Part 5 (1/2)
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 pa.s.s 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-ill.u.s.tration 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 Stra.s.sburg, or Plannck at Rome, should not be collected under the idea that they are in any true sense of the word incunabula.
What const.i.tutes 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 cla.s.sed 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 cla.s.sics, 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 ill.u.s.trate 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. Stra.s.sburg, 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 compet.i.tion 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 a.s.sociations 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 fas.h.i.+on, and these in ancient codices are very few, and the accents are very difficult to mark in printing he determined that s.p.a.ces 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 s.p.a.ces are found in many early books where Greek quotations occurred in the ma.n.u.scripts 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 (G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] Two editions of b.o.n.e.r's _Edelstein_, both ill.u.s.trated with over a hundred woodcuts, one dated 14th February, 1461 (copy at Wolfenb.u.t.tel), 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 Bibliotheque 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 Bibliotheque Nationale, the first also at Rylands and Wolfenb.u.t.tel); the same work in Latin (Rylands); lastly two editions of a poem called _Rechtstreit des Menschen mit dem Tode_ (both at Wolfenb.u.t.tel, the second also at the Bibliotheque 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 fas.h.i.+on in book-collecting is that after any particular cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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. .h.i.therto here mentioned belong to this cla.s.s. 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 ill.u.s.trate the evolution of the printed book from its ma.n.u.script 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: VII. VENICE, JENSON, 1470
CICERO. RHETORICA (41^a)]
Roughly speaking, it took about a century for printed books to shake off the influence of ma.n.u.script and establish their own traditions. The earliest books had no t.i.tlepage, no head-t.i.tle, no running t.i.tle, no pagination, and no printed chapter-headings, also no printed initials or ill.u.s.trations, blank s.p.a.ces 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: