E. Gordon Duff

“ An approximate date should always be supplied to the description of an undated book; but this date should not be a mere haphazard conjecture, but should be determined by an examination of the characteristics of the book, and comparison with dated books from the same press, so that the date that is ascribed is merely another expression for the characteristics noticed in the book. It is only after careful study that accurate dates can be ascribed to books of a particular press, and monographs on particular printers must be consulted when it is possible. ”

“ It should always be remembered that the signature has nothing whatever to do with the size. It is merely a guide to the binder to show him how many leaves go to the quire, and the order in which they come. The binder found it convenient to have his quires of from eight to twelve leaves each, and the quires were thus made up whether the book was folio, quarto, or octavo. Let us assume, for example, that the quires were to consist of eight leaves each, then each quire of the folio book contained four sheets, of the quarto book two sheets, and of the octavo book one sheet. ”

“ In our modern world, printed and written books have come to be looked upon as totally distinct things, whereas it is impossible to bring before our minds the state of things when books were first printed, until we look upon them as precisely the same. They were brought to fairs, or such general centres of circulation as Paris, Leipzig, or Frankfort, before the days of printing, just as afterwards, only that printing enabled the stationer to supply his buyers with much greater rapidity than before, and at much cheaper rates ”

“ The earliest date attributable to any of his books is 1466, the date written by Bamler, at that time an illuminator, in the copy of one of his forty-five line editions of the Bible now in the library at Wolfenbüttel. In 1471, Eggestein himself tells us that he had printed a large number of books. A little time before this he had issued a most glowing advertisement of his Bible. He appeals to the good man to come and see his wonderful edition, produced, as the early printers were so fond of saying, not by the pen, but by the wonderful art of printing. ”

“ The more popular, generally associated with the name of Dibdin, treats specimens of early printing merely as curiosities, valuable only according to their rarity or intrinsic worth, or for some individual peculiarity found in them.
The other method, of which Panzer was the first practical exponent, was called by Henry Bradshaw the Natural History method. Each press must be looked upon as a genus, and each book as a species, and the more or less close connection of the different members of the family must be traced by the characters which they present to our observation. ”

“ When speaking of fragments of books as binder’s waste, I mean books which have been in circulation, and have been thrown away as useless. The value of such fragments is principally in themselves. They may or may not be of interest. But by printer’s waste I mean ... waste, proof, or cancelled sheets in the printer’s office, which, in the early days when printers were their own bookbinders, would be used by the bookbinder for lining the boards, or the centres of quires, of books bound in the same office where they were printed. ”

“ In 1474 he began to use Gothic type, owing to its great saving of space; and in 1471, in the Epistolæ familiares, he used Greek type in the quotations, the first instance of its employment in Venice. It is curious that, with its devotion to the new learning, Venice should not have been the first to issue a Greek book. Jenson had frequently to use Greek type in his books, but he never printed a complete work in that language. Milan led the way, printing the Greek Grammar of Lascaris in 1476; and it was not till 1485 that Venice issued its first Greek book, the Erotemata of Chrysoloras. ”

“ It was not till 1479 that a printer’s name appears in the colophon to a work by Johannes Alphonsus de Benevento. The printer, Jean Parix, was a native of Heidelberg. He had founts both of Gothic and Roman type, the Gothic being especially remarkable for the shapes of the letters, which are very distinctive, and though eccentric in form they are not at all unpleasing in appearance. In 1488, Henry Mayer began to print, issuing in that year a translation of the De consolatione philosophiæ of Boethius, ‘en romance,’ and the first French translation of the Imitatio Christi. ”

“ If a collector wants modern ornamental bindings, let him put them on modern books, there only are they not out of place.
About the German binders, who necessarily concern us most at the time of the invention of printing, we know very little; but, on the other hand, there is a great deal to be learnt. Their bindings, both of pigskin and calf, are impressed with a large number of very beautiful and carefully executed dies, which could with a little care be separated into groups. ”

