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.
[Illustration: VII. VENICE, JENSON, 1470
CICERO. RHETORICA (41^a)]
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:
For viij hole vynets, prise the vynet xij^d viij^s
Item for xxj demi-vynets ... prise the demi-vynett
iiij^d vij^s
Item for Psalmes letters xv^c and di' ... the prise of
C. iiij^d vj^s ij^d
Item for p'ms letters lxiij^c ... prise of c. j^d v^s iij^d
Item for wrytynge of a quare and demi ... prise the quayr
xx^d ij^s vj^d
Item for wrytenge of a calender xij^d
Item for iij quayres of velym, prise the quayr xx^d v^s
Item for notynge of v quayres and ij leves, prise of the
quayr viij^d iii^s vij^d
Item for capital drawynge iij^c and di', the prise iij^d
Item for floryshynge of capytallis, v^c v^d
Item for byndynge of the boke xij^s
------------
li^s ij^d
------------
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 4(1/2) 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 4(1/2) 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 _[s]_ 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 Gunther 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 aesthetic 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 Bibliotheque 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-i^10; k^10+1 lm^10 n^6+1; o-z^10 [inverted 2]^10 [@]^10+1; A-F^10 G^4:
aa-nn^10; oo pp^10 qq^10+1; rr-zz AA-CC^10; DD^12 EE^10+1; FF GG^10
HH^4+1 II^10.
In this the index-letter shows the number of leaves in the quire, a-i^10
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 7(1/4) inches, the type-page should measure
about 7 by 4(3/4) inches, with a lower margin of about 2 inches, an
upper of 1 inch, an outer of 1(3/4) inches, and an inner of (3/4) 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[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.