Alfred W. Pollard

“ Should you have been anxious to find this master of the commemorated art in this aforesaid month of April, you could easily have found him at Louvain, with leisure for printing, on Flint-hill. This I am anxious to say lest, if haply you are in doubt, you should remain ignorant of the fact. “Where he works there will be his wealth,” says Ovid. There also he lives so content with his lot and craft, under such happy auspices, and with so much favor of fortune, that I cannot be induced to believe that any impulse to depart, or even to think about it, can have come to him. ”

“ This noble work was printed by Theodoric Rood, a German by blood, sent from Cologne, and an Englishman, Thomas Hunte, was his partner. The gods grant that they may surpass the Venetians. The art which the Frenchman Jenson taught the Venetians, the British land has learnt by its mother-wit. Cease, Venetians, from sending us the books you engrave: we are now, O Venetians, selling to others. The art which was first known to you, O Latin Fathers, has been discovered by us. Although Virgil sings of the Britons as all a world away, yet the Latin tongue delights them. ”

“ Lest to your loss, excellent reader, the honeyed grace of a most elegant book should some day perish by the wrongs of devouring time, or the noble memory of the most illustrious author be blotted out by age, lest also posterity, defrauded of their pleasure, should lack amorous toys, Franciscus Tantius Corniger, a Milanese poet, ordered these Rhythms of Gasparo Visconti, written in the vernacular tongue, to be printed, against their master’s will, in an edition of a thousand copies, at Milan, in the year from the Virgin’s salvation-bringing delivery 1493, on February 26th. ”

“ COLOPHONS AT MAINZ
Latin Bible. Mainz: Fust and Schoeffer, 1462.
It was said at the end of our first chapter that the presence of a colophon in an old book is to be taken as a sign of its printer’s pride in his work. This being so, it would seem only reasonable to expect that the very earliest books of all, the books in which the new art made its first appearance before the book-buying world, should be found equipped with the most communicative of colophons, telling us the story of the struggles of the inventor, and expatiating on the greatness of his triumph. ”

“ Much more might be said about the old printer as revealed by the colophon—his trade jealousies, his disposition to monopolize, his deference to patrons, his joy at having carried his work through the press, his conviction that his labors have not been unattended by the divine blessing. That inferior person, the author, too, occasionally gets a good word, especially when his authorship assumes the form of translation or commentary. ”

“ While to Mainz belongs the supreme credit of having brought printing to the position of a practical art, the city in which it attained its highest perfection and popularity in the fifteenth century was undoubtedly Venice. The output from the Venetian presses represented some forty per cent. of the entire book production of Italy, and its quality was at least as remarkable as its quantity. It is natural, therefore, to turn from Mainz to Venice in our quest for interesting colophons, as wherever printers did good work and took pride in it we may expect to find correspondingly good colophons. ”

“ Dear friend, if perchance you would fain know who was the producer and master of this volume of the printing art, learn that the craftsman’s name is Master Jan Veldener. Your eyes will tell you what industry he possesses, how sure his hand in cutting, engraving, pressing and stamping, add also in designing and fashioning and whatever secret in the art is more closely hid ”

“ If, instead of studying each colophon singly for the sake of the information it may give us as to the book which it completes, or for its own human interest,—if it chance to have any,—we compare the same printer’s colophons in successive books, and the colophons of different printers in successive editions; if we group those which have similar characteristics, and glance also at the books which have no colophons at all, or quite featureless ones, then [4] if there is anything to be learnt from colophons, we ought to be by way of learning it ”

“ It would be a proof how little the conception of painting as an art independent of every other was developed if we could suppose the illustrator of a fourteenth-century Dante, for example, whose talent would in this age have made his fortune as a painter of pictures, condescending to the humble labors of a copyist, exquisite as his calligraphy might be. ”

“ Printing started late in England and was handicapped by the impoverishment wrought by the Wars of the Roses. The facility with which all learned books were supplied from abroad quickened the growth of English learning, but restricted the English printers to printing and reprinting a few vernacular books of some literary pretensions and an endless stream of works of popular devotion and catch-penny trifles. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge could support a permanent printer, and English scholars were obliged to have their books printed abroad. ”

“ It admits us in a measure into the intimacy of the old printer, shows us what manner of man he was, and upon what he rested his claims to esteem as a benefactor of the community. We find him very decided in asserting his superiority to the copyist, a reaction, perhaps, against a feeling entertained in some quarters that the new art was base and mechanical in comparison with the transcriber’s, with which, in the estimation of the devotee of calligraphy, it could only compare as a motor-car may compare with an Arab steed. ”

“ Not every one could be expected, even at a time when interest in the new art must have been very keen, to identify the printer of a book from the type or initials used in it; and, as has already been noted, the whole reason for the existence of printers’ colophons was to identify the master-craftsman with any book of which he was proud, and so to advertise his firm. ”

“ This it is which gives the colophon such extraordinary importance in the history of early printing. Wherever one exists, the question of place and printer, and frequently the question of date, is entirely solved. Where there is no colophon, we are left to conjecture. The problem is, indeed, generally soluble by a really scientific investigation, but it is only of late that science has been thoroughly brought to bear upon it by a Bradshaw and a Proctor. ”

“ The immense advantage of a book bearing a title on its front and manifesting its nature from the first is so apparent that our practical age cannot comprehend how it could have been less obvious to our predecessors than to ourselves. ”

