Fine Books Part 4

[22] In the Cologne Chronicle. See _supra_, p. 34.

[23] Misprinted _spalmorum_.

[24] It seems reasonable to believe that Ulrich Zell, the first printer at Cologne, who was a clerk of the diocese of Mainz, and Sweynheym and Pannartz, who introduced printing into Italy, owed their training to Fust and Schoeffer.

CHAPTER V

OTHER INCUNABULA

In August, 1462, the struggle between its rival Archbishops led to Mainz being sacked. Very little more printing was done there until 1465, and we need not doubt the tradition that journeymen trained by Gutenberg and Fust and Schoeffer, finding no work for them at Mainz, carried such experience as they had gained to other towns and countries, where they appear, after a few years spent in manufacturing presses and types, in all the glory of "prototypographers."

But even before 1462 two other cities possessed the art--Bamberg and Stra.s.sburg. At Bamberg it was practised possibly by Gutenberg, who may have printed there the Thirty-six Line Bible about 1457, certainly by Albrecht Pfister, who is found in possession of the type of this Bible, and may himself have had copies for sale. The books he himself printed at Bamberg are nine in number,[25] and three or four bound volumes seem to have preserved all the remnants of them that we possess, and all of these have found their way to public libraries.

The large and stately folios produced by the early Stra.s.sburg printers have naturally resisted the ravages of time better than the Bamberg popular books. Certainly clumsier than the contemporary Mainz books, they yet have a dignity and character of their own which command respect. The first Stra.s.sburg printer, Johann Mentelin, was at work there in or before 1460, and was helped during his life and succeeded after his death (1477) by his son-in-law, Adolf Rusch, who never put his name to a book, and most of whose impressions pa.s.s under the name of "the R-printer," from the peculiar form of that letter found in one of his types. Mentelin himself did not place his name at the end of a book till he had been at work more than a dozen years; Heinrich Eggestein, who began work about 1464, was equally reticent, and throughout the 'seventies and 'eighties a large proportion of the books printed at Stra.s.sburg were anonymous. Heinrich k.n.o.blochtzer, who started about 1476, combines some of the charm of the earlier printers with greater literary interest and the attraction of ill.u.s.trations and ornamental capitals and borders. Of him we shall have to speak in a later chapter.

But after 1485 the bulk of Stra.s.sburg printing was dull and commercial.

In the fifteenth century Basel was not yet, as it became in 1501, a member of the Swiss Confederacy, and typographically its relations with Mainz, Stra.s.sburg, Nuremberg and other German towns were very close. In what year printing began there is not known. There is no dated book from a Basel press until as late as 1474, but the date of purchase, 1468, in a book (S. Gregory's _Moralia in Job_), printed by Berthold Ruppel, of Hanau, takes us back six years, and it is possible that Ruppel was at work even before this. He is identified with reasonable certainty with one of the servants of Gutenberg mentioned in connection with the lawsuit ended in 1455, and he printed Latin Bibles and other large works such as appealed to the ambition of the German prototypographers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VI. COLOGNE, ULRICH ZELL, 1465-66

CICERO. DE OFFICIIS (7^b)]

The second and more interesting Basel printer, Michael Wenssler, seems to have taken Schoeffer as his model, and reprinted many of Schoeffer's editions, following the wording of his colophons and investing them with the same glories of red ink. Whereas, however, from about 1476 Schoeffer's activity was much less conspicuous, Wenssler for the next ten years poured out edition after edition of all the heaviest legal and theological works, until he must have overstocked the market. Then he devoted himself almost exclusively to liturgical printing, but his affairs became hopelessly involved, and in 1491 he fled from his creditors at Basel, and became a wandering printer, finding commissions at Cluny and Macon, and then settling for a time at Lyon. Many of the early printers in Italy made this mistake of flooding the market with a single cla.s.s of book, but Wenssler is almost the only notable example in Germany of this lack of business instinct.

