners and also on scrolls. Schreiber distinguishes ten issues and editions, in addition to an earlier German one of a less elaborate design and with manuscript text, which belongs to a different tradition. The earlier of these ten editions appear to have been made in the Netherlands. An edition with German text was published with the colophon, “Friederich walther Mauler zu Nördlingen vnd Hans Hurning habent dis buch mitt einender gemacht,” and a second issue of this (without the colophon) is dated 1470. In the following year another edition, with copied cuts, was printed with the device of Hans Spoerer.

ARS MORIENDI

Twenty-four leaves, two containing a preface, and the remaining twenty-two eleven pictures and eleven pages of explanatory letterpress facing them, showing the temptations to which the dying are exposed, and the good inspirations by which they may be resisted, and, lastly, the final agony. The early editions are ascribed to the Netherlands or district of the Rhine; the later to Germany. There are also editions with German text, one of them signed “hanns Sporer,” and dated 1473. A set of engravings on copper by the Master E. S. (copied by the Master of S. Erasmus) may be either imitations or the originals of the earliest of these Ars Moriendi designs. (See Lionel Cust’s The Master E. S. and the Ars Moriendi.) The designs were imitated in numerous printed editions in various countries. In addition to a copy of the edition usually regarded as the earliest extant, the British Museum possesses one with the same characteristics, but of a much smaller size (the blocks measuring 137 by 100 mm. instead of 226 by 162), and from this, as much less known, a page is here given as an illustration.

CANTICA CANTICORUM

Sixteen leaves, each containing two woodcuts, illustrating the Song of Songs as a parable of the Blessed Virgin. Produced in the Netherlands.

APOCALYPSIS SANCTI JOHANNIS

Fifty leaves, or in some editions forty-eight, showing scenes from the life of S. John and illustrations of the Apocalypse, mostly with two pictures on each leaf. The early editions are assigned to the Netherlands, the later to Germany. A copy of the edition regarded as the fourth, lately sold by Herr Ludwig Rosenthal, bears a manuscript note, most probably as to the writer, just possibly as to the book, entering the household of the Landgrave Heinrich of Hesse in 1463.

SPECULUM HUMANAE SALUATIONIS

Scenes from Bible history, arranged in pairs, within architectural borders, with explanatory text beneath. No complete xylographic, or block-printed, edition is known, but twenty leaves printed from blocks are found in conjunction with forty-four leaves printed from type, and have not unreasonably been held to prove the previous production of a complete block-printed edition now lost. In like manner, the fact that two different types are used in different parts of a Dutch printed edition has encouraged Dr. Hessels to believe that this “mixed edition” should be regarded as proving the production of two complete editions, one in each type. On this theory we have (1) a hypothetical Latin block-printed edition; (2-4) three Dutch editions, each printed in a different type; (5) a Latin edition, entirely printed from type; (6) a Latin edition, printed partly from type, partly from some of the blocks of No. 1. The copy of this “mixed Latin edition,” as it is called, in the University Library at Munich, is dated in manuscript 1471, and the hypothetical complete block-printed edition may be as much earlier than this as any one pleases to imagine. But other bibliographers recognize only four editions and arrange them differently.

ANTICHRISTUS

Thirty-eight leaves, with two pictures on each leaf, illustrating the Legends relating to the Coming of Antichrist, and the Fifteen Signs which were to precede the Last Judgment. The text is in German, and the block-book was executed in Germany, probably about 1470.

FRANCISCUS DE RETZA. DEFENSORIUM INVIOLATAE CASTITATIS VIRGINIS MARIAE

Sixteen leaves, mostly with four pictures and four pieces of explanatory letterpress on each leaf, concerning marvels in the natural world which were supposed to be equally wonderful with that of the Virgin Birth, and therefore to render faith in this easier. Unfortunately the marvels are so very marvellous that they do not inspire belief, e.g. one story relates how the sun one day drew up the moisture from the earth with such rapidity that an ox was drawn up with it and subsequently deposited out of a cloud in another field. One edition was issued by a certain F. W. in 1470, another at Ratisbon by Johann Eysenhut the following year.

JOHANN MÜLLER (JOHANNES REGIOMONTANUS). KALENDER

Thirty-two leaves, containing lunar tables, tables of the eclipses for fifty-six years (1475-1530), other astronomical information, and a figure of the human body with notes of the signs of the zodiac by which it was influenced. Composed by the famous astronomer, Johann Müller, and sold by Hans Briefftruck, probably Hans Spoerer, about 1474-5, at Nuremberg and elsewhere.

JOHANN HARTLIEB. DIE KUNST CHIROMANTIA

Forty-four figures of hands, with a titlepage and page of text and a printed wrapper. Early issues are printed on one side of the paper only, later on both. The printer appears to have been Jorg Schaff, of Augsburg, and the date of issue about 1475. The date 1448 found in the book is that of composition, and it probably circulated in manuscript for many years before being printed.

MIRABILIA ROMAE

A German guide-book for visitors to Rome. Ninety-two leaves, printed with black ink on both sides of the leaf, with only a few illustrations. It was perhaps first published to meet the rush of German pilgrims to Rome at the Jubilee of Pope Sixtus IV, 1475. The blocks were probably cut in Germany, and the printing done at Rome. Some of the ornaments are said to have been used in type-printed editions by Stephan Plannck. This suggests that the book may have been published by his predecessor, Ulrich Han.

In addition to these block-books of Low Country and German origin, mention must also be made of a very curious Italian one, a Passio domini nostri Jesu Christi, fully described by the Prince d’Essling. The copy of this at Berlin contains eighteen leaves, and was probably executed at Venice about the middle of the fifteenth century. Some of the blocks were subsequently used (after a scroll at the foot had been cut off) for an edition of the Devote Meditatione sopra la Passione del Nostro Signore (attributed to S. Bonaventura), published at Venice in 1487 by Jeronimo di Sancti e Cornelio suo Compagno, and a page from this is reproduced as a frontispiece to our chapter on Italian Illustrated Books.

Mention has already been made of the Opera nova contemplativa, an adaptation of the Biblia Pauperum, printed as a block-book at Venice about 1530.

The only extant French block-book, if it can be called one, is that of the “Nine Worthies” (Les Neuf Preux). This consists of three sheets, the first showing three heathen worthies—Hector, Alexander, and Julius Cæsar; the second, three from the Old Testament—Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabæus; the third, three from medieval romance—Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Boulogne. Under each picture are six lines of verse. These three triple woodcuts, with the woodcut text, are assigned to about 1455.

No English block-book has yet been discovered, nor is it in the least likely that one ever existed, though there are a few single woodcuts.

Block-books possess two permanent attractions in addition to their supposed historical importance in the development of the invention of printing on which doubt is now cast—the attraction of popular literature and the attraction of the illustrated book. As we have seen, it would not have been worth any one’s while to cause a block-book to be laboriously engraved, or cut, unless a large and speedy sale could be expected for it. The most famous block-books are nearly all of a religious character, and they prove a widespread desire for simple instruction as to the incidents of the life of Christ and the events in the Old Testament history which were regarded as prefigurements of them, as to the dignity of the Blessed Virgin and the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, as to the end of the world and the coming of Antichrist, and as to the spiritual dangers and temptations of the dying and the means by which they might be resisted. As early specimens of book-illustration the value of the block-books varies very greatly. The majority of them are more curious than beautiful, but the pictures of the Cantica Canticorum, the Speculum Humanae Saluationis, and the Ars Moriendi have all very great merit. The tall, slender figures in the Song of Songs have a charm as great as any Dutch book-illustrations of the fifteenth century; the cuts of the Speculum are full of vigour, while the serene dignity of the scenes in the Ars Moriendi illustrating the Inspirations of the Good Angel is as impressive as the grotesque force used in depicting the diabolic suggestions. If we must grant, as the weight of authority now bids us, that these woodcuts are copies from the copper engravings of the Master E. S., it can hardly be disputed that the wood-cutter was the better artist of the two.

The block-books are a striking example of the difficulty of gleaning where the earlier collectors have reaped, a difficulty to which we shall often have to call attention. They vary greatly in positive rarity. Of the Biblia Pauperum and Ars Moriendi, which in their different issues and editions enjoyed the longest life and early attracted attention, Dr. Schreiber (if I have counted rightly) was able to enumerate in the one case as many as eighty-three copies—many of them, it is true, mere fragments—in the other sixty-one. Of the Apocalypse fifty-seven copies were known to him, of the Speculum twenty-nine, of the Antichrist thirteen, of the Defensorium twelve, and of the Mirabilia Romae six. But of these 261 copies and fragments no fewer than 223 are recorded as being locked up in public libraries and museums, the ownership of thirteen was doubtful, and only twenty-five are definitely registered as being in the hands of private collectors, viz. of the Apocalypse, eight copies or fragments; of the Biblia Pauperum, six; of the Speculum and Ars Moriendi, four each; of the Defensorium, two; and of the Cantica Canticorum, one. The chief owners known to Dr. Schreiber were the Earl of Pembroke, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and Major Holford, to whom must now be added Mr. Pierpont Morgan and Mr. Perrins. No doubt the copies in public institutions are much more easily enumerated than those in private hands, and probably most of the untraced copies are owned by collectors. But when allowance has been made for this, it remains obvious that this is no field where an easy harvest can be reaped, and that the average collector may think himself lucky if he obtains one or two single leaves. The last great opportunity of acquiring such treasures was at the sale in 1872 of the wonderful collection formed by T. O. Weigel,[11] at which the British Museum bought a very fine copy of the first edition of the Ars Moriendi, the first edition, dated 1470, of the Biblia Pauperum, in German, a block-book illustrating the virtues of the hymn Salve Regina, and the compassion of the Blessed Virgin, printed at Regensburg about 1470, besides fragments and woodcut single sheets. The foundation of the Museum collection of block-books had been laid by George III, added to by Mr. Grenville, and completed by a series of purchases from 1838 to this final haul of 1872, since when there have been few opportunities for new acquisitions. It is now quite adequate for purposes of study, though not so rich as that of the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris.

[3] The authenticity of a still earlier date, 1418, on a cut of the Blessed Virgin at Brussels is disputed.

[4] The Libro di M. Giovanbattista Palatino, printed at Rome in 1548, is spoken of by Mr. Campbell Dodgson as a “belated specimen” of a block-book. But this was a writing-book, and hardly counts.

[5] Numerous references in colophons show that the metal mostly used was brass, e.g. “Primus in Adriaca formis impressit aenis Vrbe libros Spira genitus de stirpe Johannes,” and the use of Chalcographi as a name for printers. But there are one or two references to printing “stanneis typis,” with types of tin.

[6] Of the first book printed at Venice only 100 copies were struck off, but the number was trebled in the case of its immediate successors. At Rome Sweynheym and Pannartz mostly printed 275 copies, only in a few instances as many as 300. But at the end of the century Pynson was printing at least 600 copies of large books and as many as 1000 of small ones.

[7] A very small third group, earlier than either of these, consists of woodcuts with manuscript text. The most important of these is a German Biblia Pauperum quite distinct from those started in the Netherlands.

[8] Some early woodcuts were printed by pressing the block down on the paper by hand; for the early block-books, however, the usual method seems to have been to press the paper on to the face of the block by rubbing it on the back with a burnisher. The paper was thus quite as strongly indented as if passed through a press, but the impression is usually less even. The friction on the back of the paper often gives it a polished appearance. As long as this method continued in use it was, of course, impossible to print on both sides of the paper.

[9] It is possible that the earliest specimens of block-printing were intended not to be bound in books but to be pasted on walls. In the case of the Biblia Pauperum, for instance, the space between the two woodcuts placed on each sheet is so small in some issues that the sheets cannot be bound without concealing part of the pictures.

[10] Different issues are distinguished by the signs of wear in the blocks, or occasionally by their being differently arranged, or with changes made in the blocks. In a different edition we have to deal with a new set of blocks.

[11] Since this was written the interesting collection formed by Dr. Schreiber himself has been dispersed.

CHAPTER III

THE INVENTION OF PRINTING—HOLLAND

Up to the year 1465 only one firm of printers evinced any appreciation of the uses of advertisement. In 1457 Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, of Mainz, set their names at the end of the liturgical Psalter which they were issuing from their press, and stated also the date of its completion, “In vigilia Assumpcionis,” on the vigil of the feast of the Assumption, i.e. August 14th. Save in the case of a few unimportant books this preference for publicity remained the settled practice of the firm until Peter Schoeffer’s death early in the sixteenth century, and later still when it was in the hands of his son Johann. With other printers at first the tendency was all the other way. Albrecht Pfister placed his name in one or two of the handful of popular illustrated books which he printed at Bamberg about 1461. No other book before 1465 contains its printer’s name, and both at Strassburg and at Basel the practice of publishing anonymously continued in fashion throughout the ’seventies—in Strassburg, indeed, for the best part of another decade.

While printing continued mainly anonymous chroniclers took no note of it, but in the ten years which began in 1465 the progress of the art was rapid and triumphant. Printers, mostly Germans, invaded the chief cities of Europe, and boasted in their books of having been the first to practise it in this place or that. Curiosity as to the beginnings of the invention was thus aroused, and from 1470 onwards we meet with numerous attempts, not always accurate, to satisfy it. The earliest of these attempts is in a letter from Guillaume Fichet, a Professor at the Sorbonne, who was mainly responsible for bringing the first printers to Paris, to his friend Robert Gaguin. This is contained in one copy of the second Paris book, the Orthographia of Gasparinus Barzizius, printed in 1470, Fichet having a fondness for giving individuality to special copies by additions of this kind. In this letter he speaks of the great light which he thinks learning will receive from the new kind of bookmen whom Germany, like another Trojan Horse, has poured forth.

Ferunt enim illic, haut procul a ciuitate Maguncia, Ioannem quendam fuisse cui cognomen bonemontano, qui primus omnium impressoriam artem excogitauerit, qua non calamo (ut prisci quidem illi) neque penna (ut nos fingimus) sed æreis litteris libri finguntur, et quidem expedite, polite et pulchre. Dignus sane hic uir fuit quem omnes musæ, omnes artes, omnesque eorum linguæ qui libris delectantur, diuinis laudibus ornent, eoque magis dis deabusque anteponant, quo propius ac presentius litteris ipsis ac studiosis hominibus suffragium tulit. Si quidem deificantur Liber et alma Ceres, ille quippe dona Liei inuenit poculaque inuentis acheloia miscuit uuis, hæc chaoniam pingui glandem mutauit arista. Atque (ut poeta utamur altero) prima Ceres unco glebam dimouit aratro, prima dedit fruges alimenta mitia terris. At bonemontanus ille, longe gratiora diuinioraque inuenit, quippe qui litteras eiusmodi exculpsit, quibus quidquid dici, aut cogitari potest, propediem scribi ac transcribi & posteritatis mandari memoriæ possit.

The good Fichet is absurdly rhetorical, but here in 1470 is a quite clear statement that, according to report, there (i.e. in Germany), not far from[12] the city of Mainz, a certain John, surnamed Gutenberg, first of all men thought out the printing art, by which books are fashioned not with a reed or pen, but with letters of brass, and thus deserved better of mankind than either Bacchus or Ceres, since by his invention whatever can be said or thought can forthwith be written and transcribed and handed down to posterity.

Four years later in his continuation of the Chronica Summorum Pontificum, begun by Riccobaldus, Joannes Philippi de Lignamine, the physician of Pope Sixtus IV, who had set up a press of his own at Rome, wrote as one of the events of the pontificate of Pius II (1458-64), how “Jakob Gutenberg, a native of Strassburg, and a certain other whose name was Fust, being skilled in printing letters on parchment with metal forms, are known each of them to be turning out three hundred sheets a day at Mainz, a city of Germany, and Johann Mentelin also, at Strassburg, a city of the same province, being skilled in the same craft, is known to be printing daily the same number of sheets.”[13] A little later De Lignamine records the arrival at Rome of Sweynheym and Pannartz, and also of Ulrich Han, and credits them also with printing three hundred sheets a day. Other references follow in later books without adding to our knowledge, save by proving the widespread recognition in the fifteenth century that printing was invented at Mainz; but there is nothing specially to detain us until the publication by Johann Koelhoff in 1499 of the Cologne Chronicle—Die Cronica van der hilliger Stat Coellen—in which occurs a famous passage about printing, which may be translated or paraphrased as follows:—

“This right worthy art was invented first of all in Germany, at Mainz, on the Rhine. And that is a great honour to the German nation that such ingenious men are found there. This happened in the year of our Lord 1440, and from that time until 1450 the art and all that pertains to it was investigated, and in 1450, which was a Golden Year, men began to print, and the first book that was printed was the Bible in Latin, and this was printed with a letter as large as that now used in missals.