“ Too little attention has been paid, in this country at any rate, to the fact that some knowledge about early bookbinding is essential to the student of early printing. At first the printer was also a stationer and bookbinder, and the three occupations were hardly clearly defined or definitely separated within the first hundred years after the invention of printing. Books always required some kind of binding, and the early printer sold his books to the purchaser ready bound, though copies seem always to have been obtainable in sheets by such as wished them in that state. ”

“ Only two types are used throughout the Psalter, but both are very large. Mr. Weale, on account of the variations observable in the letters, insists that the book was printed from cut and not cast type; but he gives no reason for this opinion; and when we consider that books had already been produced from cast type, it is impossible to understand why Schœffer should have resorted to so laborious a method. The dissimilarity of some letters is not so strong a proof of their having been cut, as the similarity of the greater number is of their having been cast. ”

“ There is no doubt that, as types come to be studied and recognised, more books will be found printed by this Brotherhood. Other establishments of the same Order had practised, or were shortly to practise, the art of printing. That at Marienthal, important in the history of printing, had been at work for some years; others at Rostock, Nuremberg, and Gouda were to follow; while, as we have seen, if we are to believe M. Madden, the monastery at Weidenbach was the instructor of all the more noted printers of Europe. ”

“ When we speak of the invention of printing, we mean the invention of the art of multiplying books by means of single types capable of being used again and again in different combinations for the printing of different books. ”

“ It has been said inventions will always be made when the need for them has arisen, and this is the real reason, perhaps, why the discovery of printing was delayed. The intellectual requirements of the mediæval world were not greater than could be satisfactorily supplied by the scribe and illuminator, but with the revival of letters came an absolute need for the more rapid multiplication of the instruments of learning. ”

“ When there was no Greek press in Paris, we find Georgius Hermonymus making a living by constant copying of Greek books for the scholars who were so eager for them. So Reuchlin in the same way supported himself by copying.
‘In fact, the two departments of compositor and corrector in the printing office were the direct representatives and successors of the scribe and corrector of manuscripts from the early times. The kind of men whom we find mentioned in the early printing offices as correctors, are just such men as would be sought for in earlier times in an important scriptorium. ”

“ When we consider that printing of a rudimentary kind had existed for so many centuries, and that during the whole of the early part of the fifteenth century examples with words or even whole lines of inscription were being produced, we can only wonder that the discovery of printing from movable types should have been made so late. ”

“ It will be noticed that printing was introduced into many of the provincial towns of France merely to serve a temporary purpose, and not for the object of permanent work. In many cases the printer was brought to the town, probably at the request and expense of the ecclesiastical authorities, to print such service-books as were required for the use of the church. For this reason we find printers and types moving from place to place, so that it is not always easy to assign a book to a particular town, when the type in which it is printed was used in several places. ”

“ The number of different block-books in existence is hard to estimate, but it must approach somewhere near one hundred. Many of these are of little importance, many others of too late a date to be of much interest.
The best known of the earlier block-books are the Ars Moriendi, the Biblia Pauperum, the Apocalypse, and the Canticum Canticorum. Of these, the first and third are probably German, the second and fourth Dutch. [9] Of all these books there are a number of editions, not easily distinguishable apart, and which it is difficult to place in chronological order. ”

“ The Fifteen Oes itself is a most interesting book. It was printed originally, no doubt, as an extra part for an edition of the Horæ ad usum Sarum now [136] entirely lost. It contains a beautifully executed woodcut of the crucifixion,—one of a series of five which occur complete in a Horæ printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1494, and it is also the only existing book from this press which has borders to the pages. Caxton printed altogether about one hundred books, using in them altogether eight types. ”

“ We may safely assume, with our present knowledge, that the art of printing was introduced into Italy in 1465 by two Germans, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz. On their arrival in Italy they settled first in the Monastery of Saint Scholastica at Subiaco, an establishment of Benedictines, of which Cardinal Turrecremata was Abbot, where they would be in congenial society, since, as Cardinal Quirini says, many of the inmates were Germans. ”

“ For the study of typography the Italian presses are not nearly so interesting as those of other countries, but from a literary point of view they are immeasurably superior. The Renaissance movement had been at work in Italy during the whole of the fifteenth century, and the great impetus given by the fall of Constantinople was acting most powerfully when the printing press was introduced. ”