EARLY PRINTING
Wherever typography originated, it was from Mentz that it was taught to
the world. The disturbances in that city in 1462 drove many of its
citizens from their homes, and the German printers were thus dispersed
over Europe. Within a little more than twenty years from the time of the
first issue from the Mentz printing-press, other presses were
established at Strasburg, Bamberg, Cologne, Augsburg, Nuremberg,
Spires, Ulm, Lubeck, and Breslau; Basle, Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples,
and many other Italian cities; Paris and Lyons; Bruges; and, in 1477, at
Westminster.
Before the end of the fifteenth century eighteen European countries were
printing books. Italy heads the list with seventy-one cities in which
presses were at work, Germany follows with fifty, France with
thirty-six, Spain with twenty-six, Holland with fourteen; and after
these England's four printing-places--Westminster, London, Oxford, and
St Albans--make a somewhat small show. Some other countries, however,
had but one printing-town. With the possible exception of Holland,
England and Scotland are the only countries which are indebted to a
native and not (as in every case save that of Ireland) to a German for
the introduction of printing.
The early printers were more than mere workmen. They were usually
editors and publishers as well. Some of them were associated with
scholars who did the editorial work: Sweynheim and Pannartz, for
instance, the first to set up a press in Italy, had the benefit of the
services of the Bishop of Aleria, and their rival, Ulric Hahn, enjoyed
for a while the assistance of the celebrated Campanus. Aldus Manutius,
too, the founder of the Aldine press at Venice, though himself a
literary man and a learned editor, availed himself of the help of
several Greek scholars in the revising and correcting of classical
texts. The exact relations of these editors to the printers, however,
is not known. The English printer, Caxton, who also was a scholar,
usually, though not invariably, edited his publications himself.
The first printers were also booksellers, and sold other people's books
as well as their own. Several of their catalogues or advertisements
still exist. The earliest known book advertisements are some issued by
Peter Schoeffer, one, dating from about 1469, giving a list of
twenty-one books for sale by himself or his agents in the several towns
where he had established branches of his business, and another
advertising an edition of St Jerome's _Epistles_ published by Schoeffer
at Mentz in 1470. An advertisement by Caxton is also extant, and being
short, as well as interesting, may be quoted here. It is as follows:--
If it plese ony man spirituel or temporel to bye ony pyes,[3] of two
and thre comemoracios of salisburi vse enpryntid after the forme of
this preset lettre whiche ben wel and truly correct, late hym come
to westmonester in to the almonesrye at the reed pale and he shal
haue them good chepe.
Supplico stet cedula.
[3] The Pye, or Pica, directed how saints'-days falling in Lent,
Easter, Whitsuntide, and the octave of Trinity, were to be observed
with respect to the "commemorations" of these seasons.
The date of this notice is about 1477 or 1478. Other extant examples of
early advertisements are those of John Mentelin, a Strasburg printer,
issued about 1470, and of Antony Koburger, of Nuremberg, issued about
ten years later. In 1495 Koburger advertised the Nuremberg Chronicle.
Early printed books exhibit a very limited range of subject, and were
hardly ever used to introduce a new contemporary writer. Theology and
jurisprudence in Germany, and the classics in Italy, inaugurated the new
invention, and lighter fare was not served to the patrons of printed
literature until a later date. Italy made the first departure, and took
up history, romance, and poetry. France began with the classics, and
then neglected them for romances and more popular works, but at the same
time became noted for the beautifully illuminated service-books produced
at Paris and Rouen, and which supplied the clergy of both France and
England. England, who received printing twelve years after Italy and
seven years after France, made more variety in her books than any.
Caxton's productions consist of works dealing with subjects of wider
interest, even if less learned and improving--romances, chess, good
manners, _Æsop's Fables_, the _Canterbury Tales_, and the _Adventures of
Reynard the Fox_.
From what sort of type the Bible usually considered to be the first
printed book was produced is not known. Some competent authorities think
that wooden types were used. Others are in favour of metal, and like the
late Mr Winter Jones, scout the notion of wooden types and consider them
"impossible things." But Skeen, in his _Early Typography_, declares that
hard wood would print better than soft lead, such as Blades hints that
Caxton's types were made of, and to illustrate the possibility of wooden
types prints a word in Gothic characters from letters cut in boxwood.