“Although this art was invented at Mainz, as far as regards the manner in which it is now commonly used, yet the first prefiguration (Vurbyldung) was invented in Holland from the Donatuses which were printed there before that time. And from and out of these the aforesaid art took its beginning, and was invented in a manner much more masterly and subtler than this, and the longer it lasted the more full of art it became.

“A certain Omnibonus wrote in the preface to a Quintilian, and also in other books, that a Walloon from France, called Nicolaus Jenson, was the first inventor of this masterly art—a notorious lie, for there are men still alive who bear witness that books were printed at Venice before the aforesaid Nicolaus Jenson came there, and began to cut and make ready his letter. But the first inventor of printing was a Burgher at Mainz, and was born at Strassburg, and called Yunker Johann Gutenberg.

“From Mainz the art came first of all to Cologne, after that to Strassburg, and after that to Venice. The beginning and progress of the art were told me by word of mouth by the Worshipful Master Ulrich Zell of Hanau, printer at Cologne in this present year 1499, through whom the art came to Cologne.”[14]

Zell, or his interviewer, ignores the books printed anonymously at Strassburg by Mentelin and Eggestein, and also the handful printed by Albrecht Pfister at Bamberg; he also is misled by Gutenberg’s long residence at Strassburg into calling him a native of that city; in other respects, so far as we are able to check this account, it is quite accurate. It tells us emphatically that “this right worthy art was invented first of all in Germany, at Mainz, on the Rhine”; and again, that “the first inventor of printing was a Burgher at Mainz named Junker Johann ‘Gudenburch’”; but between these two unqualified statements is sandwiched a reference to a prefiguration which took shape in Holland in Donatuses, printed there before the Mainz presses were at work, and much less masterly and subtle than the books which they produced. He connects no name with this “Vorbildung,” and, unhappily, he gives no clue as to how it foreshadowed, and was yet distinct from, the real invention.

Sixty-nine years[15] after the appearance of this carefully balanced statement, the facts as to Dutch “prefigurations” which had inspired it moved a Dutch chronicler, Hadrianus Junius, in compiling his Batavia (not published till 1588), to write the well-known passage as to the invention of printing, which has been summarized as follows:—

There lived, about 1440, at Haarlem, in the market-place opposite the Town Hall, in a respectable house still in existence, a man named Lourens Janszoon Coster, i.e. Laurence, son of John Coster. The family name was derived from the hereditary office of Sacristan, or Coster of the Church—a post both honourable and lucrative. The town archives give evidence of this, his name appearing therein many times, and in the Town Hall are preserved his seal and signature to various documents. To this man belongs the honour of inventing Printing, an honour of which he was unjustly robbed, and which afterwards was ascribed to another. The said Laurence Coster, one day after dinner, took a walk in the wood near Haarlem. While there, to amuse himself, he began to cut letters out of some beech-bark. The idea struck him to ink some of these letters and use them as stamps. This he did to amuse his grandchildren, cutting them in reverse. He thus formed two or three sentences on paper. The idea germinated, and soon with the help of his son-in-law, and by using a thick ink, he began to print whole pages, and to add lines of print to the block-books, the text of which was the most difficult part to engrave. Junius had seen such a book, called Spieghel onzer Behoudenisse. It should have been said that Coster was descended from the noble house of Brederode, and that his son-in-law was also of noble descent. Coster’s first efforts were of course very rude, and to hide the impression of the letters on the back, they pasted the leaves, which had one side not printed, together. His letters at first were made of lead, which he afterwards changed for tin. Upon his death these letters were melted down and made into wine-pots, which at the time that Junius wrote were still preserved in the house of Gerrit Thomaszoon, the grandson of Coster. Public curiosity was greatly excited by Coster’s discovery, and he gained much profit from his new process. His trade, indeed, so increased that he was obliged to employ several workmen, one of whom was named John. Some say this was John Faust, afterwards a partner with Gutenberg, and others say he was Gutenberg’s brother. This man when he had learnt the art in all its branches, took the opportunity one Christmas eve, when all good people are accustomed to attend Church, to break into the rooms used for printing, and to pack up and steal all the tools and appliances which his master, with so much care and ingenuity, had made. He went off by Amsterdam and Cologne to Mainz, where he at once opened a workshop and reaped rich fruit from this theft, producing several printed books. The accuracy of this story was attested by a respectable bookbinder, of great age but clear memory, named Cornelis who had been a fellow-servant with the culprit in the house of Coster, and indeed had occupied the same bed for several months, and who could never talk of such baseness without shedding tears and cursing the thief.

Written nearly a hundred and thirty years after the supposed events which it narrates, this story is damned by its circumstantiality. It is thus that legends grow, and it is not difficult to imagine Haarlem bookmen picking up ideas out of colophons in old books and asking the “respectable bookbinder of great age” whether it was not thus and thus that things happened. Many of the details of the story are demonstrably false; its one strong point is the bookbinder, Cornelis, for a binder of this name is said to have been employed as early as 1474 and as late as 1514 to bind the account-books of Haarlem Cathedral, and in the two years named, and also in 1476, to have strengthened his bindings by pasting inside them fragments of Donatuses printed on vellum in the type of the Speculum Humanae Saluationis. The fragment in the account-book for 1474 is rubricated, and must thus either have been sold or prepared for selling, i.e. it is not “printer’s waste,” but may have been bought by Cornelis for lining his covers in the ordinary way of trade. But we have here a possible link between Zell’s story of early Dutch Donatuses and the story of Junius about Coster and his servant Cornelis, since we find fragments of a Donatus in the possession of this particular man.

There were plenty of such Donatuses in existence in the Netherlands about 1470. In 1887 Dr. Hessels, in his Haarlem the Birthplace of Printing, not Mentz, enumerated fragments of twenty different editions, printed in eight types, of which the type used in the Speculum Humanae Saluationis (see p. 26) is one, while the other seven are linked to it, or to each other, in such a way that we may either suppose them to have all belonged to the same printer, or distribute them among two or more anonymous firms. Besides these twenty editions of Donatus on the Eight Parts of Speech, Dr. Hessels enumerated eight editions of the Doctrinale of Alexander Gallus[16] (another school book popular in the fifteenth century), three of the Distichs of Dionysius Cato (the work from which Dame Pertelote quoted to convince Chantecleer of the futility of dreams), and one or two editions each of a few other works, the Facetiae Morales of Laurentius Valla (twenty-four leaves), the Singularia Juris of Ludovicus Pontanus, with a treatise of Pope Pius II (sixty leaves), and the De Salute Corporis of Gulielmus de Saliceto with other small works (twenty-four leaves). These latter books offer no very noticeable features; some of the Donatus fragments, on the other hand, have printing only on one side of the leaf (whence they are called by the barbarous term “anopisthographic,” “not printed on the back”) and have a very rude and primitive appearance. This may have been caused in part at least by their having been pasted down, and possibly scraped, by binders, for almost all of them have been found in bindings; but it counts for something.

Not one of the books or fragments of which we have been speaking makes any mention of its printer, or of the place or date at which it was produced. A copy of one of the later books, the De Salute Corporis of Gulielmus de Saliceto, was purchased by Conrad du Moulin while abbot of the Convent of S. James at Lille, a dignity which he held from 1471 to 1474. The earliest Haarlem account-book which contained Donatus fragments was for the year 1474. It is entirely a matter of opinion as to how much earlier than this any of the extant fragments can be dated. There is no reason why some of them should not be later.

As to the place or places at which these books were printed, there is no evidence of any weight. But, as has been already said, the whole series can be closely or loosely connected with the types used in editions of the Speculum Humanae Saluationis, and in 1481 Jan Veldener, a wandering printer, while working at Utrecht, introduced into an edition of the Epistles and Gospels in Dutch two woodcuts, each of which was a half of one of the double pictures in the Speculum. Two years later, when at Kuilenburg, he printed a quarto edition of the Speculum itself (Dutch version), in which he used a large number of the original Speculum blocks, all cut up into halves, so as to fit a small page. As Veldener (as far as we know) used the Speculum blocks first at Utrecht, it is supposed that it was at Utrecht that he obtained them. If the blocks were for sale at Utrecht, this may have been the place at which the earlier editions of the Speculum were issued, and thus, in the absence of any evidence which they were willing to recognize in favour of any other place, Henry Bradshaw and his disciples attributed the whole series of editions of the Speculum, Donatus, Doctrinale, etc., to Utrecht, about, or “not after,” 1471-1474. Bradshaw himself clearly indicated that this attribution was purely provisional. He felt “compelled to leave” the books at Utrecht, so he phrased it, i.e. the presumption that Veldener found the blocks of the Speculum there constituted a grain of evidence in favour of Utrecht; and if a balance is sufficiently sensitive and both scales are empty, a grain thrown into one will suffice to weigh it down. It would have been better, in the present writer’s opinion, if the grain had been disregarded, and no attempt made to assign these books and fragments to any particular place. As it is, Bradshaw’s attribution of them to Utrecht has been repeated without any emphasis on its entirely provisional character, even without any mention of this at all, and perhaps with a certain humorous enjoyment of the chance of prejudicing the claims of Haarlem by an unusually rigorous application of the rules as to bibliographical evidence.

In the eyes of Dr. Hessels, on the other hand, the legend narrated by Junius offers a sufficient reason for assigning all these books to Haarlem, and to Lourens Janszoon Coster as their printer. Dr. Hessels was even ill-advised enough to point out that, as there are twenty editions of Donatus in this group of types, we have only to allow an interval of a year and a half between each to take back the earliest very close to 1440, the traditional date of the invention of printing. This is perfectly true, but as no reason can be assigned for fixing on this particular interval the value of such a calculation is very slight.

One result of all this controversy is that the whole series of books and fragments have been dubbed “Costeriana,” and the convenience of having a general name for them is so great that it has been generally adopted, even by those who have no belief in the theory which it implies. All that is known of Lourens Janszoon Coster is that he resided at Haarlem from 1436 to 1483, and that contemporary references show him to have been a chandler and innkeeper, without making any mention of his having added printing to his other occupations.

It is difficult to claim more for the story told by Junius than that it represents an unknown quantity of fact with various legendary additions. It is difficult to dismiss it as less than a legend which must have had some element of fact as its basis. In so far as it goes beyond the statements of the Cologne Chronicle, it is supported only by the evidence that Coster and the venerable bookbinder Cornelis existed, and that the latter bound the account-books of Haarlem Cathedral. But no indiscretion of Hadrianus Junius writing in 1568 can affect the credit of the statements made in the Cologne Chronicle in 1499 on the authority of Ulrich Zell, and we have now to mention an important piece of evidence in favour of Zell’s accuracy. This is the entry in the diaries of Jean de Robert, Abbot of Saint Aubert, Cambrai, of the purchase in 1446 and again in 1451 of a copy of the Doctrinale of Alexander Gallus, jeté en moule, a phrase which, while far from satisfactory as a description of a book printed from movable type, cannot possibly refer to editions printed from woodblocks, even if these existed. The Doctrinale, which was in verse, was a less popular school-book than the Donatus. It is significant that among the so-called “Costeriana” there are eight editions of the one against twenty of the other. Where the Doctrinale was used we may be sure that the Donatus would be used also, and in greater numbers, so that this mention of a “mould-casted” Doctrinale as purchased as early as 1446 is a real confirmation of Zell’s assertion. We have no sufficient ground for believing that any of the fragments, either of the one book or the other, now in existence were produced as early as this. It is of the nature of school-books to be destroyed, and every improvement in the process of production would help to drive the earlier experiments out of existence. But taking Zell’s statement and the entries in the Abbot’s diaries together, it seems impossible to deny that there is evidence of some kind of printing being practised in Holland not long after 1440.

An ingenious theory as to the form which these “prefigurements” may have taken has lately been suggested, viz. that the earliest types may have consisted simply of flat pieces of metal, without any shanks to them, and that they were “set up” by being glued upon wood or stiff paper in the order required. They would thus be movable, but with a very low degree of movability, so that we can easily understand why short books like the Donatus and Doctrinale were continually reprinted without any attempt being made to produce a large work such as the Bible. It is curious, however, that in the description of a “ciripagus” by Paulus Paulirinus, of Prag,[17] “we have a reference” to a Bible having been printed at Bamberg “super lamellas,” a phrase which might very well refer to types of this kind, though the sentence is usually explained as referring to either the Latin or German edition of the Biblia Pauperum issued by Albrecht Pfister. I think it just possible myself that the reference is really to the Latin Bible known as the Thirty-six Line Bible, which seems certainly to have been sold, if not printed, at Bamberg a little before 1460, and that Paulirinus, having seen books printed “super lamellas,” supposed (wrongly) that this was printed in that way. But the statement that it was printed in four weeks is against this.

Whether the Dutch “Vorbildung” of the Art of Printing subsequently invented at Mainz took the form of experiments with shankless types, or fell short of the fully developed art in some other way, does not greatly concern the collector. It is in the highest degree improbable that the claim put forward on behalf of the so-called “Costeriana” will ever be decisively proved or disproved. They are likely to remain as perpetual pretenders, and as such will always retain a certain interest, and a specimen of them always be a desirable addition to any collection which aims at illustrating the history of the invention of printing. Such a specimen will not be easy to procure, because many of the extant fragments have been found in public libraries, more especially the Royal Library at the Hague, and have never left their first homes. On the other hand, the number of fragments known has been considerably increased by new finds. Thus there is no reason to regard a specimen as unattainable.

[12] Dr. Hessels supposes that this phrase indicates the Monastery of Saint Victor, outside Mainz, with which Gutenberg was connected, and that the “report,” therefore, can be traced to Gutenberg himself. If so, we have the very important fact that Gutenberg himself claimed to be the inventor.

[13] Iacobus cognomento Gutenbergo: patria Argentinus, & quidam alter cui nomen Fustus, imprimendarum litterarum in membranis cum metallicis formis periti, trecentas cartas quisque eorum per diem facere innotescunt apud Maguntiam Germanie ciuitatem. Iohannes quoque Mentelinus nuncupatus apud Argentinam eiusdem prouincie ciuitatem: ac in eodem artificio peritus totidem cartas per diem imprimere agnoscitur.... Conradus Suueynem: ac Arnoldus pannarcz Vdalricus Gallus parte ex alia Teuthones librarii insignes Romam uenientes primi imprimendorum librorum artem in Italiam introduxere trecentas cartas per diem imprimentes.

[14] Item dese hoichwyrdige kunst vursz is vonden aller eyrst in Duytschlant tzo Mentz am Rijne. Ind dat is der duytschscher nacion eyn groisse eirlicheit dat sulche synrijche mynschen syn dae tzo vynden. Ind dat is geschiet by den iairen vns heren, anno domini. MCCCCxl. ind van der zijt an bis men schreue. l. wart vndersoicht die kunst ind wat dair zo gehoirt. Ind in den iairen vns heren do men schreyff. MCCCCl. do was eyn gulden iair, do began men tzo drucken ind was dat eyrste boich dat men druckde die Bybel zo latijn, ind wart gedruckt mit eynre grouer schrifft. as is die schrifft dae men nu Mysseboicher mit druckt.

Item wiewail die kunst is vonden tzo Mentz, als vursz vp die wijse, als dan nu gemeynlich gebruicht wirt, so is doch die eyrste vurbyldung vonden in Hollant vyss den Donaten, die dae selffst vur der tzijt gedruckt syn. Ind van ind vyss den is genommen dat begynne der vursz kunst. ind is vill meysterlicher ind subtilicher vonden dan die selue manier was, vnd ye langer ye mere kunstlicher wurden.

Item eynre genant Omnebonum der schrijfft in eynre vurrede vp dat boich Quintilianus genoempt. vnd ouch in anderen meir boicher, dat eyn Wale vyss Vranckrijch, genant Nicolaus genson haue alre eyrst dese meysterliche kunst vonden, mer dat is offenbairlich gelogen. want Sij syn noch jm leuen die dat getzuigen dat men boicher druckte tzo Venedige ee der vursz Nicolaus genson dar quame, dair he began schrifft zo snijden vnd bereyden. Mer der eyrste vynder der druckerye is gewest eyn Burger tzo Mentz. ind was geboren van Straiszburch. ind hiesch joncker Johan Gudenburch. Item van Mentz is die vursz kunst komen alre eyrst tzo Coellen. Dairnae tzo Straisburch, ind dairnae tzo Venedige. Dat begynne ind vortganck der vursz kunst hait myr muntlich vertzelt d’ Eirsame man Meyster Vlrich tzell van Hanauwe. boich drucker zo Coellen noch zertzijt. anno. MCCCCxcix. durch den die kunst vursz is zo Coellen komen.

[15] The first trace of the legend is in a reference to Coster as having “brought the first print into the world in 1446” in a manuscript pedigree of the Coster family compiled about 1559.

[16] A page from a fragment of one of these in the British Museum forms the frontispiece to this chapter (Plate IV).

[17] Et tempore mei Pambergæ quidam scripsit integrum Bibliam super lamellas, et in quatuor septimanis totam Bibliam super pargameno subtili presignavit scriptura.

CHAPTER IV

THE INVENTION OF PRINTING—MAINZ

No contrast could be much greater than that between the so-called “Costeriana” and the incunabula printed at Mainz. Annually as a small boy I used to be taken to the Crystal Palace, and there a recognized part of the programme in each visit was to spend half an hour in solemnly pedalling backwards and forwards on a semicircular track on a machine miscalled a velocipede. Perhaps these clumsy toys really constituted a definite stage in the invention and perfection of the modern bicycle. On the other hand, whatever may be the historical facts, there is no reason in the nature of things why the modern bicycle should not have been invented quite independently of them. The relative positions of Holland and Germany as regards the invention of printing are very analogous to those of the old velocipede and the bicycle. Even if it could be proved decisively that some Dutch fragment of a Donatus was earlier than any experiment made at Mainz or Strassburg, it was at Mainz that the possibility was first demonstrated of producing by print books as beautiful as any written by the scribes, and it was from Germany, not from Holland, that printers carried the art which they had proved to be practicable to all parts of Europe, including Holland itself.

In the development of the art of printing at Mainz three men had a share, though the precise part which each of them played is matter of conjecture rather than knowledge. The first of the three was Johann Gutenberg, the Johannes Bonemontanus whom Fichet, as early as 1470, acclaimed as the first of all men to think out the printing art, whom the popular verdict has recognized as the inventor, and whom patriotic German bibliographers delight to invest with every virtue that distinguishes themselves.

Gutenberg’s real name was Gänsfleisch, Gutenberg being an addition to his mother’s surname[18] which he assumed for reasons not known to us. He was born about 1400, and just when he attained manhood his family, which belonged to the patrician party at Mainz, was banished and sought refuge at Strassburg. At Strassburg Gutenberg remained till about 1446, and legal and municipal records, so far as we can trust to their authenticity, offer us some tantalizing glimpses of his career there. When the town clerk of Strassburg came to Mainz the exile caused him to be arrested for a debt due to his family, and the matter had to be arranged to avoid a quarrel between the two cities. On the other hand, Gutenberg was himself called to account for unpaid duties on wine, and was sued for a breach of promise of marriage. In 1437 he was the defendant in a much more interesting trial. He had admitted two partners to work an invention with him, and on one of these partners dying his brother claimed, unsuccessfully, to take his place in the partnership. The use of the words “presse,” “forme,” and “trucken” in connection with this invention leaves it hardly open to doubt that it was concerned with some kind of printing, and loans which Gutenberg negotiated in 1441 and 1442 were presumably raised for the development of this. About the middle of the decade he returned to Mainz and there also borrowed money, presumably again for the same object.

At this point we are confronted with five fragmentary pieces of printing, all but one of them only recently discovered. The latest of these, according to German bibliographers, is a fragment of an astronomical Calendar in German verse for an unspecified year, which might be 1429, 1448, or 1467, but does not exactly fit any of them; the earliest is part of a leaf of a Sibyllenbuch (originally known as Das Weltgericht, because the text of this fragment deals with the Last Judgment). Between these two are placed fragments of three editions of Donatus, De octo partibus orationis, two found recently in copies of an edition of Herolt’s Sermones de tempore et sanctis printed at Strassburg[19] by Martin Flach in 1488 and now at Berlin, the third one of the minor treasures of the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, where it has lain for over a century. Granting that the Calendar was printed for use in 1448 (it has been argued, on the other hand, that its mention of movable festivals was intended to be only approximate), and that the other four pieces can be proved by typographical evidence to have preceded it, we may suppose the Sibyllenbuch to have been printed by Gutenberg shortly after his return to Mainz, i.e. about 1445, or shortly before this at Strassburg.

Soon after the supposed date of the Calendar the second of the three protagonists in the development of printing at Mainz comes on the scene. This was Johann Fust, a goldsmith, who in or about August, 1450, lent Gutenberg eight hundred guilders to enable him to print books, himself, nominally or truly, borrowing the money from another capitalist, and thereby gaining the right to charge interest on it without breaking the canon law. By about December, 1452, the loan was exhausted, and Fust made a fresh advance of the same amount. The inner history of the next four years is hid from us, and the undisputed facts which belong to them have consequently been interpreted in every variety of way that human ingenuity can devise. These facts are that—

(i) Printing was continued with the fount of type used for the Calendar attributed to 1448, fragments of more than a dozen different editions of Donatus printed with it being still extant, also a prognostication, Manung widder die Durken, printed in December, 1454, a Bull of Pope Calixtus “widder die Turcken” of 1456, a medical Calendar for 1456, and an undated Cisianus, another work of an astronomical character.

(ii) When the pardoners employed by the proctor-general of the King of Cyprus came to Mainz in the autumn of 1454 to raise money by means of a papal Indulgence, valid till 30 April of the following year, they were able to substitute two typographically distinct editions for the manuscript copies which they had previously used, the text of each of these Indulgences being printed in a separate fount of beautifully clear small type, while a larger type was used for a few words. In one of these Indulgences the larger type belongs, with some differences, to the same fount as the books named in our last paragraph. This Indulgence has thirty-one lines, and four issues of it have been distinguished, three of them dated 1454 (the earliest of these being the earliest dated piece of printing) and the fourth 1455. In the other Indulgence there are only thirty lines, the large type is neater, and three issues have been distinguished, one dated 1454, the other two 1455.

(iii) In November, 1455, an action brought by Fust to recover the 1600 guilders which he had lent Gutenberg, with the arrears of interest, reached its final stage. In this suit the third of the Mainz protagonists, Peter Schoeffer, was a witness on the side of Fust, and we hear also, as servants of Gutenberg, of Heinrich Keffer and Bertolf von Hanau, who may apparently be identified with printers who worked subsequently at Nuremberg and Basel. The document which has come down to us and is now preserved at the University Library at Göttingen is that recording the oath taken by Fust, as the successful plaintiff, in order to obtain judgment for the amount of his claim.

(iv) In August, 1456, Heinrich Cremer, vicar of the collegiate church at Mainz, recorded his completion of the rubrication and binding of a magnificent printed Bible in two volumes, now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, the type of which used to be thought identical with the larger type of the thirty-line Indulgence mentioned above, but is now considered to be only closely similar.

For this last undoubted date of rubrication, August, 1456, German bibliographers have lately substituted a reference to a manuscript date, 1453, in another copy of this printed Bible, now preserved in the Buchgewerbe-Museum at Leipzig, formerly owned by a well-known German collector of the last century, Herr Klemm. While, however, this date appears to have been written at a period approximating to that of the production of the book, its relevance as evidence of the date of printing is highly disputable, more especially as there appear to be signs of erasure near it. Its owner, Herr Klemm, preserved a discreet silence as to its existence, and it is certainly not obligatory at present to accept it as valid evidence.

In a work which does not pretend to the dignity of a history of printing it is impossible to discuss, or even to enumerate, the different theories as to the events of the years 1453-6, which have been formulated to account for these facts. The edition of the Bible of which Heinrich Cremer rubricated the copy now at Paris is so fine a book and so great a landmark in typographical history, that the desire to regard it as the production of the man who is credited with the invention of printing, Johann Gutenberg, easily becomes irresistible. To refuse to call it the Gutenberg Bible may, indeed, appear almost pedantic, though its old name, the “Mazarine Bible,” which it gained from the accident of the copy in the Mazarine Library at Paris being the first to attract attention, still survives, and it is also known among bibliographers as the “Forty-two Line Bible,” a safe uncontroversial title based on the number of lines in most of its columns. Whoever printed it appears to have been possessed of ample means and to have been a master of detail and an excellent organizer. Under the minute examination to which it has been subjected the book has yielded up some of its secrets, and we know that it was printed simultaneously on six different presses, that the body of the type was twice reduced, forty-two lines finally occupying slightly less space than the forty which had at first formed a column, that after the printing had begun it was resolved to increase the size of the edition, and that there is some reason to think that eventually a hundred and fifty copies were printed on paper and thirty on vellum,[20] and that the paper was ordered in large quantities and not in small parcels as it could be paid for. To the present writer it appears that if Gutenberg had possessed the financial means, the patience and the organizing power needed to push through this heavy piece of work in the way described, it is difficult to perceive any reason why the capitalist Fust should have quarrelled with him, or to imagine how Gutenberg exposed himself to such an action as that which Fust successfully carried against him. On the supposition that the Bible was completed in or soon after 1453 the difficulty becomes almost insuperable, for it is inconceivable that if Gutenberg had produced the book within a few months of receiving his second loan from Fust he should not, by the autumn of 1455, have paid his creditor a single guilder, either for principal or interest. After his quarrel with Fust, Gutenberg apparently had dealings with two other men, with Albrecht Pfister who is found in possession of a later casting of the heavier fount of type in which the Astrological Calendar attributed to 1448 had been printed, and with a Dr. Homery. He ended his days as a pensioner at the court of the Archbishop of Mainz, while Fust, with the aid of Peter Schoeffer, whom he made his son-in-law, developed a great business. The inventor who lacks organizing power and whose invention never thrives till it has passed into other hands is no unfamiliar figure, and such a conception of Gutenberg perhaps accords better with the known facts of his career than that of a living incarnation of heroism and business ability such as his German eulogists love to depict. According to a theory developed by the present writer in an article in The Library for January, 1907 (Second Series, Vol. VIII), though no originality is claimed for it, the key to the situation lies in the assertion[21] made on behalf of Peter Schoeffer that his skill in engraving had enabled him to attain results denied to the two Johns, Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust.

According to this theory, it was Schoeffer who engraved the two founts of small type used in the two sets of Indulgences of 1454-5, and thus demonstrated that the new art could be applied to produce every kind of book and document which had previously circulated in manuscript. Fust gave him his daughter Christina in marriage, and Johann Schoeffer, the offspring of the alliance, distinctly tells us that this was in reward for his services. From the first, or almost the first, the firm adopted a policy of advertisement which other printers were slow to imitate, the partners giving their names in their earliest colophons and making no secret of the fact that they were using an “adinuentio artificiosa imprimendi ac caracterizandi” which enabled them to dispense with the pen. In 1460, in the Catholicon of that year, the work of an anonymous printer to which we shall have to recur (see p. 51 sqq.), the invention is distinctly claimed for Mainz, and from 1467 this claim was taken over by Peter Schoeffer, who in the colophons of his subsequent books again and again celebrated Mainz as the city singled out by divine favour to give the art to the world. The fact that for nearly forty years (1460-99) these statements remained unchallenged, and passed into the contemporary history of the time, is the strongest evidence in favour of the substantial invention of the art at Mainz that can be conceived. A single reference in 1499[22] to prefigurations of a humbler kind in Donatuses printed in Holland and the presentation of a rival theory in 1568 cannot deprive of its due weight the evidence that during all the years when the facts were easily ascertainable judgment in favour of Mainz was allowed to go by default. But the Fust and Schoeffer colophons tell us more than this, for while they make no mention of Gutenberg they never claim the invention of printing as their own achievement. It is clear that Fust could not claim this himself, and while he was alive his son-in-law did not think fit to put forward, or allow to be put forward, any claim on his own behalf. It was only in 1468, when both Gutenberg and Fust were dead, that Schoeffer’s “corrector,” or reader, Magister Franciscus, was permitted to assert on his behalf, in the Justinian of that year, that though two Johns had the better in the race he, like his namesake S. Peter, had entered first into the sepulchre, i.e. the inner mysteries of printing. The claim, thus irreverently put forward, is deprived of much of its weight by the moment at which it was made; nevertheless it can hardly have been baseless.

The desire to credit Gutenberg with some really handsome and important piece of printing has caused his name to be connected with two other large folios, a Latin Bible, of thirty-six lines to a column, printed in a variety of the type used for the Sibyllenbuch and the Kalendar of “1448,” and a Latin Dictionary known by the name Catholicon, the work of a thirteenth century writer, Joannes Balbus, of Genoa. The type of the Thirty-six Line Bible passed into the hands of Albrecht Pfister, of Bamberg, who printed a number of popular German books with it in 1461 and 1462. There is considerable evidence, moreover, that a large number of copies of the Bible itself were sold at Bamberg about 1460. The greater part of the text appears to have been set up from a copy of the Forty-two Line Bible. Where, when, and by whom it was printed we can only guess, but the place was more probably Bamberg than Mainz, and as the type is believed to have been originally Gutenberg’s, and there is evidence that Pfister, when he began printing the popular books of 1461-2, was quite inexperienced, Gutenberg has certainly a better claim to have printed this volume than any one else who can be suggested. The Thirty-six Line Bible is a much rarer book than the Forty-two Line, but copies are known to exist at the British Museum, John Rylands Library, Bibliothèque Nationale, and Musée Plantin, and at Greifswald, Jena, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Wolfenbüttel. A copy is also said to be in private hands in Great Britain, but has not been registered. None has been sold in recent times. Besides the more complete copies mentioned above, various fragments have been preserved and some of these are on vellum. The vellum fragment of leaf 204 now in the British Museum was at one time used as a book-cover.

The Catholicon is printed in a small type, not very cleanly cut. It was issued without printer’s name, but with a long colophon, which has been translated:

By the help of the Most High, at Whose will the tongues of infants become eloquent, and who oft-times reveals to the lowly that which He hides from the wise, this noble book Catholicon, in the year of the Lord’s Incarnation 1460, in the bounteous city of Mainz of the renowned German nation, which the clemency of God has deigned with so lofty a light of genius and free gift to prefer and render illustrious above all other nations of the earth, without help of reed, stilus, or pen, but by the wondrous agreement, proportion and harmony of punches and types has been printed and brought to an end.

Upon this follow four Latin verses in honour of the Holy Trinity and the Virgin Mary and the words “Deo Gracias.” We can imagine an inventor who, despite his invention, remained profoundly unsuccessful, writing the opening words of this colophon, and it is not easy to see their appropriateness to any one else. It is thus highly probable that Gutenberg set up this book and refused to follow Fust and Schoeffer in their advertising ways. He may even have had a special reason for this, for among the forty-one copies registered (almost all in great libraries) two groups may be distinguished, one embracing the copies on vellum and the majority of the paper copies, the other the rest of the paper copies. The groups are distinguished by various differences, of which the most important is that in the one case the workmen used four and in the other two pins to keep the paper in its place while being printed. An attractive explanation of all this would be that while Gutenberg set up the book and was allowed to print for himself a certain number of copies, there was a richer partner in the enterprise whose pressmen pulled the greater part of the edition. But Dr. Zedler, who has brought together all the available information about the book in his monograph Das Mainzer Catholicon, has a different explanation.

In the same type as the Catholicon are two small tracts of little interest, the Summa de articulis fidei of Thomas Aquinas, and the Dialogus of Matthaeus de Cracovia; also an Indulgence of Pope Pius II. In 1467 the type is found in the hands of Heinrich Bechtermünze at Eltvil, who died while printing a vocabulary. This was completed by his brother Nicholas, who also printed three later editions of it.

During the years which precede 1457, Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, the one a goldsmith, the other a clerk in minor orders of the diocese of Mainz, are involved in the obscurity and uncertainty which surround Gutenberg’s career. Reasons have been offered for believing that it was Schoeffer who designed the small neat types used in the Mainz Indulgences of 1454-5, and that he with his skill and Fust with his money pushed the Forty-two Line Bible to a successful completion. If they printed this, they no doubt printed also a liturgical psalter in the same type, of which a fragment is preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. But we do not touch firm ground until we come to the famous Psalter of 1457, the colophon of which leaves us in no doubt as to its typographical authorship. This runs:

Presens psalmorum[23] codex venustate capitalium decoratus Rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus Adinuentione artificiosa imprimendi ac caracterizandi absque calami ulla exaracione sic effigiatus, Et ad eusebiam dei industrie est consummatus, Per Iohannem fust ciuem maguntinum, Et Petrum Schoffer de Gernszheim Anno domini Millesimo .cccc.lvij. In vigilia Assumpcionis.

The present book of the Psalms, decorated with beautiful capitals and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any ploughing of a pen, And to the worship of God has been diligently brought to completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim, in the year of the Lord, 1457, on the vigil of the Assumption.

Thus in the Psalter of 1457 we have the first example of a book informing us when and by whom it was manufactured; it also illustrates in a very remarkable way the determination of the new partners to produce a volume which should fully rival the best shop-made manuscripts. The effort to print rubrics had already been made in the Forty-two Line Bible, but the red printing was abandoned in that instance as too troublesome. Now it was revived with complete success, and with the printed rubrics came also printed capitals or initial letters in two colours, red and blue, and several different sizes. A good discussion of the manner in which these were printed will be found in the Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Printed Books exhibited at the Historical Music Loan Exhibition (1886) by Mr. W. H. J. Weale. In an article in the first volume of Bibliographica Mr. Russell Martineau showed that part of the edition was printed twice. When Mr. Martineau wrote nine copies were known, all on vellum, viz. (i) five of an issue of 143 leaves containing the Psalms and Canticles only, these being at the British Museum, Royal Library Windsor, John Rylands Library, Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, and Royal Library Darmstadt; (ii) four of an issue of 175 leaves, containing also the Vigils of the Dead, these being at the Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, University Library Berlin, Royal Library Dresden, and Imperial Library Vienna. To these must now be added a copy of the larger issue, wanting five leaves, presented in 1465 by René d’Anjou to the Franciscans of La Baumette-les-Angiers and now in the municipal library at Angers. The distribution of the Psalms in this 1457 edition is that of the general “Roman use,” but blank spaces were left for the insertion of the characteristic differences of the use of any particular diocese.

Two years later (29 August, 1459) Fust and Schoeffer produced another Psalter, in the same types and with the same capitals, with twenty-three instead of twenty lines to a page. This was stated in the colophon to have been printed “ad laudem dei ac honorem sancti Jacobi,” and was thus apparently commissioned by the Benedictine monastery of S. James at Mainz. Its arrangement is that generally in use at the time in German monasteries. Thirteen copies of this edition are preserved, all on vellum, viz. four in England (British Museum, Bodleian, John Rylands Library, and the Earl of Leicester’s library at Holkham), two at Paris, one at the Hague, five in Germany, and one in Mr. Morgan’s collection at New York. This last was bought by Mr. Quaritch at the sale of the library of Sir John Thorold for £4950.

Between the production of these two Psalters Fust and Schoeffer printed in the same types on twelve leaves of vellum the Canon of the Mass only, obviously that it might be bought by churches which owned Missals otherwise in good condition, but with these much-fingered leaves badly worn. The unique copy of this edition of the Canon was discovered at the Bodleian Library in a Mainz Missal of 1493 and identified by Mr. Gordon Duff. It is described by Mr. Duff in his Early Printed Books, and by Dr. Falk and Herr Wallau in Part III of the Publications of the Gutenberg Gesellschaft, with facsimiles of ten pages.

In October, 1459, Fust and Schoeffer took an important step forward by printing in small type the Rationale Diuinorum Officiorum of Gulielmus Duranti, a large work explaining the meaning of the various services of the Church and the ceremonies used in them. The text is printed in double columns with sixty-three lines in each column, and the type measures 91 mm. to twenty lines. A copy at Munich is printed partly on paper, partly on vellum. All the other forty-two copies described by Mr. De Ricci are entirely on vellum. The book has also one large and two smaller capitals printed in two colours, and the first of these has been reproduced as a frontispiece to this chapter, together with a piece of the neat small type which, by demonstrating the possibility of cheap printing, set up a real landmark.

In 1460 Fust and Schoeffer gave another proof of their skill in their edition of the Constitutions of Pope Clement V with the commentary of Joannes Andreae. The text of the Constitutions is printed in two columns in the centre of each page in a type measuring 118 mm. to twenty lines, with the commentary completely surrounding it in the 91 type used in the Duranti. Headings and colophon are printed in red, and the general effect is extremely rich and handsome. All the fourteen copies known to Mr. De Ricci are printed on vellum.

In 1461 printing was put to a new use by the publication of a series of eight placards (one in two editions) relative to the struggle between the rival archbishops of Mainz—a papal bull deposing Diether von Isenburg, the Emperor’s confirmation of this, papal briefs as to the election of Adolf von Nassau, a petition of Diether’s to the Pope, and the manifestos of the two archbishops. All these, and also a bull of the same year as to a crusade against the Turks, are printed in the neat 91 type, and though we may be struck by the difficulty of reading the long lines unrelieved by any headings, these publications must have been a great advertisement for the new art.

In 1462 the archiepiscopal struggle led to Mainz being sacked, but on 14 August there was completed there perhaps the finest of all the early Bibles, printed throughout in the 118 type, with headings in red and numerous two-line capitals and chapter-numbers in red and blue, though spaces were left for others to be supplied by hand. Three different colophons to this book have been described, and examples of all of these are in the British Museum. Of the sixty-one extant copies registered by Mr. De Ricci at least thirty-six are printed on vellum. The Lamoignon copy bequeathed to the Museum by Mr. Cracherode has good painted capitals added by hand and is a singularly fine book.

The Bible of 1462 marks the close of the great period of printing at Mainz. Whether six, seven, or nine years separate it from the Forty-two Line Bible the time had been splendidly employed. The capacity of the new art had been demonstrated to the full, and taken as a group these early Fust and Schoeffer incunabula have never on their own lines been surpassed. The disaster of the sack of Mainz and perhaps the financial strain involved in the production of the Bible almost reduced their press to silence until 1465, and it was during these years that their workmen are said to have left them and begun carrying the art into other towns and countries.[24] When the partners resumed active work in 1465 they struck out a new line in their De Officiis and Paradoxa of Cicero, but attained no special excellence in such small folios and quartos. Fust died about this time, and Schoeffer, left to himself, displayed no further originality. The Bible of 1472, save for the absence of printed capitals, is a close copy of that of 1462. The Clementine Constitutions of 1460 were reprinted, and similar editions were issued of the Institutes and Codex of Justinian, Decretals of Pope Gregory IX, etc. For his miscellaneous books Schoeffer seems rather to have followed the lead of other printers at Strassburg and Rome than to have set new fashions himself. In 1483 he printed a Breslau Missal, and this was followed by two reprints and editions for the use of Cracow, Meissen, Gnesen, and Mainz itself. He also printed the Hortus Sanitatis in 1485, and in 1490 the first of several Psalters in the style of the editions of 1457 and 1459. In 1503 he was succeeded by his son Johann.

About 1476-80 a few unimportant books were issued at Mainz by an anonymous printer known as the “Printer of the Darmstadt Prognostication,” from the fact that the first copy of the Prognostication in question to attract notice was that in the Darmstadt library. The books of this press attained undeserved notoriety from the forged dates inserted in many of them about 1800, in order to connect them with Gutenberg.

The work of three other printers, Johann Neumeister, Erhard Reuwich, and Jacob Meidenbach is chiefly important in the history of book-illustration, and will be found mentioned in Chapter VII. The only other Mainz printer in the fifteenth century was Peter von Friedberg, who is chiefly notable as having printed a little series of works by Johannes Trithemius (Tritheim or Trittenheim), the erudite Abbot of Spanheim.

After about 1472 Mainz was easily surpassed as a centre of printing by Strassburg, Cologne, Augsburg, and Nuremberg. But if no book had been printed there after the sack of the city ten years earlier, its fame as long as civilization lasts would still be imperishable.

[18] Her maiden name was Elsa Wyrich, but she lived at the Hof zum Gutenberg at Mainz, and the name Gutenberg thus came into the family.

[19] It will be noted that this connection with Strassburg offers just a grain of evidence in favour of the Donatuses having been printed there rather than at Mainz.

[20] According to the excellent Catalogue raisonné des premières impressions de Mayence of Mr. Seymour de Ricci, eleven copies on vellum and thirty on paper can now be located, but some of these have only one of the two volumes. The vellum copy belonging to Mr. Robert Hoe sold in 1911 for $50,000.

[21] In the verses by Magister Franciscus in the Justinian of 1468, subsequently twice reprinted.

[22] In the Cologne Chronicle. See supra, p. 34.

[23] Misprinted spalmorum.

[24] It seems reasonable to believe that Ulrich Zell, the first printer at Cologne, who was a clerk of the diocese of Mainz, and Sweynheym and Pannartz, who introduced printing into Italy, owed their training to Fust and Schoeffer.

CHAPTER V

OTHER INCUNABULA

In August, 1462, the struggle between its rival Archbishops led to Mainz being sacked. Very little more printing was done there until 1465, and we need not doubt the tradition that journeymen trained by Gutenberg and Fust and Schoeffer, finding no work for them at Mainz, carried such experience as they had gained to other towns and countries, where they appear, after a few years spent in manufacturing presses and types, in all the glory of “prototypographers.”

But even before 1462 two other cities possessed the art—Bamberg and Strassburg. At Bamberg it was practised possibly by Gutenberg, who may have printed there the Thirty-six Line Bible about 1457, certainly by Albrecht Pfister, who is found in possession of the type of this Bible, and may himself have had copies for sale. The books he himself printed at Bamberg are nine in number,[25] and three or four bound volumes seem to have preserved all the remnants of them that we possess, and all of these have found their way to public libraries.

The large and stately folios produced by the early Strassburg printers have naturally resisted the ravages of time better than the Bamberg popular books. Certainly clumsier than the contemporary Mainz books, they yet have a dignity and character of their own which command respect. The first Strassburg printer, Johann Mentelin, was at work there in or before 1460, and was helped during his life and succeeded after his death (1477) by his son-in-law, Adolf Rusch, who never put his name to a book, and most of whose impressions pass under the name of “the R-printer,” from the peculiar form of that letter found in one of his types. Mentelin himself did not place his name at the end of a book till he had been at work more than a dozen years; Heinrich Eggestein, who began work about 1464, was equally reticent, and throughout the ’seventies and ’eighties a large proportion of the books printed at Strassburg were anonymous. Heinrich Knoblochtzer, who started about 1476, combines some of the charm of the earlier printers with greater literary interest and the attraction of illustrations and ornamental capitals and borders. Of him we shall have to speak in a later chapter. But after 1485 the bulk of Strassburg printing was dull and commercial.

In the fifteenth century Basel was not yet, as it became in 1501, a member of the Swiss Confederacy, and typographically its relations with Mainz, Strassburg, Nuremberg and other German towns were very close. In what year printing began there is not known. There is no dated book from a Basel press until as late as 1474, but the date of purchase, 1468, in a book (S. Gregory’s Moralia in Job), printed by Berthold Ruppel, of Hanau, takes us back six years, and it is possible that Ruppel was at work even before this. He is identified with reasonable certainty with one of the servants of Gutenberg mentioned in connection with the lawsuit ended in 1455, and he printed Latin Bibles and other large works such as appealed to the ambition of the German prototypographers.

The second and more interesting Basel printer, Michael Wenssler, seems to have taken Schoeffer as his model, and reprinted many of Schoeffer’s editions, following the wording of his colophons and investing them with the same glories of red ink. Whereas, however, from about 1476 Schoeffer’s activity was much less conspicuous, Wenssler for the next ten years poured out edition after edition of all the heaviest legal and theological works, until he must have overstocked the market. Then he devoted himself almost exclusively to liturgical printing, but his affairs became hopelessly involved, and in 1491 he fled from his creditors at Basel, and became a wandering printer, finding commissions at Cluny and Maçon, and then settling for a time at Lyon. Many of the early printers in Italy made this mistake of flooding the market with a single class of book, but Wenssler is almost the only notable example in Germany of this lack of business instinct.

Travelling along the Rhine from Mainz in the opposite direction we come to Cologne, and here Ulrich Zell, like Berthold Ruppel, a native of Hanau, but who calls himself in his books a “clerk of the diocese of Mainz,” enrolled his name on the register of the University in June, 1464, doubtless for the sake of the business privileges which the Senate had it in its power to confer. The first dated book from his press, S. John Chrysostom, Super psalmo quinquagesimo (Psalm li., according to our English reckoning), was issued in 1466, but before this appeared he had almost certainly produced an edition of the De Officiis (see the frontispiece to this chapter, Plate VI), the most popular of Cicero’s works in Germany, which Fust and Schoeffer had printed in 1465 and reprinted the next year. Avoiding the great folios on which the early printers of Mainz, Strassburg, and Basel staked their capital, Zell’s main work was the multiplication of minor theological treatises likely to be of practical use to priests. Of these he issued countless editions in small quarto, along with a comparatively few small folios, in which, however, his skill as a printer is seen to better advantage. He continued in active work until 1494, gave, as we have seen (Chapter III.), his version of the origin of printing to the compiler of the Cologne Chronicle published in 1499, and was still alive as late as 1507.

Zell’s earliest rival at Cologne was Arnold ther Hoernen, who printed from 1470 to 1482. He may very likely have been self-taught, for his early work is very uneven, but he developed into an excellent craftsman. He is the first notable example of a printer getting into touch with a contemporary author, and regularly printing all his works, the author in this case being Werner Rolewinck, a Carthusian of Cologne, who wrote sermons and historical works, including the Fasciculus Temporum, an epitome of history, which found much favour all over Europe. Ther Hoernen used to be credited with the honour of having printed the first book with a titlepage, the Sermo ad populum predicabilis In festo presentacionis Beatissime Marie semper virginis of 1470. Schoeffer, however, had preceded him by some seven years by devoting a separate page to the title of each of his editions of a Bull of Pius II (see p. 93), and as neither printer continued the practice these isolated instances must be taken as accidental. In the same book, ther Hoernen for the first time placed printed numbers on the leaves, but this improvement also was not followed up. The third Cologne typographer, Johann Koelhoff the Elder, was the first (in 1472) to place printed “signatures” on the quires of a book, so as to show the binder the order in which they were to be arranged. Hitherto the quires had been marked by hand, and this improvement was not suffered to drop for a time like the others, but quickly spread all over Europe.

At Augsburg Günther Zainer completed his first book, an edition of the Latin Meditations on the Life of Christ taken from the works of S. Bonaventura, on the 13th March, 1468. Though he followed this with three heavy books which had found favour at Mainz and Strassburg, Zainer had the wisdom to strike out a line for himself. Augsburg had long been the chief centre of the craftsmen who cut and printed the woodcuts of saints, for which there seems to have been a large sale in Germany, and also the pictures used for playing-cards. The cutters were at first inclined to regard the idea of book-illustrations with suspicion, as likely to interfere with their existing business. It was decided, however, by the local Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, an ecclesiastic with typographical tastes, that illustrated books might be printed so long as members of the wood-cutters’ guild were employed in making the blocks. With this as a working agreement, illustrated books greatly prospered at Augsburg, not only Günther Zainer, but Johann Bämler and Anton Sorg (a very prolific printer), turning them out with much success throughout the ’seventies.

At Nuremberg printing was introduced in 1470 by Johan Sensenschmidt, who for a short time had as his partner Heinrich Kefer, of Mainz, another of Gutenberg’s servants. Much more important, however, was the firm of Anton Koberger, who began work the next year, and speedily developed the largest business of any printer in Germany. Koberger was able to deal successfully in all the heavy books, which after 1480 other firms found it wiser to leave alone, and seems to have employed Adolf Rusch at Strassburg and perhaps other printers elsewhere, to print for him. He also printed towards the end of the century some very notable illustrated books. Next to Koberger, Friedrich Creussner, who started in 1473, had the largest business in Nuremberg, and Georg Stuchs made himself a reputation as a missal printer, a special department from which Koberger held aloof.