Travelling along the Rhine from Mainz in the opposite direction we come to Cologne, and here Ulrich Zell, like Berthold Ruppel, a native of Hanau, but who calls himself in his books a "clerk of the diocese of Mainz," enrolled his name on the register of the University in June, 1464, doubtless for the sake of the business privileges which the Senate had it in its power to confer. The first dated book from his press, S.

John Chrysostom, _Super psalmo quinquagesimo_ (Psalm li., according to our English reckoning), was issued in 1466, but before this appeared he had almost certainly produced an edition of the _De Officiis_ (see the frontispiece to this chapter, Plate VI), the most popular of Cicero's works in Germany, which Fust and Schoeffer had printed in 1465 and reprinted the next year. Avoiding the great folios on which the early printers of Mainz, Stra.s.sburg, and Basel staked their capital, Zell's main work was the multiplication of minor theological treatises likely to be of practical use to priests. Of these he issued countless editions in small quarto, along with a comparatively few small folios, in which, however, his skill as a printer is seen to better advantage. He continued in active work until 1494, gave, as we have seen (Chapter III.), his version of the origin of printing to the compiler of the Cologne Chronicle published in 1499, and was still alive as late as 1507.

Zell's earliest rival at Cologne was Arnold ther h.o.e.rnen, who printed from 1470 to 1482. He may very likely have been self-taught, for his early work is very uneven, but he developed into an excellent craftsman.

He is the first notable example of a printer getting into touch with a contemporary author, and regularly printing all his works, the author in this case being Werner Rolewinck, a Carthusian of Cologne, who wrote sermons and historical works, including the _Fasciculus Temporum_, an epitome of history, which found much favour all over Europe. Ther h.o.e.rnen used to be credited with the honour of having printed the first book with a t.i.tlepage, the _Sermo ad populum predicabilis In festo presentacionis Beatissime Marie semper virginis_ of 1470. Schoeffer, however, had preceded him by some seven years by devoting a separate page to the t.i.tle of each of his editions of a Bull of Pius II (see p.

93), and as neither printer continued the practice these isolated instances must be taken as accidental. In the same book, ther h.o.e.rnen for the first time placed printed numbers on the leaves, but this improvement also was not followed up. The third Cologne typographer, Johann Koelhoff the Elder, was the first (in 1472) to place printed "signatures" on the quires of a book, so as to show the binder the order in which they were to be arranged. Hitherto the quires had been marked by hand, and this improvement was not suffered to drop for a time like the others, but quickly spread all over Europe.

At Augsburg Gunther Zainer completed his first book, an edition of the Latin Meditations on the Life of Christ taken from the works of S.

Bonaventura, on the 13th March, 1468. Though he followed this with three heavy books which had found favour at Mainz and Stra.s.sburg, Zainer had the wisdom to strike out a line for himself. Augsburg had long been the chief centre of the craftsmen who cut and printed the woodcuts of saints, for which there seems to have been a large sale in Germany, and also the pictures used for playing-cards. The cutters were at first inclined to regard the idea of book-ill.u.s.trations with suspicion, as likely to interfere with their existing business. It was decided, however, by the local Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, an ecclesiastic with typographical tastes, that ill.u.s.trated books might be printed so long as members of the wood-cutters' guild were employed in making the blocks.

With this as a working agreement, ill.u.s.trated books greatly prospered at Augsburg, not only Gunther Zainer, but Johann Bamler and Anton Sorg (a very prolific printer), turning them out with much success throughout the 'seventies.

At Nuremberg printing was introduced in 1470 by Johan Sensenschmidt, who for a short time had as his partner Heinrich Kefer, of Mainz, another of Gutenberg's servants. Much more important, however, was the firm of Anton Koberger, who began work the next year, and speedily developed the largest business of any printer in Germany. Koberger was able to deal successfully in all the heavy books, which after 1480 other firms found it wiser to leave alone, and seems to have employed Adolf Rusch at Stra.s.sburg and perhaps other printers elsewhere, to print for him. He also printed towards the end of the century some very notable ill.u.s.trated books. Next to Koberger, Friedrich Creussner, who started in 1473, had the largest business in Nuremberg, and Georg Stuchs made himself a reputation as a missal printer, a special department from which Koberger held aloof.

At Speier, after two anonymous firms had worked in 1471 and 1472 without much success, Peter Drach (1477) developed an important business. At Ulm Johann Zainer, a kinsman of Gunther Zainer, of Augsburg, began in 1473 by printing ill.u.s.trated books, which were subsequently taken up in the 'eighties by Leonhard Holle, Conrad Dinckmut, and Johann Reger, while Zainer himself became a miscellaneous printer. At Lubeck Lucas Brandis produced a universal history called the _Rudimentum Nouitiorum_ in 1475 and a fine _Josephus_, important liturgical work being subsequently done by Bartholomaeus Ghotan, Matthaeus Brandiss and Stephan Arndes, similar work being also produced at Magdeburg partly by some of these Lubeck printers. Fine liturgical work was also done at Wurzburg by Georg Reyser, who may previously have printed anonymously at Speier, and who started his kinsman Michel in a similar business at Eichstatt. At Leipzig, where Marcus Brandis printed one or two books in 1481, and the following years, a sudden development took place about 1490, and a flood of small educational works was poured out by some half a dozen printers, of whom Conrad Kachelofen and Martin Landsberg were the most prolific.

Presses were also set up in numerous other places, so that by the end of the century at least fifty German cities, towns and villages had seen a printer at work. In many of these the art took no root, and in some the printer was only employed for a short time to print one or more books for a particular purpose. But the total output of incunabula in Germany was very large, and leaving out of count the fugitive single sheets, the scanty remnants of which can bear no relation to the thousands which must have been produced, out of about 25,000 different books and editions printed in the fifteenth century registered as extant at the time of writing probably nearly a third were produced in Germany. If, as is likely, a large proportion of the eleven thousand undescribed incunabula (among which, however, there must be many duplicates and triplicates) reported to have been discovered by the agents of the German Royal Commission for a General Catalogue of Incunabula are German, this rough estimate must be largely increased, and it may be proved that Germany was as prolific as Italy itself.

Considerable as was this output of German printing at home, it was probably nearly equalled by the work done by German printers in the other countries of Europe to which they hastened to carry the new art.

Turning first to Italian incunabula we find that the first book printed in Italy has perished utterly. The cruel little Latin grammar which pa.s.sed under the name of _Donatus_ had, as we have seen, been frequently printed in Holland and by the first Mainz printers, and there are several later instances of an edition of it being produced as soon as a press was set up, merely to show the printer's types. This was done by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, the two Germans who began printing at the monastery of Saint Scholastica at Subiaco, some forty miles from Rome, in 1465, or perhaps in the previous year. Being a school-book, the _Donatus_ was thumbed to pieces, so that no copy now survives, and it is only known from the printer's allusion to it as the book "_unde imprimendi initium sumpsimus_" in a list of their publications drawn up in 1472. Of the three other books printed by them at Subiaco, Cicero's _De Oratore_ has no printed date, but a copy described by Signor Fumagalli bears a ma.n.u.script note dated Pridie Kal. Octobres M.cccclxv., i.e. 30 September, 1465, the authenticity of which has, however, been challenged, though probably without good reason. The two others both bear printed dates, the works of _Lactantius_, that of 29 October, 1465, and S. Augustine's _De Ciuitate Dei_, 12 June, 1467. Probably even before this last book was completed the printers were already moving some of their material to Rome, where they found shelter in the palace of Pietro de' Ma.s.simi, for their edition of the _Epistulae Familiares_ of Cicero was completed there in the same year, probably in or before November. Even so it is not certain that this was the first book printed at Rome, for Ulrich Han, a native of Vienna and citizen of Ingolstadt, whose later work, like that of Michael Wenssler at Basel, shows a tendency to imitate Schoeffer, completed an edition of the _Meditationes de vita Christi_ of Cardinal Turrecremata on the last day of the same year, and Mr. Proctor (after the publication of his _Index_) a.s.signed to Han's press and to an even earlier date than the _Meditationes_ a bulky edition of the Epistles of S. Jerome, which must certainly have taken a year to print.