“ Here end the Decretals, most correctly printed in the bounteous city of Rome, queen of the whole world, by those excellent men Master Ulrich Han, a German, and Simon di Niccolo of Lucca: with the ordinary glosses of Bernard of Parma and his additions, which are found in few copies; both printed and corrected with the greatest diligence. Purchase these, book-buyer, with a light heart, for you will find such excellence in this volume that you will be right in easily reckoning other editions as worth no more [109] than a straw. ”

“ For in it is seated the foundation of our faith, and the glory and root of the Christian religion. From reading it you will provide yourself with knowledge of all the things in which our salvation consists, and you should do this the more willingly because this most precious manuscript has been published in a most correct form at so happy an epoch, in the fifth year namely of the pontificate of our most holy lord Pope Sixtus IV, the twenty-sixth of the imperial rule of the most Christian Frederick III, and the first of the noble doge of Venice Andrea Vendramini. ”

“ The end of this very useful ordinary exposition of the Codex of Justinian the German, printed in the flourishing University of Naples by the most expert and renowned Sixtus Riessinger, a German, who, amid his obstacles, flourishes, thrives, and wins renown, nor thinks that traitors, malignants, and shifty rogues will accomplish more for the glory of Eternal God and the welfare of the country of King Ferdinand. ”

“ The Venetian colophons are plentiful and full of information, though chiefly about the publisher’s side of printing. What makes them a little [31] alarming to the pedestrian editor is that so many of the earliest and most interesting specimens are in verse. The books most favored by the first Venetian printers were editions of the Latin classics and Latin translations of the Greek ones. To see these through the press each printer had to retain the services of a corrector, who filled a position half-way between the modern proof-reader’s and editor’s. ”

“ But during these twenty-two years from 1457 to 1478, inclusive, he had made his books bear continual testimony to one great fact, that the art of printing had been invented and brought to perfection in Germany, in the city of Mainz; and in any weighing of the comparative claims that have been advanced on behalf of Germany and Holland, I think that the evidence of Schoeffer’s colophons alone would suffice to give the priority to Germany and Mainz. ”

“ The beginnings of printing, as of other arts, were obscure, and we must be most grateful for any information which has been afforded us by men who assuredly no more thought of posterity than does any tradesman who advertises his wares without reflecting that he too is contributing something to the history of culture or of industry. ”

“ A single instance will suffice to illustrate the secrets thus revealed. To Ludwig Hain, Bartolommeo di Libri of Florence is the printer of four books. In Mr. Proctor’s Index he is credited with no fewer than one hundred and twenty-six in the collections of the British Museum and the Bodleian alone, among these being the famous first edition of Homer and some of the finest Florentine illustrated books. He is thus raised [5] from obscurity to the front rank of Italian printers, an example of a man who, though he did excellent work, hardly ever troubled himself to take credit for it. ”

“ But in Germany at this time, between citizens of the same town, trade rights, I fancy, were much more respected than at Venice, for instance, or at Paris, where the editions of Caesaris and Stoll were impudently pirated by two other firms in the very same street. At all events, it is worth noticing that the “Catholicon” printer’s colophon seems to have been taken over by Schoeffer, who bought some of his stock, and by the brothers Bechtermünze, who had the use of his types. ”

“ It is clear, therefore, that in an edition now lost to us Caesaris must have played Veldener the same trick as Conrad of Westphalia had already played him, and that this Paris edition must have been reprinted by Balsarin at Lyons without troubling to alter the colophon. Truly there are pitfalls for the unwary in dealing with early books!
Perhaps one reason why colophons were sometimes reprinted as they stood was that a printer without a scholarly “corrector” to aid him had a wholesome dread of plunging into the middle of a Latin sentence. ”

“ Proctor, who would have been delighted to quote them in his admirable monograph on “The Printing of Greek.”
Difficulties were natural in the early days of the art, and must often have beset the path of the wandering printers who passed from town to town, or from monastery to monastery, printing one or two books at each. As late as 1493 one such printer, not yet identified, who started his press at Acqui, though he was engaged on only a humble school-book, the “Doctrinale” of Alexander Gallus, found himself in sore straits owing to the plague raging in the neighboring towns. ”

“ I beseech you, my friend, when you are reading my book, to keep your hands behind its back, for fear you should do mischief to the text by some sudden movement, for a man who knows nothing about writing thinks that it is no concern of his. ”

“ But when Rome was vying with Venice, and the rest of Italy with both, and almost every important press was turning out classical editions, the market quickly became overstocked, and great printers like Wendelin of Speier at Venice and Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome found that they had burnt their fingers. Hence a commercial motive reinforced that natural self-esteem which still causes every editor to assume that his method of crossing a t or dotting an i gives his edition a manifest superiority over every other. ”

“ Who never ceasest to praise the devout Mary.
Thanks be to God. In addition to the “Catholicon,” the British Museum possesses three books in the same type, which are, therefore, ascribed to the same press—a “Tractatus racionis et conscientiae” of Matthew of Cracow, and two editions of the “Summa de articulis fidei” of S. Thomas Aquinas; but these, perhaps because they are only little books, have no printer’s colophon. ”

“ We might imagine that there was a fear that the natural conservatism of the church would look askance at the new art, and that therefore in printing the Bible it was thought best to say nothing about it. ”