At Speier, after two anonymous firms had worked in 1471 and 1472 without much success, Peter Drach (1477) developed an important business. At Ulm Johann Zainer, a kinsman of Günther Zainer, of Augsburg, began in 1473 by printing illustrated books, which were subsequently taken up in the ’eighties by Leonhard Holle, Conrad Dinckmut, and Johann Reger, while Zainer himself became a miscellaneous printer. At Lübeck Lucas Brandis produced a universal history called the Rudimentum Nouitiorum in 1475 and a fine Josephus, important liturgical work being subsequently done by Bartholomaeus Ghotan, Matthaeus Brandiss and Stephan Arndes, similar work being also produced at Magdeburg partly by some of these Lübeck printers. Fine liturgical work was also done at Würzburg by Georg Reyser, who may previously have printed anonymously at Speier, and who started his kinsman Michel in a similar business at Eichstätt. At Leipzig, where Marcus Brandis printed one or two books in 1481, and the following years, a sudden development took place about 1490, and a flood of small educational works was poured out by some half a dozen printers, of whom Conrad Kachelofen and Martin Landsberg were the most prolific. Presses were also set up in numerous other places, so that by the end of the century at least fifty German cities, towns and villages had seen a printer at work. In many of these the art took no root, and in some the printer was only employed for a short time to print one or more books for a particular purpose. But the total output of incunabula in Germany was very large, and leaving out of count the fugitive single sheets, the scanty remnants of which can bear no relation to the thousands which must have been produced, out of about 25,000 different books and editions printed in the fifteenth century registered as extant at the time of writing probably nearly a third were produced in Germany. If, as is likely, a large proportion of the eleven thousand undescribed incunabula (among which, however, there must be many duplicates and triplicates) reported to have been discovered by the agents of the German Royal Commission for a General Catalogue of Incunabula are German, this rough estimate must be largely increased, and it may be proved that Germany was as prolific as Italy itself.

Considerable as was this output of German printing at home, it was probably nearly equalled by the work done by German printers in the other countries of Europe to which they hastened to carry the new art. Turning first to Italian incunabula we find that the first book printed in Italy has perished utterly. The cruel little Latin grammar which passed under the name of Donatus had, as we have seen, been frequently printed in Holland and by the first Mainz printers, and there are several later instances of an edition of it being produced as soon as a press was set up, merely to show the printer’s types. This was done by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, the two Germans who began printing at the monastery of Saint Scholastica at Subiaco, some forty miles from Rome, in 1465, or perhaps in the previous year. Being a school-book, the Donatus was thumbed to pieces, so that no copy now survives, and it is only known from the printer’s allusion to it as the book “unde imprimendi initium sumpsimus” in a list of their publications drawn up in 1472. Of the three other books printed by them at Subiaco, Cicero’s De Oratore has no printed date, but a copy described by Signor Fumagalli bears a manuscript note dated Pridie Kal. Octobres M.cccclxv., i.e. 30 September, 1465, the authenticity of which has, however, been challenged, though probably without good reason. The two others both bear printed dates, the works of Lactantius, that of 29 October, 1465, and S. Augustine’s De Ciuitate Dei, 12 June, 1467. Probably even before this last book was completed the printers were already moving some of their material to Rome, where they found shelter in the palace of Pietro de’ Massimi, for their edition of the Epistulae Familiares of Cicero was completed there in the same year, probably in or before November. Even so it is not certain that this was the first book printed at Rome, for Ulrich Han, a native of Vienna and citizen of Ingolstadt, whose later work, like that of Michael Wenssler at Basel, shows a tendency to imitate Schoeffer, completed an edition of the Meditationes de vita Christi of Cardinal Turrecremata on the last day of the same year, and Mr. Proctor (after the publication of his Index) assigned to Han’s press and to an even earlier date than the Meditationes a bulky edition of the Epistles of S. Jerome, which must certainly have taken a year to print.

The career of Sweynheym and Pannartz in partnership at Rome lasted but little over six years, their latest book bearing the date 31 December, 1473. Already in March, 1472, they were in difficulties, and printed a letter to Pope Sixtus IV begging for some pecuniary aid. They had printed, they said, no fewer than 11,475 volumes, and gave a list of the different books and of the numbers printed of each. Four of these editions were of 300 copies, the rest of 275, and we can see from the list that there had been three editions of the Lactantius and De Ciuitate Dei and two each of Cicero’s Epistulae Familiares, De Oratore, and Opera Philosophica, and also of Virgil, so that clearly some of their books had shown a profit. But the list is entirely made up of Latin classics, “profane” and theological, and by March, 1472, printing had been introduced into at least ten other Italian cities (Venice, Foligno, Trevi, Ferrara, Milan, Florence, Treviso, Bologna, Naples, and Savigliano), and in most, if not all of these, the one idea of the first printers was to produce as many Latin classics as possible, as though no other firm in Italy were doing the same thing. Unable to obtain help from the Pope, Sweynheym and Pannartz dissolved partnership, the former devoting himself to engraving maps for an edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, which he did not live to see (it was printed by Arnold Bucking in 1478), while Pannartz resumed business on a somewhat smaller scale on his own account, and died in 1476.

At Venice, the first printer, Johann of Speier, seems to have had some foreboding of what might happen, and thoughtfully protected himself against competition by procuring from the Senate an exclusive privilege for printing at Venice during the space of five years. This might seriously have retarded the development of the press at Venice. Johann, however, after printing two editions of Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares and Pliny’s Historia naturalis in 1469, was carried off by death while working on his fourth book, S. Augustine’s De Ciuitate Dei, in 1470, and his brother Wendelin, or Vindelinus, who took over the business, had no privilege to protect him from competition.

In 1470, the way thus being left clear, a Frenchman, Nicolas Jenson, set up the second press in Venice, and by the beauty of his fine Roman type speedily attained a reputation which has lasted to this day. Another fine printer, Christopher Valdarfer, produced his first book in the same year. In 1471 three other firms (an Italian priest, Clemente of Padua, and two Germans, Adam of Ammergau and Franz Renner of Heilbronn) began publishing, and in 1472 yet seven more (three Germans and four Italians). But the pace was impossible, and by this time men were rapidly falling out. As we have seen, Sweynheym and Pannartz, after their ineffectual attempt to obtain a subsidy from the Pope, dissolved their partnership at Rome after 1473, and Ulrich Han in 1471 had taken a moneyed partner, with whose aid he weathered the storm. At Venice Wendelin, after producing thirty-one books in the previous two years, reduced his output to six in 1473, and soon after seems to have ceased to work for himself. Jenson’s numbers sank from twenty-eight in 1471-2 to six in 1473-4. Valdarfer gave up after 1471, and is subsequently found at Milan. Other Venetian printers also dropped out, and only two new firms began work in 1473.

At Florence after the first printer Bernardo Cennini and his sons had produced a Virgil in 1471, and Johann Petri of Mainz Boccaccio’s Philocolo and Petrarch’s Trionfi in 1472, printing ceased for some years. Presses started at Foligno, Trevi, and Savigliano came to a speedy end. At Treviso, where Gerardus Lisa had published four books in 1471, there was, according to Mr. Proctor, a gap from December in that year till the same month in 1474, though Dr. Copinger quotes one book each for the intervening years. Only one book was published at Ferrara in 1473. What happened at Naples is hard to say, since Sixtus Riessinger, the first printer there, issued many books without dates. At Bologna trade seems to have been stationary. At Milan, where both Antonius Larotus in 1471 and Philippus de Lavagna in 1472 had begun with extreme caution, there was healthy progress, and these two firms continued issuing editions of the classics, and with the great falling off of competition may have found it profitable to do so. But of the reality of the crisis in the Italian book trade in 1472-3, although little is said of it in histories of printing, there can be no doubt. When it was over there were symptoms of a similar over-production of some of the great legal commentaries. But this danger was avoided. There was a steady increase in the range of the literature published, and the bourgeois book-buyer was remembered as well as the aristocratic student. Soon there came a great extension, not only of the home but of the foreign market, and Italy settled down to supply the world with books, a task for which Venice, both from its geographical position and its well-established commercial relations, was peculiarly fitted. But it is the books printed before 1474 that form the real Italian incunabula. In the subsequent work within the limits of the fifteenth century Rome took no very important part. Ulrich Han continued to print till 1478. Joannes Philippi de Lignamine, Papal Physician and native of Sicily, produced some exceptionally interesting books between 1470 and 1476, and again in 1481-4, and Georg Lauer, who worked from 1470 to 1481, and completed an edition of S. Jerome’s Letters, left unfinished by Pannartz at the time of his death, showed himself a good craftsman. The later printers, especially Stephan Plannck and Eucharius Silber, had some good types, but produced few notable books, the bulk of the Roman output after 1480 being editions in small quarto of official documents and speeches at the Papal Court.

To devise any summary description of fifteenth century printing at Venice is wellnigh impossible. Some 150 firms were at work there; at a low estimate some four thousand extant books and editions must be credited to them, and these embraced almost every kind of literature for which readers could be found in the fifteenth century, and many varieties of craftsmanship. From a decorative point of view, the firm of Erhard Ratdolt did exceptionally good work, and it is also remarkable for specializing mainly on astronomy, mathematics, and history. Liturgical printing began somewhat late (there seems to have been a prejudice against printed service books in Italy, and I can remember none printed at Rome); in the fifteenth century Johann Hammann or Herzog and Johann Emerich were its chief exponents. Franz Renner produced chiefly Latin theology, a department much less predominant at Venice than in Germany. Several firms, e.g. Jacques Le Rouge, Baptista de Tortis, Andreas Torresanus (father-in-law of Aldus and a very fine printer), and Georgius Arrivabene devoted themselves like Jenson first mainly to Latin classics and then to law; others, such as Filippo di Pietro mingled Latin and Italian classics. Filippo’s kinsman, Gabriele di Pietro, was one of the earliest vernacular printers. Many firms, such as that of Bonetus Locatellus, who seems to have had a University connection, and printed all kinds of learned Latin books, despised the vernacular altogether. The brothers Giovanni and Gregorio dei Gregorii were perhaps the most prolific and miscellaneous printers in both Latin and Italian. Johannes Tacuinus, a learned printer towards the end of the century, is notable for adorning his books with pictorial capitals, mostly of boys at play. Aldus Manutius will be spoken of in a later chapter.

While all this activity was displayed at Venice other cities were not idle. At Milan upwards of eight hundred incunabula were produced, mostly by its earliest printer, Antonius Zarotus, and two Germans, Leonhard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenzeler. Ferrara seems to have been able to support only one press at a time, and at Florence it was some years before printing flourished, but in the last quarter of the century many interesting books were printed there, both learned and vernacular, as to the illustrations in which much will have to be said later on. Some of the early Treviso books from the press of Gerard Lisa are distinctly pretty. Bologna produced about three hundred incunabula. Naples probably not so many, but of much better quality. Altogether well over ten thousand Italian incunabula must still be extant, and these were produced at no fewer than seventy different places, though many of these were of no typographical importance, and only find their way into histories of printing from having sheltered a wandering printer for a few weeks as he was on his way from one large town to another.

In France also the earliest books were addressed to students of the classics, though they were produced on a much more limited scale. There the first printers, three Germans, had been invited to set up their presses at Paris in the Sorbonne by two of its professors, Guillaume Fichet and Jean Heynlin, of Stein, better known in his own day as Johannes de Lapide. Between the summer of 1470 and the autumn of 1472 eighteen works were printed at the Sorbonne, mostly of the kind which would be of use to its students. Among them was Sallust, three works of Cicero, Virgil’s Bucolics and Georgics, the Satires of Juvenal and Persius, Terence, some text books, the Speculum Humanae Vitae of Bishop Roderic of Zamora, and the Orations of Fichet’s patron, Cardinal Bessarion. In August, 1472, the Cardinal arrived in France on a fruitless mission to rouse the king to a crusade against the Turks. He was rebuffed and ordered to leave France. Fichet accompanied him, and never returned to Paris. As early as the previous March Heynlin seems to have been called away, and now the imported German printers, Michael Freiburger, Ulrich Gering, and Martin Crantz, were left wholly to their own devices. Thus abandoned they printed four books of a less special character, for which they sought princely instead of scholarly patronage, and then in April, 1473, moved from the Sorbonne and set up for themselves at the sign of the Soleil d’Or in the Rue S. Jacques. Here they printed still in Latin, but a much more popular class of books, and soon had to contend with two rival firms, that of Pieter de Keysere and Johann Stol, and the printers at the sign of the “Soufflet Vert” or Green Bellows. The finest of the subsequent printers was Jean Dupré, who used excellent capitals and issued many illustrated books, but three prolific printers, Antoine Caillaut, Gui Marchand, and Pierre Levet, along with many dull books issued some very interesting ones. Towards the end of the century an enterprising publisher, Antoine Vérard, kept many of the Paris printers busy, and Paris became noted typographically for its fine illustrated editions of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin, issued by Vérard, Dupré, Pigouchet (and his publisher, Simon Vostre), and Thielman Kerver. But these with the publications of Vérard belong to another chapter.

At Lyon printing was introduced by the enterprise of one of its citizens, Barthélemi Buyer, who engaged Guillaume Leroy (a native of Liège) to print for him, and subsequently employed other printers as well. The first Lyon book was a little volume of popular religious treatises, containing among other things the De miseria humanae conditionis of Pope Innocent III. It was completed 17 September, 1473. Until nearly 1490 the books printed at Lyon were mainly popular in character with a considerable proportion of French books, many of them illustrated. From 1490 onwards learned Latin books occur more frequently, and printing rapidly became as general or miscellaneous as at Paris itself, although only a single attempt was made, unsuccessfully, to rival the Paris Horae. The two cities between them probably produced more than three-fourths of the three thousand incunabula, which at a rough guess may be attributed to French presses, the share of Paris being about twice as great as that of Lyon. According to the stereotyped phrase, printing was introduced into no fewer than thirty-seven other French towns during the fifteenth century, but as a rule the printers were but birds of passage, and it was only at Poitiers (1479) and Rouen (1487) that it took root and flourished continuously, though on but a small scale. In other towns the struggle to maintain a press continued for several years, as at Toulouse, or was abandoned after the fulfilment of a single commission.

In Holland the first books which bear the name of their printer and date and place of imprint are those produced at Utrecht by Nicolaus Ketelaer and Gerardus Leempt, who began work in 1473. It is tolerably certain, however, that some of the so-called “Costeriana” (see Chap. II) preceded this date, and they are at least as likely to have been printed at Haarlem as at Utrecht, there being no decisive evidence in favour of either place. No namable printer appears at Haarlem until the end of 1483, when Jacob Bellaert set up a short-lived press there. For some seven years (1477-84) excellent work was done at Gouda by Gerard Leeu, who then moved to Antwerp. At Delft, where a fine Bible was printed by Jacob Jacobszoen and Mauricius Yemantszoen in 1477, printing was kept up continuously by Jacobszoen, Christian Snellaert, and Hendrik Eckert till the end of the century, though there seems to have been only work enough for one firm at a time. At Zwolle, Pieter van Os, who began work in 1479, was able to maintain himself, with a brief interval about 1482, till past the magic date 1500. Lastly, at Deventer, where Richardus Pafraet started in the same year, an output was speedily attained greater than in any other Dutch town, and for the latter years of the century a rival firm, that of Jacobus de Breda, shared Pafraet’s prosperity. The great majority of the Deventer books, however, belong to the minor literature of ecclesiasticism and education, and are far from exciting.

The beginnings of printing are much more interesting in the Southern Netherlands, which correspond roughly to what we now call Belgium. Here also the first positive date is 1473, the year in which Johann of Paderborn in Westphalia, best known to English collectors as John of Westphalia, printed three books at Alost. A fourth followed in May, 1474, but by the following December John had removed to Louvain, a University town, where he remained doing excellent and abundant work till nearly the end of the century. At Louvain he had found another printer, Jan Veldener, already in the field, and seems to have hustled him away not very honourably. Veldener, however, was not ruined, but is subsequently found at Utrecht and Kuilenburg, and again for a short time at Louvain.

At Bruges the first printers were Colard Mansion and William Caxton, names well known to English book-lovers, though not all the labours of Mr. William Blades and Mr. Gordon Duff have made it quite clear which of the two was the leader. Only two English books were printed, the Recuyell of the Histories of Troy and The Game and Play of the Chess, when Caxton returned to England and set up his presses in the Almonry at Westminster. Whether he had any pecuniary interest in the French Recueil and the Quatre Dernières Choses, and whether printings at Bruges began with the Recuyell, or, as Mr. Proctor contended, with the French Boccaccio De la ruine des nobles hommes et femmes of 1476, are points of controversy. From 1477 till his flight from Bruges to avoid arrest for debt in 1484, Mansion worked steadily by himself, and the total output of his press amounts to twenty-five French works and two in Latin.

At Brussels the Brothers of the Common Life, who worked also as printers in other places, published numerous popular Latin works between 1476 and 1487, about which time their press seems to have stopped. But the removal of Gerard Leeu’s business from Gouda to Antwerp in 1484 soon gave that town a typographical importance which (except for a few years at the end of the century) it long maintained.

The true incunabula of the Netherlands are, of course, the “Costeriana.” Whatever view we may take of their date and birthplace, they were undoubtedly home products, with a strongly marked individuality. Ketelaer and Leempt, however, at Utrecht, Veldener at Louvain and elsewhere, Caxton and Mansion at Bruges, were real pioneers. In a sense this is true also of John of Westphalia and Gerard Leeu, notably of the former, who had learnt his art in Italy and by the type which he had brought thence raised the standard of printing in his new home. It is, indeed, almost exclusively at Deventer that we get the dull commercial work which has nothing primitive or individual about it, and thus, perhaps because their grand total is so much smaller than in the case of Germany, Italy, or even France, the special interest of incunabula attaches to rather a high proportion of the early books of the Netherlands.

If this be true of the Netherlands, it is even truer of the two countries with which we have still to deal in this rapid survey, Spain and England. Of Spanish incunabula about seven hundred are now registered; of English, three hundred is a fairly liberal estimate of the grand total still extant. Within the limits of the fifteenth century neither country reached the purely mechanical stage of book production to which so many German and Italian books belong after about 1485. In England, indeed, this stage was hardly reached until the general downfall of good printing towards the end of the sixteenth century.

The first book printed in Spain was a thin volume of poems in honour of the Blessed Virgin, written by Bernardo Fenollar and others on the occasion of a congress held at Valentia in March, 1474. It offers no information itself on any bibliographical point, but it was presumably printed not long after the congress, at Valentia where the congress was held, and by Lambertus Palmart (or Palmaert), who on 18 August, 1477, completed there the third part of the Summa of S. Thomas Aquinas and duly described it as “impressa Valentie per magistrum Lambertum Palmart Alemanum, anno M.CCCC.LXXVII, die vero xviii. mensis Augusti.” Palmart is supposed to have been a Fleming (a nationality to which the description Alemannus is often applied), but nothing is known of him. He printed a work called Comprehensorium and the Bellum Jugurthinum of Sallust in February and July, 1475, without putting his name to them, and these with the Fenollar and other anonymous books now attributed to him are in roman type. In 1478 he completed a Catalan Bible in conjunction with a native Spaniard, Alonzo Fernandez de Cordoba, and thereafter worked by himself until 1490, using gothic types in these later books. Seven other firms worked at Valentia during the fifteenth century, but none of these attained much importance.

Another Fleming, of the name of Matthew or Matthaeus, printed the Manipulus Curatorum of Guido de Monte Rotherii at Saragossa in October, 1475, and five other presses were established there before 1500, that of Paul Hurus being the most prolific. At Tortosa a single book (the Rudimenta Grammaticae of Perottus) was printed by Nicolaus Spindeler and Pedro Brun early in 1477, and in August of the same year Antonio Martinez, Alonso del Puerto, and Bartolome Segura completed the first fully dated book (the Sacramental of Sanchez de Vercial) at Seville, where printing subsequently throve as much as anywhere in Spain. The following year Spindeler and Brun, having moved from Tortosa, introduced printing into Barcelona, a date MCCCCLXVIII in a treatise by Bartholomaeus Mates, Pro condendis orationibus, being obviously a misprint, though to what it should be corrected cannot positively be shown.[26]

At Salamanca printing was introduced as early as 1481, and continued more actively after 1492, mainly for the production of educational works. At Burgos Friedrich Biel, who had been trained under Michael Wenssler at Basel, began printing in 1485, and a native of the place, Juan de Burgos, brought out his first book in 1490, both of these firms doing excellent work. Altogether, twenty-four towns and places in Spain possessed presses during the fifteenth century, but in many cases only for a short time.

The outline of the story of printing in England during the fifteenth century may be very quickly sketched, fuller treatment being reserved for a later chapter. At Michaelmas, 1476, Caxton rented premises in the Almonry from the Abbot of Westminster, and here he stayed till his death in 1491, printing, as far as we know, about a hundred books and documents. In 1478 a press was set up at Oxford, presumably by Theodoric Rood of Cologne, whose name, however, does not appear in any book until 1481. By 1485 Rood had been joined by an English stationer, Thomas Hunte, but in 1486 or the following year the press was closed after printing, as far as we know, only seventeen books.

The few books printed at Oxford were all more or less scholastic in character, and six out of eight works printed by Caxton’s second rival (apparently a friendly one), the Schoolmaster-Printer at St. Albans, belonged to the same class, his two more popular books being Caxton’s Chronicles of England, with a new appendix, and the famous Book of St. Albans. Of these eight works, the earliest bearing a date was issued in 1480, the latest in 1486.

A more formidable competitor to Caxton than either the Oxford or the St. Albans printer began work in the City of London in 1480. This was John Lettou, i.e. John the Lithuanian, who, as Mr. Gordon Duff notes, used type identical save in a single letter with a fount used at Rome in 1478 by Johann Bulle of Bremen. Lettou appears to have been financed in the first instance by a Londoner, William Wilcock. In 1482 he was joined by William Machlinia (presumably a native of Malines), and after five law books had been printed in partnership, Lettou dropped out, and Machlinia continued working by himself, possibly until as late as 1490 or 1491, when his stock seems to have been taken over by Richard Pynson, a Norman, from Rouen. On Caxton’s death in 1491 his business passed into the hands of his foreman, Wynkyn de Worde, a native of Lorraine. The only other press started in the fifteenth century was that of Julyan Notary, who worked at first with two partners, I.B. and I.H. Of these I.B. was certainly Jean Barbier, and I.H. probably Jean Huvin of Rouen. We have no information as to the nationality of Notary, but if, as seems probable, he was a Frenchman, printing in England for some twenty years after Caxton’s death was wholly in the hands of foreigners.

Meagre and bare of details as is this sketch of the beginnings of printing in the chief countries of Europe, it should yet suffice to prove that the purely arbitrary date 1500 and the slang word incunabula, used to invest all fifteenth century impressions with a mystic value, are misleading nuisances. By the time that printing reached England it was beginning to pass into its commercial stage in Germany and Italy. In both of these countries, and in a less degree in France, scores and hundreds of books were printed during the last fifteen years of the century which have little more connection with the invention of printing, or the story of its diffusion, than English or Spanish books a century later. From the point of view of the history of literature and thought there is much to be gained from the collection in large libraries of all books printed before 1501. From the point of view of the history of printing every decade of book-production has its interest, and the decade 1490 to 1500 among the rest. Incidentally it may be noted that in respect of book-illustration this particular decade in Italy is one of exceptional interest. But books of the third generation of German or Italian printers, men like Flach, for instance, at Strassburg, or Plannck at Rome, should not be collected under the idea that they are in any true sense of the word incunabula.

What constitutes a true incunable cannot be defined in a sentence. We must consider the country or city as well as the book, the individual man as well as the art of which he was perhaps a belated exponent. The same piece of printing may have much more value and interest if we can prove that it was produced in one place rather than another. After the publication of his Index, Mr. Proctor satisfied himself that some anonymous books in roman type which he had classed as the work of an unidentified press at Naples were really among the earliest specimens of Palmart’s typography in Spain, and one does not need to be a Spaniard to appreciate the distinction thus added to them. If sentiment is to count for anything we must admit the interest of the first books printed in any country which possesses an important history and literature—if only because we may legitimately be curious to know on what books a printer, with all the extant literature to choose from, ventured his capital as likely in that particular country and time to bring him the quickest and most profitable return. That the first large book in Germany was a Bible, the first books in Italy Latin classics, the first produced for the English market one that we must call an historical romance, cannot be regarded as merely insignificant. Nor are the differences in the types and appearance of the page unimportant, for these also help to illustrate national characteristics.

If this is true of the early books printed in any country, it is also true in only slightly less degree of those which first appeared in any great city which afterwards became a centre of printing. Strassburg, Cologne, and Nuremberg, Rome, Venice, and Florence, Paris and Lyon, Antwerp and London (if we may be permitted for once to ignore the separate existence of Westminster), each has its own individuality, and in each case it is interesting to see with what wares, and in what form, the first printers endeavoured to open its purse-strings. But when we come to towns and townlets some distinction seems needed. I may be misled by secret sympathy with that often scholarly, too often impecunious figure, the local antiquary. To him the first book printed in his native townlet, though by a printer merely stopping on his way between one great city and another, must needs be of interest, and it is hard that its price should be forced beyond his reach by the competition between dealers keen to do business with a rich collector to whom the book will have none of the fragrance it would possess for him. Typographical itinerancy, this printing by the roadside, as we may almost call it, must needs be illustrated in great collections, like any other habit of the early printers. But the ordinary private collector can surely dispense with buying books because they have been printed in places which have no associations for him, of which perhaps he has never heard.

As for the individual man, if we would keep any oases green in what may easily become a sandy desert, we must surely treasure every trace of his personality. One large element in the charm of incunabula is the human interest of difficulties overcome, and wherever a craftsman began work by cutting a distinctive type to suit the calligraphic fashion of the neighbourhood, at whatever date he started, his books will still have some interest. When he becomes articulate and tells us of his difficulties, or boasts of how they have been overcome, we may value his work still higher. As the first book printed at Florence, the Commentary of Servius on Virgil needs no added attraction, and yet how much its charm is enhanced by its printers’ addresses to the reader. Here is the second of them roughly Englished:

To the Reader. Bernardino Cennini, by universal allowance a most excellent goldsmith, and Domenico his son, a youth of very good ability, have been the printers. Pietro, son of the aforesaid Bernardo, has acted as corrector, and has made a collation with many very ancient copies. His first anxiety was that nothing by another hand should be ascribed to Servius, that nothing which very old copies showed to be the work of Honoratus should be cut down or omitted. Since it pleases many readers to insert Greek words with their own hand, and in their own fashion, and these in ancient codices are very few, and the accents are very difficult to mark in printing he determined that spaces should be left for the purpose. But since nothing of man’s making is perfect, it must needs be accounted enough if these books (as we earnestly hope) are found exceptionally correct. The work was finished at Florence on October 5, 1472.

It is impossible to read a colophon such as this without feeling ourselves in the very atmosphere of the printing house, with the various members of the printer’s family at work around us. Blank spaces are found in many early books where Greek quotations occurred in the manuscripts from which they were printed. But it was not every printer who took so much trouble as Cennini to justify the omission.

As many as twenty-one years later, when printing in the great towns was becoming merely mechanical, we find the same personal note in a little grammar-book printed at Acqui. Here the colophon tells us:

The Doctrinale of Alexander of Villedieu (God be praised!) comes to a happy end. It has been printed amid enough inconveniences, since of several things belonging to this art the printer, in making a beginning with it, could obtain no proper supply, owing to the plague raging at Genoa, Asti and elsewhere. Now this same work has been corrected by the prior Venturinus, a distinguished grammarian, and that so diligently that whereas previously the Doctrinale in many places seemed by the fault of booksellers too little corrected, now by the application of his care and diligence it will reach men’s hands in the most correct form possible. After this date books will be printed in type of another kind, and elegantly, I trow; for both artificers and a sufficiency of other things of which hitherto the putter forth has been in need he now possesses by the gift of God, Who disposes all things according to the judgement of His will.

Late as he appeared and small as was the town at which he produced his one book—his hopes and promises as to others seem to have come to naught—this man had the true pioneer spirit, and deserves to be remembered for it.

Of a different kind, but no less, is the interest in what is perhaps my own favourite colophon, that recording the death of Gerard Leeu at Antwerp, while engaged in printing an edition of The Chronicles of England for the English market.

Here ben endyd the Cronycles of the Reame of Englond, with their apperteignaunces. Enprentyd in the Duchy of Braband in the towne of Andewarpe In the yere of our Lord M.cccc.xciij. By maistir Gerard de leew a man of grete wysedom in all maner of kunnyng: whych nowe is come from lyfe unto the deth, which is grete harme for many [a] poure man. On whos sowle God almyghty for hys hygh grace haue mercy. Amen.

Leeu had been killed accidentally by one of his workmen in the course of a dispute, and this testimonial to him in the colophon, which reads as if the compositor had slipped it in of his own accord, is very gracious and touching in its simplicity.

Just as the possession of a personal colophon brings a book within a circle of interest to which it otherwise would not have approached, so we may justly value a piece of printing all the more if it chances, through any accident, to throw light on the printer’s methods. I have felt a peculiar affection for an edition of Valerius Maximus, printed by Schoeffer in 1471, ever since I discovered that a change in the form of the punctuation at certain points of the book makes it possible to work out the number of presses on which it was being printed, the order in which the sheets were being set up, and how quickly the type of the worked pages was distributed. The slowness of the presswork in the simple form of press at first used obliged the printers to keep several presses, sometimes as many as six, occupied with different sections of the same book, and the trouble they were given to make the end of one section join neatly to the beginning of the next has left many traces. Any book which thus lets us into the secrets of the early printing offices possesses in a very high degree the charm which should attach to an incunable, if that hardly used word is to retain, as it should, any reference to the infancy of printing. But more will be said as to this aspect of early books in our next chapter.

[25] Two editions of Boner’s Edelstein, both illustrated with over a hundred woodcuts, one dated 14th February, 1461 (copy at Wolfenbüttel), the other undated (Royal Library, Berlin); Die Historij von Joseph, Danielis, Judith, Hester, dated in rhyming verse 1462 “nat lang nach Sand Walpurgentag” (Rylands Library and Bibliothèque Nationale); the Belial seu Consolatio peccatorum of Jacobus de Theramo (Rylands and Germanisches Museum, Nuremberg); two issues of a German Biblia Pauperum with thirty-four woodcuts (both at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the first also at Rylands and Wolfenbüttel); the same work in Latin (Rylands); lastly two editions of a poem called Rechtstreit des Menschen mit dem Tode (both at Wolfenbüttel, the second also at the Bibliothèque Nationale).

[26] In its colophon the book is said to have been “a docto viro Bertolommeo Mates conditus et per P. Johannem Matoses Christi ministrum presbiterumque castigatus et emendatus sub impensis Guillermi ros et mira arte impressa per Johannem Gherlinc alamanum.” Gherlinc is only heard of again in 1494, and then not at Barcelona.

CHAPTER VI

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING

One great cause of changes of fashion in book-collecting is that after any particular class of book has been hotly competed for by one generation of book-lovers, all the best prizes gradually get locked up in great public or private collections, and come so seldom into the market that new collectors prefer to take up some other department rather than one in which it is impossible for them to attain any striking success. The first-fruits of printing, if reckoned strictly chronologically, are probably as nearly exhausted as any class of book which can be named. No matter how rich a man may be, the chances of his ever obtaining a copy of the Thirty-six Line Bible, the 1457 Psalter, or the first book printed at Venice, are infinitesimally small. Other incunabula, if not hopelessly out of reach even of the very rich, are only likely to be acquired after many years of waiting and a heavy expenditure when the moment of possible acquisition arrives. Many of the books hitherto here mentioned belong to this class. And yet, from what may be called the logical as opposed to the chronological standpoint, incunabula little, if at all, less interesting are still to be obtained at quite small prices by any one who knows for what to look. Any collector who sets himself to illustrate the evolution of the printed book from its manuscript predecessors, and the ways of the early printers, will find that he has undertaken no impossible task, though one which will need considerable pursuit and good taste and judgment in the selection of appropriate specimens.