The career of Sweynheym and Pannartz in partners.h.i.+p at Rome lasted but little over six years, their latest book bearing the date 31 December, 1473. Already in March, 1472, they were in difficulties, and printed a letter to Pope Sixtus IV begging for some pecuniary aid. They had printed, they said, no fewer than 11,475 volumes, and gave a list of the different books and of the numbers printed of each. Four of these editions were of 300 copies, the rest of 275, and we can see from the list that there had been three editions of the _Lactantius_ and _De Ciuitate Dei_ and two each of Cicero's _Epistulae Familiares_, _De Oratore_, and _Opera Philosophica_, and also of Virgil, so that clearly some of their books had shown a profit. But the list is entirely made up of Latin cla.s.sics, "profane" and theological, and by March, 1472, printing had been introduced into at least ten other Italian cities (Venice, Foligno, Trevi, Ferrara, Milan, Florence, Treviso, Bologna, Naples, and Savigliano), and in most, if not all of these, the one idea of the first printers was to produce as many Latin cla.s.sics as possible, as though no other firm in Italy were doing the same thing. Unable to obtain help from the Pope, Sweynheym and Pannartz dissolved partners.h.i.+p, the former devoting himself to engraving maps for an edition of Ptolemy's _Geographia_, which he did not live to see (it was printed by Arnold Bucking in 1478), while Pannartz resumed business on a somewhat smaller scale on his own account, and died in 1476.

At Venice, the first printer, Johann of Speier, seems to have had some foreboding of what might happen, and thoughtfully protected himself against compet.i.tion by procuring from the Senate an exclusive privilege for printing at Venice during the s.p.a.ce of five years. This might seriously have r.e.t.a.r.ded the development of the press at Venice. Johann, however, after printing two editions of Cicero's _Epistulae ad familiares_ and Pliny's _Historia naturalis_ in 1469, was carried off by death while working on his fourth book, S. Augustine's _De Ciuitate Dei_, in 1470, and his brother Wendelin, or Vindelinus, who took over the business, had no privilege to protect him from compet.i.tion.

In 1470, the way thus being left clear, a Frenchman, Nicolas Jenson, set up the second press in Venice, and by the beauty of his fine Roman type speedily attained a reputation which has lasted to this day. Another fine printer, Christopher Valdarfer, produced his first book in the same year. In 1471 three other firms (an Italian priest, Clemente of Padua, and two Germans, Adam of Ammergau and Franz Renner of Heilbronn) began publis.h.i.+ng, and in 1472 yet seven more (three Germans and four Italians). But the pace was impossible, and by this time men were rapidly falling out. As we have seen, Sweynheym and Pannartz, after their ineffectual attempt to obtain a subsidy from the Pope, dissolved their partners.h.i.+p at Rome after 1473, and Ulrich Han in 1471 had taken a moneyed partner, with whose aid he weathered the storm. At Venice Wendelin, after producing thirty-one books in the previous two years, reduced his output to six in 1473, and soon after seems to have ceased to work for himself. Jenson's numbers sank from twenty-eight in 1471-2 to six in 1473-4. Valdarfer gave up after 1471, and is subsequently found at Milan. Other Venetian printers also dropped out, and only two new firms began work in 1473.

At Florence after the first printer Bernardo Cennini and his sons had produced a Virgil in 1471, and Johann Petri of Mainz Boccaccio's _Philocolo_ and Petrarch's _Trionfi_ in 1472, printing ceased for some years. Presses started at Foligno, Trevi, and Savigliano came to a speedy end. At Treviso, where Gerardus Lisa had published four books in 1471, there was, according to Mr. Proctor, a gap from December in that year till the same month in 1474, though Dr. Copinger quotes one book each for the intervening years. Only one book was published at Ferrara in 1473. What happened at Naples is hard to say, since Sixtus Riessinger, the first printer there, issued many books without dates. At Bologna trade seems to have been stationary. At Milan, where both Antonius Larotus in 1471 and Philippus de Lavagna in 1472 had begun with extreme caution, there was healthy progress, and these two firms continued issuing editions of the cla.s.sics, and with the great falling off of compet.i.tion may have found it profitable to do so. But of the reality of the crisis in the Italian book trade in 1472-3, although little is said of it in histories of printing, there can be no doubt.