The objections made to types of this nature are that they would be too
weak to bear the press, could never stand washing and cleaning, and
would swell when wet and shrink when dried. Some have thought that the
early types were made by stamping half-molten metal with wooden punches,
and so forming matrices from which the types were subsequently cast.
As we have already noticed in connection with the Mazarin Bible, the
forms of the types were copied from the Gothic or black letter
characters in which Bibles, psalters, and missals were then written.
When Roman type was first cut is uncertain. The "R" printer of
Strasburg, whose name is unknown, and whose works are dated only by
conjecture, may have been the first to use it. It was employed by
Sweynheim and Pannartz in 1467, and by the first printers in Paris and
Venice. It was brought to the greatest perfection by Nicolas Jenson, a
Frenchman working in Venice. Caxton never employed it, and it was not
introduced into England until 1509. In that year Richard Pynson, a
London printer and a naturalised Englishman, though Norman by birth,
used some Roman type in portions of the _Sermo Fratris Hieronymi de
Ferrara_, and in 1518 he produced _Oratio Ricardi Pacaei_, which was
entirely printed in these characters.
Had the idea of the title-page, in the modern sense of the term, a very
obvious idea, as it seems to us, occurred to the first printers, we
should not have to sharpen our wits on the hundred and one doubtful
points with which the subject of early bibliography bristles. To-day,
the title-page not only introduces the book itself, but declares the
name of the writer and the publisher, and the time and place of
publication. But during the first sixty years of printing title-pages
were rare, and the old methods followed by the scribes in writing their
manuscript books still obtained. The subject matter began with "Incipit"
or "Here beginneth," etc., according to the language in which the work
was written, and such information as the printer considered it desirable
to impart was contained in the colophon, or note affixed to the end of
the book.
More often than not these colophons are irritatingly reticent, and
withhold the very thing we want to know. At other times they are
informing, and in some cases amusing. Dr Garnett has suggested that as a
literary pastime some one might do worse than collect fifteenth-century
colophons into a volume, for the sake of their biographical and personal
interest, but I am not aware that his idea has been carried out. Two
colophons have already been quoted here, the first printed colophon (see
p. 103) and one which is possibly from the pen of Gutenberg (see
p. 101). A quaint specimen found in a volume of Cicero's _Orationes
Philippicæ_, printed at Rome by Ulrich Hahn, about 1470, descends to
puns. It is in Latin verse, and supposed by some to have been written by
Cardinal Campanus, who edited several of Hahn's publications. It informs
the descendants of the Geese who saved the Capitol, that they need have
no more fear for their feathers, for the art of Ulrich the _Cock_
(German _Hahn_ = Latin _Gallus_ = English _Cock_) will provide a potent
substitute for quills. A colophon to Cicero's _Epistolæ Familiares_,
printed at Venice in 1469 by Joannes de Spira, declares with pardonable
pride that he had printed two editions of three hundred copies in four
months.
The first book with any attempt at a title-page is the _Sermo ad Populum
Predicabilis_, printed at Cologne in 1470 by Arnold Therhoernen, but a
full title-page was not generally adopted till fifty years later. The
first English title-page is very brief, and reads as follows:--
A passing gode lityll boke necessarye & behouefull agenst the
Pestilence.
This gode lityll boke, written by Canutus, Bishop of Aarhaus, was
printed in London about 1482 by Machlinia. A later development of the
title-page was a full-page woodcut, headed by the name of the work, as
in the =Kynge Richarde cuer du lyon=, printed in 1528 by Wynkyn de
Worde. The same woodcut does duty in another of the same printer's books
for Robert the Devil.
Early title-pages in Latin sometimes render the names of familiar places
of publication in a very unfamiliar form. London may appear as Augusta
Trinobantum, Edinburgh as Aneda, Dublin as Eblana. Some towns are easily
recognised by their Latin names, such as Roma or Venetiæ; others are
less obvious, such as Moguntia, or Mentz; Lutetia, or Paris; Argentina,
or Strasburg. Several places had more than one Latin form of name.
London, for example, was also Londinum, and Edinburgh, Edemburgem.
Pagination, or numbering of the pages, was first introduced by Arnold
Therhoernen, in the same book in which he gives us the first title-page,
and to which reference has already been made. He did not place the
figures at the top corner, however, but in the centre of the right hand
margin.
The practice of printing the first word of a leaf at the foot of the
leaf preceding, as a guide for the arrangement of the sheets, was first
employed by Vindelinus de Spira, of Venice, in the _Tacitus_ which he
printed about 1469.