Roughly speaking, it took about a century for printed books to shake off the influence of manuscript and establish their own traditions. The earliest books had no titlepage, no head-title, no running title, no pagination, and no printed chapter-headings, also no printed initials or illustrations, blank spaces being left often for the one and occasionally for the other to be supplied by hand. At the time when printing was invented the book trade in many large cities had attained a high degree of organization, so that the work of the calligrapher or scribe was clearly distinguished from that of the luminer or illuminator, and even from that of the rubricator (rubrisher). Take, for instance, this Bury St. Edmunds bill of 1467 for a Psalter, preserved among the Paston Letters:

It is possible that the work in this case was all done by one man, though it is equally possible that several were engaged on it, under the direction of a master-scrivener, but in either case the fact that vignettes and demi-vignettes, psalter letters (i.e. the small red letters at the beginning of each verse of a psalm, sometimes called versals), the mysterious “p’ms letters” (possibly the dabs of colour bestowed on small initials), the writing of the text, the writing of the calendar, the musical notation, and the drawing and flourishing the capitals, were all charged separately, at so much a piece or so much a hundred, shows how distinct each operation was kept. Partly, no doubt, from policy, so as not to rouse the wrath of more than one industry at a time, partly to save themselves trouble and expense, the earliest printers, with few exceptions, set themselves to supplant only the calligrapher, and sold their books with all the blanks and spaces, which the most modest or perfunctory scribe could have left to be filled by his kindred craftsmen.

No better starting-point for a typographical collection could be desired than fine copies of two well-printed books in which the printer has confined himself severely to reproducing the text, leaving all headings, capitals, and ornaments to be supplied by hand. In one (as in the page from a book of Jenson’s, which forms the illustration to this chapter, Plate VII) the blanks should remain blanks (as more especially in early books printed in Italy they often did remain), in the other they should have been filled in with red ink or colours by a rubricator. The owner of two such volumes is really as much at the fountain-head as the possessor of the Mainz Indulgences of 1454, or any still earlier document that may yet be found.[27] This is the logical beginning, and the logic of history is quite as interesting as the chronology.

From the starting-point of the book of which the printer printed nothing but the text the collector can advance in many different directions. There was no regular and unbroken progress in the development of the modern form of book, nor does it matter greatly that the examples of any particular improvement should be either absolutely or nearly the earliest. The main thing is that they should be good illustrations of the special feature for which they are acquired. The problem how to dispense with the aid of a rubricator had to be faced by countless printers in many different towns, for rubricating by hand must have added very considerably to the cost of a book. The obvious thing to do was to print in red all the headings, chapter-numbers, etc., which the rubricator used to add in that colour. But this was both expensive and troublesome, as it involved two printings and the placing of the paper in exactly the same position in the press in each. Caxton and one or two other early printers tried to avoid this double printing and difficulty of registration by putting on both red and black ink at the same time—very probably, where they came close together, they were rubbed on with a finger—but this so often resulted in smudges and lines half of one colour, half of another, that it was soon abandoned. Double printing was mostly soon abandoned also, except by the most expert men. It was tried and abandoned by the printer of the Forty-two Line Bible, though subsequently Fust and Schoeffer completely mastered it. Between 1472 and 1474 it was tried and abandoned by almost every printer in Strassburg. The difficulty was generally[28] overcome by substituting, for red ink used with type of the same size or face as the text, type of a larger size or heavier face, which could be printed in black ink with the text and yet stand out sufficiently clearly from it to catch the eye.

The need for this differentiation accelerated the tendency to reduce the size of types, which was doubtless in the first place dictated by a desire for economy. The earlier German text-types for ordinary books very commonly measure about 6 mm. a line. To enable small differences to be shown they are quoted in the British Museum Catalogue of Incunabula by the measurements of twenty lines, and many of the early Mainz and Strassburg types range closely round the number 120. These large text-types are often the only ones used in a book, notes or other accompaniments of the text being clumsily indicated by brackets or spaces. The better printers, however, gradually imitated Fust and Schoeffer, and along with their 120 text-types used smaller commentary types measuring about 4 to 4½ mm. a line, or from 80 to 90 mm. for twenty lines. In the great folio commentaries on the Canon and Civil Law a very fine effect is produced by two short columns of text in large type being placed two-thirds way up the page and then completely surrounded by the commentary in smaller type, also in double columns. But the economy of using the smaller type for the text of books without commentary was quickly perceived, and along with 4 to 4½ mm. small text-types, heavy and often rather fantastic types of just twice this size (8 to 9 mm. a line, 160 to 180 mm. to twenty lines) came into use for headings, and the opening words of books and chapters. The same course was followed with respect to headlines, when it was desired to add these to a book without the aid of a scribe. Eggestein printed one book with headlines in red, but the same heavy type which was used for chapter headings was soon used for headlines, and also, with very ugly effect, for numbering the leaves.

In considering what specimens of printing to collect Englishmen who have been accustomed for more than two centuries to nothing but roman types may well be bewildered, as they look through any volume of facsimiles, by the extraordinary variety of the founts. The main reasons for this variety may be sought (1) in the dependence of the first printers on the styles of writing which they found in vogue at the time, and in the countries and towns where they made their ventures; and (2) in the different styles considered appropriate to different classes of books—Latin and vernacular, liturgical and secular, etc. Even now, when bookhands can hardly be said to exist, the varieties of handwriting are endless, and there are strongly marked differences between those of one country and another. In the fifteenth century, when there was less intercommunication between distant countries, the differences were even greater. As to this, however, it is possible to make some distinctions. The unifying effect of the Church is seen in the smaller range of variations in the books for liturgical use, and the fellowship of scholars exercised at least some influence in the same direction. In Italy, the home of ancient learning, the aristocratic bookhand was the fine round minuscules which had been evolved, by a conscious antiquarian revival, from the bookhand of the twelfth century, itself a revival of the Carlovingian bookhand of the eighth and ninth. Sweynheym and Pannartz, being Germans, failed in the first instance to realize the hopelessness of seeking scholarly favour with any other kind of character, and their Subiaco books are printed in a light and pleasing gothic much admired by William Morris, and used by Mr. St. John Hornby for his splendid Ashendene Dante. When they started afresh at Rome in 1467 they gave up their gothic fount and used instead a fine roman character noticeable for its use of the long ʃ at the end of words, a peculiarity often found in Italian manuscripts of this period. The early printers at Venice made no false start, but all used roman characters from the outset, Venetian gothic type making its first appearance in 1472. That gothic type was used at all in Italy was due partly to the difficulty found in cutting very small roman type, so that gothic was used for economy, partly to the advantages of the heavy gothic face when a contrast was needed between text and commentary.

In Germany roman types were tried by Adolf Rusch (the R-printer) at Strassburg about 1464, and by both Günther Zainer at Augsburg and Johann Zainer at Ulm, but met with no favour until in the last years of the century they were reintroduced for the books written or edited by Brant, Locher, Wimpheling, Peter Schott, and the other harbingers of the new learning. In the Netherlands John of Westphalia started with a round but rather thin roman type brought from Italy. In France the scholarly ideals of the patrons of the first Paris press were reflected in the use for the books printed at the Sorbonne of a beautiful roman type, only injured by the excessive prominence of the serifs. In Spain also the first books, those printed at Valentia by Lambert Palmart, were in roman; but in both countries gothic types long commanded the favour of the general reader, while in England their supremacy was unchallenged for a third of a century, no book entirely in roman type appearing until 1508.

As regards the æsthetic value of the different roman types in use during the fifteenth century, the superiority of the Italian is so marked that, with the exception of the first French type, the rest, from this point of view, may be neglected. Almost all the roman types used in Italy until late in the ’seventies are either beautiful or at least interesting, and it is remarkable that some of the most beautiful are found in small places like Cagli, Mondovi, Viterbo, and Aquila, or in the hands of obscure printers, such as the self-taught priest Clemente of Padua, who worked at Venice in 1471. The pre-eminence of Jenson’s fount is indisputable, though he often did it injustice by his poor presswork. But those used by John and Wendelin of Speier, and at a later date by Antonio Miscomini, were also good, as also were several of the founts used at Rome and Milan. At Naples and Bologna, on the other hand, some quite early roman founts are curiously hard and heavy.

After about 1480 roman types in Italy enter on a second stage. They no longer have the appearance of being founded directly on handwriting. Doubtless the typecutters were so used to their work that they no longer needed models, but designed new types according to their own ideas. Naturally the letters are more uniform and regular than in the earlier founts, but naturally also they have less charm, and the ordinary close-set Venetian type of the end of the century is singularly dull. Even the large roman type used by Aldus to print the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is no real exception, as the letters are narrow for their height. A far finer fount is the large text type used by the Silbers at Rome, on both sides of 1500. This is well proportioned and beautifully round, and it is surprising that it has not yet been imitated by any modern typecutter.

When we pass from roman to gothic types there is a bewildering field from which to choose. Here again dull commercialism gained the upper hand about 1480, and towards the end of the century an ugly upright text-type of 80 mm. to twenty lines, with a fantastic headline type of twice its size, or a little more, found its way all over Germany. But types with a twenty-line measurement ranging round 120 mm., such as those of Peter Schoeffer or the Printer of Henricus Ariminensis, are often extraordinarily handsome. Both of Schoeffer’s earlier small types and the small type of Ulrich Zell at Cologne are engagingly neat, and at the opposite end there is the magnificently round gothic used by Ulrich Han at Rome.

Most of the finest gothic types were used for Latin books of law and theology, the peculiar appropriateness of roman type being considered to be confined to works appealing to classical scholars. In Germany, for some time, not much distinction was observed, but there was a tendency in classical books to use an f and long ſ starting from the level of the line, whereas in most vernacular books the tails of these letters came below the line, giving a strangely different appearance to the type. In the ’nineties a distinctively cursive type called Schwabacher, usually measuring 93 mm. to twenty lines, makes its appearance all over Germany. In Italy, both at Naples and by Ulrich Han at Rome, a very small text type, which is certainly cursive in its affinities, was used at the very outset, but found no favour. The typical vernacular French types are also very often on a slope. The small cursive type cut for Aldus in 1501 by Francesco da Bologna was thus not quite so great a revolution as is sometimes represented. Its clearness in proportion to its size, its extreme compactness, and the handiness of the small octavos with which it was at first specially connected, gained for it a great success, and it gradually, though only gradually, usurped the name of italic, the upright Italian bookhand being distinguished from it as roman. Few treatises on printing or the development of books give any idea of the immense popularity of italics during the sixteenth century. About 1570 they seemed to have established themselves as the fashionable vernacular type both in Italy and France, and even in England whole books were printed in them. In Switzerland also and Germany they gained some hold; but gradually the tide turned, the upright bookhand regained its predominance, and italics now survive chiefly for emphasis and quotations—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were often used for proper names—giving to the page on which they occur an unpleasantly spotty appearance. Their occasional use in prefaces and dedicatory letters is much more appropriate.

The completion of books at first by a colophon, afterwards by a titlepage, may be illustrated in the same way as that by which we have traced the evolution of the text from incompleteness to completeness and the development of different classes of types. At least one printer, Johann Mentelin of Strassburg, seems to have considered the addition of colophons as the proper business of the rubricator. While printed colophons in his books are exceptionally rare, several copies have come down to us in which full colophons have been added by hand, e.g. in a vellum copy of the Speculum Morale in the Bibliothèque Nationale, after praise of the book, we read:

Impressumque in inclyta vrbe Argentinensium ac nitide terse emendateque resertum per honorandum dominum Dominum Iohannem Mentelin artis impressorie magistrum famosissimum. Anno a partu virginis salutifero millesimo quadringentesimo septuagesimo sexto. die mensis nouembris sexta.

Despite a few instances of this kind, however, it is certain that the majority of printers who omitted to print colophons to their books did so, not in the expectation that they would be supplied by hand, but in imitation of the manuscript books to which they were accustomed, in which it is distinctly exceptional to find any mention of the name of the scribe. But the men who took a pride in their new art, and who thought that their work was good enough to bring more custom to their press if their name were associated with it, took the opposite course, and so colophons from 1457 onwards are common in the best books, and may perhaps be found in about 40 per cent of the incunables that have come down to us. By the men who were skilful in using red ink they were often thus printed, and whether in red or in black, they frequently had appended to them the printer’s mark or device, which gave a very decorative finish to the book.

Nowadays, when we have been accustomed all our lives to the luxury of titlepages, it may well seem to us merely perverse to hide the title of a book, the name of the author, and information as to where, when, and by whom it was printed in a closely set paragraph at the end of the book. But if we think for a moment of how the manuscript books to which the early printers were accustomed had been produced we shall see that it was the most natural thing in the world. A scribe would take his quire of paper or vellum, and if he were a high-class scribe, mindful of the need of keeping his text clean, he would leave his first leaf blank and begin at the top of his second. But here he would begin to write straight away, sometimes with the first words of his text, sometimes with a preliminary paragraph, which may be called the Incipit, from the important word in it. In this paragraph he would give either the name of his book or, almost as commonly, the name of the first section of it, introducing the title only incidentally.

Incipit Racionale diuinorum officiorum.

Incipiunt Constitutiones Clementis pape V una cum apparatu Ioannis Andree.

Marci Tullii Ciceronis Arpinatis consulisque Romani ac oratorum maximi Ad M. Tullium Ciceronem filium suum Officiorum liber incipit.

Incipit epistola sancti Hieronimi ad Paulinum presbiterum de omnibus diuine historie libris.

That it did not occur to him to devote his blank page to a displayed title of the book he was copying was due to the fact that every medieval manuscript was the direct descendant, through many or few stages, of the author’s own original draft, and that this was the most pretentious way and least natural in which any author could begin to write a book. So the scribes imitated the author in his normal beginning, and the early printers imitated the scribes, and because an author was more inclined to relieve his feelings at the end of a book than to express them volubly at the beginning, it was only when books multiplied so greatly that purchasers wanted to see at a glance what was the name of the book at which they were looking that titlepages superseded colophons. The proof of this explanation being the true one is that titlepages become common just about the time (1480 to 1490) that book-production was beginning to be divided up between publishers and printers, and that the publisher very quickly claimed them for his own.

The earliest titlepages, those of the Mainz Bul zu deutsch des bapst Pius II (1463), Rolewinck’s Sermon for the Feast of the Presentation (Cologne: Arnold ther Hoernen, 1470), the Flores Sancti Augustini (Cologne, 1473), and the Kalendarium of Joannes de Monteregio and its Italian translation (Venice: Ratdolt and partners, 1476), were all more or less of the nature of “sports.” When titlepages came to stay, a year or two later than the last of these precursors, they everywhere took the form of labels, a single sentence containing the short title of the book, printed sometimes in large, sometimes in small type, but with no other information. The label title, being usually printed high up on the page, left two-thirds, or thereabouts, blank beneath it, and this space was soon filled, sometimes by a pictorial woodcut, sometimes by a mark or device, which at first might be either that of the printer or publisher, but gradually came to be much more often the publisher’s. The short title and device taken together filled the page sufficiently for decorative purposes, but they left room for a further paragraph of type to be added if desired, and the advantage of filling this with the name and address of the firm from whom the book might be obtained was so obvious that the “imprint,” as it is rather loosely called, soon made its appearance and gradually became recognized as an essential part of the titlepage. When printers and publishers lost pride in their work and ceased to care to decorate their titlepages with pictures or devices, the title was displayed in a series of single lines and made to straggle down the page till it came nearly low enough to meet the imprint.

If we go back to the habits of the scribes it is easy to understand another point in the early history of books, their make-up into quires and the marking of these quires by signatures and catchwords. The word quaire or quire is a shortened form of the Latin quaternio, the name devised for four sheets of paper folded down the middle so as to form eight leaves. A gathering of five sheets making ten leaves was called a quinternion, and this, though it has yielded no modern word, was for generations such a popular form that quinterniones was sometimes used as a general expression for manuscripts. Gatherings of three sheets, making six leaves, were called terniones; gatherings of two sheets, making four leaves, duerniones. A few, but only a few, books exist—nearly all of those which I have seen are either block-books or thin folios of poetry of the reign of Charles II—which are made up in single sheets not placed one within the other, but following consecutively. But the system of gathering from two to five or more sheets together into quires was practically universal both before and after the invention of printing, and this for the excellent reason that it reduced the quantity of sewing necessary in binding a book, and reduced also the risk of the sewing cutting through the paper or vellum, as it would be very likely to do if there were only a single thickness to resist it.

When the scribe had arranged his quire or gathering he wrote first page by page on all the leaves on the left hand until he came to the middle of the quire, when he proceeded to write page by page on all the leaves on the right hand. Thus in a quire of four sheets the left half of the first sheet would be leaf 1, pages 1 and 2, and the right half would be leaf 8, pages 15 and 16, so that the same sheet formed the beginning and end of the quire. In the earliest printed books the quires were printed page by page exactly as the quires of a manuscript had been written. But early in the ’seventies (Peter Schoeffer can be proved to have adopted the practice between 1471 and September, 1474) the advantage was perceived of printing both the pages on the upper or lower side of a sheet at the same time, i.e. in a quaternion, page 16 together with page 1. As soon as a printer had learnt to print two folio pages together, it became easy to print four quarto pages, or eight octavo pages, or sixteen sextodecimo pages. In each case the amount of type to be printed at a pull would be approximately the same. It thus ceased to be disadvantageous to print small books, whereas so long as each page had to be pulled separately it was obviously wasteful to make that page a very small one.

Even when the printers had learnt how to print two folio pages at the same time the presswork remained very laborious. The earliest presses were worked with only a single screw, and when the pressman had pulled the lever one way to bring the platen down on the type, he had to push the lever back again in order to raise the platen and release the paper. Thus in order to print a large book quickly four or six sets of pressmen had to work on it at once, each at a different press. To avoid mistakes, therefore, the practice was to allot one section of the book to each press. Thus if a book were calculated to run to 288 leaves, six presses might begin simultaneously at leaves 1, 49, 97, 145, 193, and 241. What more often happened was that either to follow the natural sections of the book, or because some of the printers were engaged on other tasks and not ready to begin at once, the sections were of much less regular lengths, and we can sometimes prove that the first press was far advanced in its section before the fifth and sixth had begun. Now in all these cases, unless they were reprinting an earlier book, page for page, it is obvious that some nice calculations would be needed to make each section end with the end of a quire so as to be able to join on with the beginning of the quire containing the next section without any gap or crowding. Hence the striking irregularities in the make-up of many early books. Instead of a book being printed in a succession of quinternions or a succession of quaternions we have many a make-up which can only be expressed by a cruelly mathematical formula, such as this, which represents the quiring of the Forty-two Line Bible.

a-i10; k10+1 lm10 n6+1; o-z10

10

10+1; A-F10 G4: aa-nn10; oo pp10 qq10+1; rr-zz AA-CC10; DD12 EE10+1; FF GG10 HH4+1 II10.

In this the index-letter shows the number of leaves in the quire, a-i10 being a short way of stating that each of the nine quires a b c d e f g h i has ten leaves in it. In the tenth quire (k) there is an extra leaf, and again in the thirteenth (n) the printer found that he had too much copy for six leaves and not enough for eight, and was therefore obliged to put in an odd one, because another press had already printed off the beginning of the next quire (o). Not infrequently it would happen that the odd amount of copy for a section was very difficult to fit exactly into a leaf even when the printer had compressed it by using as many contractions as possible, or eked it out by using no contractions at all. This accounts for the occurrence of a blank space, large or small, at the end of some sections without any break in the text, as the printer was sometimes careful to explain by the printed notice “Hic nihil deficit,” or as in our page from Ulrich Zell, “Vacat.”

As has been already noted, in a moment of enthusiasm Mr. Proctor once said to the present writer that it was impossible to find a fifteenth century book that was really ugly. This was certainly putting the case for his beloved incunables a peg too high, for there were plenty of bad printers before 1500, and even such a master as Jenson was by no means uniformly careful as to the quality of his presswork. But one of the legacies which the early printers received from the scribes was the art of putting their text handsomely on the page, and the difference which this makes in the appearance of a book is very marked, little as many modern printers and publishers attend to it. But in the books of the best printers of our own day, as well as in those of the best of the fifteenth century, from 65 per cent to 72 per cent of the height of the page is devoted to the text, from 28 per cent to 35 per cent being reserved for the upper and lower margins, of which at least two-thirds is for the lower and not more than one-third for the upper. As compared with the height of a page of type the breadth is usually in the proportion of about 45 to 70 (a trifle more in a quarto), and here again the outer margin is at least twice as great as the inner. Thus in a book with a page measuring 10 by 7¼ inches, the type-page should measure about 7 by 4¾ inches, with a lower margin of about 2 inches, an upper of 1 inch, an outer of 1¾ inches, and an inner of ¾ inch.

It will be greatly to the advantage of book-buyers to bear these proportions in mind, in order to measure how much a book offered to them has been cut down, and also to be able to instruct their binders as to how to reduce the absurd margins of some modern “Large Paper” copies to more artistic dimensions. Whether it is legitimate further to reduce the margins of an old book which has already been mangled by a binder in order to get the proportions better balanced is a nice question of taste. If a two-inch lower margin has been halved and a one-inch upper margin left intact, if the upper margin is reduced, the book will become a pleasant “working copy” instead of an obviously mangled large one, and the collector must settle in his own conscience whether this be a sufficient justification for snipping off a centimetre of old paper.

Exactly why the proportions here laid down, with their limits of variation, are right for books cannot easily be set forth. It is easiest to see in the case of the relation between the inner and outer margins. As William Morris was never tired of insisting, the unit in a book is, not a single page, but the two pages which can be seen at the same time. The two inner margins separate the two type-pages by a single band of white, which, if each inner margin were as large as the outer, would become insufferably conspicuous. As for the proportions between the lower and upper margins, the explanation may lie in the angle at which we habitually read books, or by the need for leaving room for the reader to hold the book in his hands. But whether it be a matter of inherent rightness or merely of long-established convention, the pleasure of handling a book with correct margins is very great, and a collector who secures an uncut copy of even a poorly printed book of the period when margins were understood, will find that it presents quite a pleasing and dignified appearance. And so in regard to other points, any book which illustrates the relations of the early printers to the scribes, the difficulties which they experienced in their work and the expedients by which they were surmounted deserves, whatever its date or present price, to be reckoned as a real incunable, and the collector who gets together a few dozen books of this kind will have far better sport for his outlay than he who is tied down too rigorously by chronology.

[27] It will be so much the better if the collector can add to them a copy of one of the early books printed at Rome (the German ones are too rare) in which there still survives the text of the rubrics, printed not in their appropriate places, but on a separate leaf or quire for the guidance of the rubricator.

[28] By Jenson and many early printers in Italy, and by Husner and a few others in Germany, the majuscules of the founts used in the text were massed together in headings with admirable effect. But for a time the heavy heading types carried all before them.

CHAPTER VII

EARLY GERMAN AND DUTCH ILLUSTRATED BOOKS

The natural method of illustrating a book printed with type is by means of designs cut in relief, which can be locked up in the forme with the type, so that text and illustrations are printed together by a single impression[29] without any special preparation of the paper. So long as the design to be printed stands out clearly on the block it matters nothing whether it be cut on wood or on soft metal. Even as between the design cut by hand and the process line-block which has as its basis a photograph taken direct from a pen drawing, the difference can hardly be said to be one of better and worse. We lose the individuality of the wood-cutter or wood-engraver, but we are brought into closer touch with the individuality of the artist, and whether we gain or lose depends on the ability of the artist to dispense with a skilled interpreter. The one requisite for success is that either the artist, or an interpreter for him, should recognize the limits within which his work can be effective. The reproductions of the artist’s designs will be looked at, not in isolation, but as part of an ensemble made up of two pages printed in a type which, perhaps with a little trouble, can be ascertained beforehand, and they will be printed not as proofs on a special press by a special workman on paper chosen solely to suit them, but with average skill and care in an ordinary press and on paper the choice of which will be dictated by several considerations. Whenever relief blocks have been used for any length of time as a method of book-illustration the rivalry of artists has tended to cause these restrictions to be forgotten. In our own day line-blocks have been almost driven out of the field by “half-tones,” which cannot be printed without the aid of paper specially coated, or at least rolled or “calendared.” Shortly before the process line-block was perfected the extreme fineness of the American school of wood-engraving had induced a nearly similar result. The successors of Bewick worked with equal disregard of the need for clearly defined lines, and when we travel back to the first half of the sixteenth century we find the Holbeins, Burgkmair, Weiditz, and other artists producing designs far too delicate for the conditions under which they were to be reproduced. Thus the charm of the woodcuts in books of the fifteenth century is by no means confined to that “quaintness” which is usually the first thing on which the casual observer comments. The “quaintness” is usually there, but along with it is a harmony between print, paper, and woodcut which has very rarely since been attained.

The claim made in the last paragraph must be understood as applying only to books honestly illustrated with blocks specially made for them. Books decorated with a job lot of cuts, as was often the case, especially after about 1495, may accidentally be delightful and often possess some of the charm of a scrapbook. It is good sport, for instance, to take one of Vérard’s later books and trace the origin of the cuts with which that cheaply liberal publisher made his wares attractive. But the incongruity is mostly manifest, and collectors might well be more fastidious than they show themselves and refuse to waste the price of a good book with homogeneous illustrations in buying half a dozen dull little volumes with an old Horae cut at the beginning and the end of each.

A second exception must be recognized in the books illustrated by untrained wood-cutters. In Germany and the Low Countries few, if any, quite untrained wood-cutters were employed, and this is true also of Paris and Florence. But at Lyon and other provincial towns in France (the Abbeville cutters, who probably came from Paris, are strikingly good), in a few books printed at Rome and Venice, here and there in Spain, and in one or two of Caxton’s and several of Wynkyn de Worde’s books in England, the cutting is so bad that, though it is possible sometimes to see that excellent designs underlie it, the effect is either ludicrous or repellent. Only fanatics could admire such pictures as we find in the early Lyonnese Quatre fils d’Aymon (s.n., but about 1480), in the Opuscula of Philippus de Barberiis printed by Joannes de Lignamine (Rome, 1481), in a large number of the cuts of the Malermi Bible of 1490 (Venice, G. Ragazzo for L. A. Giunta, 1490), in Los doze trabajos de Ercules (Zamora, 1483), in Caxton’s Aesop or in Wynkyn de Worde’s Morte d’Arthur (1527). Books such as these (the Malermi Bible is on a different footing from the rest owing to the wonderful excellence of the good cuts) may be bought as curiosities, or for the light they throw on the state of the book trade when such work could be put on the market, but no artistic merit can be claimed for them.

In Germany good work began early, because, to supply the demand for playing-cards and pictures of saints, schools of wood-cutters had grown up, more especially at Augsburg and at Ulm. Block-books also had come into existence in the district of the lower Rhine, and these, which in their earliest forms can hardly be later than 1460, must be divided between the Low Countries and Germany and prove the existence of competent workmen. The earliest type-printed books which possess illustrations are the little handful printed by Albrecht Pfister at Bamberg in and about 1461, described in Chapter V, but it was at Augsburg in the early seventies that book-illustration first flourished. As has been mentioned in Chapter V, trade difficulties at first stood in the way, but by the arbitration of Melchior Stanheim, abbot of the local monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra, these were settled on the sensible basis that printers might have as many illustrations in their books as they chose to provide, but that they must be designed and cut by Augsburg craftsmen. The series seems to have begun with some tolerably good column-cuts to an edition of the Lives of the Saints in German, of which the first part was issued in October, 1471, and the second in April, 1472. In Das guldin spiel of a Dominican writer, Ingold, finished on 1 August of the latter year, we find for the first time real power of characterization. Lovers of woodcuts owe some gratitude to the medieval trick of attaching edifying discourses to matters of everyday interest and amusement, for whereas the edifying discourses themselves could hardly carry illustrations, hunting, chess, or, as here, seven games which could be likened to the seven deadly sins, gave opportunities for showing pictures by which the natural man would be attracted. Another important book of this year, only known to me in Bämler’s plagiarism of it, was the first edition of the Belial, the amazing book which tells the story of Christ being summoned for the trespass committed in harrowing Hell.

In 1473 the heavy gothic type which Zainer used in these illustrated books was put at the disposal of the Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra and used to print a Speculum Humanae Saluationis, to which was added a summary in verse by Frater Johannes, an inmate of his monastery. This book was illustrated by 176 different cuts of Biblical subjects, of varying degrees of merit. In the same year, and again in 1474, Zainer printed an illustrated Plenarium, i.e. the Epistles and Gospels for the round of the Church’s year. In or shortly after 1475 he printed and illustrated a narrative of great contemporary interest, the story, written by one Tuberinus, of a child named Simon, who was supposed to have been slain by the Jews out of hatred of the Christian faith and desire to taste Christian flesh. The tale appears to contain internal evidence of its untruth, and the unhappy Jews who were cruelly executed had much better claims to be regarded as martyrs than “das susses Kind” Simon. But some of the pictures are quite animated, especially one (see Plate VIII) of the hired kidnapper beguiling the child through the streets and then deftly hurrying him into the house of doom with a touch of his knee.

In 1475 or 1476, and again with the date 1477, Zainer produced editions of the German Bible in large folio, illustrated with great pictorial capitals at the beginning of each book. But his greatest achievement was in an undated book of this period, the Speculum Humanae Vitae of Rodericus Bishop of Zamora, in the German translation of Heinrich Steinhowel. If this Mirror of Man’s Life had been written by a man with his eyes open instead of by a vapid rhetorician it should have been one of the most valuable documents for the social life of the fifteenth century, since it professes to contrast the advantages and evils of every rank and occupation of life, from the Pope and the Emperor down to craftsmen and labourers. There is but little joy to be gained from its text, but the Augsburg artist has atoned for many literary shortcomings by his vivid and charming pictures of scenes from the social life of his day, though it is not to be supposed that German judges took bribes quite so openly as he is pleased to represent. In addition to fifty-four woodcuts of this kind, there is a large genealogical tree of the House of Hapsburg, which is a triumph of decorative arrangement.

Two other early Augsburg printers devoted themselves to illustrated work, Johann Bämler and Anton Sorg. The former at first contented himself with prefixing a full-page frontispiece to his books, as in the Summa of Johannes Friburgensis and Die vier und zwanzig goldenen Harfen, both of 1472, and again in the picture of S. Gregory and Peter the Deacon in the Dialogues of the former printed for the monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra, and that of the dying Empress in the Historie von den sieben weisen Meistern of the following year. In the Belial of 1473 and Plenarium of 1474 Bämler was content for most of the cuts to borrow or copy from the editions of Zainer, but in the Alexander der Grosse of the former year and Melusine and Sieben Todsünden of the latter he himself led the way with some excellent sets of woodcuts, which were copied by others. Again, in Das Buch der Natur of 1475 we find a dozen specially designed full-page cuts, one to each book, illustrating man, the spheres, beasts, birds, mermaids, serpents, insects, etc.; in the Chronica von allen Kaisern and Königen of 1476 there are four large cuts, showing Christ in glory, the dream of the Emperor Sigismund, the vision of S. Gregory at Mass, and S. Veronica holding before her the cloth with the imprint of Christ’s face. It was perhaps in this same year that Bämler issued, without dating it, Jacob Sprenger’s Die Rosenkranz Bruderschaft, with two very striking cuts, one of the offering of garlands to Our Lady, the other of Christ’s scourgers looking back mockingly as they leave Him. A dated edition appeared in 1477. Another book of 1476 with a good set of cuts was the romance of Apollonius, King of Tyre. In 1477 Bämler issued a Buch der Kunst, which, like the Buch der Natur, went through several editions; it must be noted, however, that there is no such contrast between Art and Nature as the short title of this book might suggest, the full title being Buch der Kunst geistlich zu werden. The illustrations for the most part represent a soul in different situations, but there are also many of Biblical subjects. The last book of Bämler’s which need be mentioned is the Turken-Kreuzzüge of Rupertus de Sancto Remigio, which has an effective frontispiece of the Pope preaching to the Crusaders and some vigorous smaller cuts.

Anton Sorg began printing in 1475 and issued his first illustrated book the next year. He was a prolific printer, and issued many close imitations of books originated by Günther Zainer and others. The most famous work specially connected with his name is Ulrich von Reichenthal’s Das Conciliumbuch geschehen zu Costencz (1483), illustrated with forty-four larger cuts, all in the first ninety leaves, and 1158 coats of arms of the various dignitaries present at the Council. The larger cuts show the knighting of the Burgermeister of Constance, processions, a tournament, and the martyrdom of Huss (despite his safe conduct) and the scattering of his ashes over a field. The later Augsburg illustrated books, issued by the elder Schoensperger, Johann Schobsser, Peter Berger, and Hans Schauer, though they maintain a respectable level of craftsmanship, have less interest and individuality than these earlier ones. One Augsburg printer, Erhard Ratdolt, who had made himself a reputation by ten years’ work at Venice (1476-86), shortly after his return issued a notable illustrated book, the Chronica Hungarorum of Thwrocz. His main business was the production of missals and other service books, in some of which he made experiments in colour-printing.