When it was over there were symptoms of a similar over-production of some of the great legal commentaries. But this danger was avoided. There was a steady increase in the range of the literature published, and the bourgeois book-buyer was remembered as well as the aristocratic student.

Soon there came a great extension, not only of the home but of the foreign market, and Italy settled down to supply the world with books, a task for which Venice, both from its geographical position and its well-established commercial relations, was peculiarly fitted. But it is the books printed before 1474 that form the real Italian incunabula. In the subsequent work within the limits of the fifteenth century Rome took no very important part. Ulrich Han continued to print till 1478. Joannes Philippi de Lignamine, Papal Physician and native of Sicily, produced some exceptionally interesting books between 1470 and 1476, and again in 1481-4, and Georg Lauer, who worked from 1470 to 1481, and completed an edition of S. Jerome's Letters, left unfinished by Pannartz at the time of his death, showed himself a good craftsman. The later printers, especially Stephan Plannck and Eucharius Silber, had some good types, but produced few notable books, the bulk of the Roman output after 1480 being editions in small quarto of official doc.u.ments and speeches at the Papal Court.

To devise any summary description of fifteenth century printing at Venice is wellnigh impossible. Some 150 firms were at work there; at a low estimate some four thousand extant books and editions must be credited to them, and these embraced almost every kind of literature for which readers could be found in the fifteenth century, and many varieties of craftsmans.h.i.+p. From a decorative point of view, the firm of Erhard Ratdolt did exceptionally good work, and it is also remarkable for specializing mainly on astronomy, mathematics, and history.

Liturgical printing began somewhat late (there seems to have been a prejudice against printed service books in Italy, and I can remember none printed at Rome); in the fifteenth century Johann Hammann or Herzog and Johann Emerich were its chief exponents. Franz Renner produced chiefly Latin theology, a department much less predominant at Venice than in Germany. Several firms, e.g. Jacques Le Rouge, Baptista de Tortis, Andreas Torresa.n.u.s (father-in-law of Aldus and a very fine printer), and Georgius Arrivabene devoted themselves like Jenson first mainly to Latin cla.s.sics and then to law; others, such as Filippo di Pietro mingled Latin and Italian cla.s.sics. Filippo's kinsman, Gabriele di Pietro, was one of the earliest vernacular printers. Many firms, such as that of Bonetus Locatellus, who seems to have had a University connection, and printed all kinds of learned Latin books, despised the vernacular altogether. The brothers Giovanni and Gregorio dei Gregorii were perhaps the most prolific and miscellaneous printers in both Latin and Italian. Johannes Tacuinus, a learned printer towards the end of the century, is notable for adorning his books with pictorial capitals, mostly of boys at play. Aldus Manutius will be spoken of in a later chapter.

While all this activity was displayed at Venice other cities were not idle. At Milan upwards of eight hundred incunabula were produced, mostly by its earliest printer, Antonius Zarotus, and two Germans, Leonhard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenzeler. Ferrara seems to have been able to support only one press at a time, and at Florence it was some years before printing flourished, but in the last quarter of the century many interesting books were printed there, both learned and vernacular, as to the ill.u.s.trations in which much will have to be said later on. Some of the early Treviso books from the press of Gerard Lisa are distinctly pretty. Bologna produced about three hundred incunabula. Naples probably not so many, but of much better quality. Altogether well over ten thousand Italian incunabula must still be extant, and these were produced at no fewer than seventy different places, though many of these were of no typographical importance, and only find their way into histories of printing from having sheltered a wandering printer for a few weeks as he was on his way from one large town to another.

In France also the earliest books were addressed to students of the cla.s.sics, though they were produced on a much more limited scale. There the first printers, three Germans, had been invited to set up their presses at Paris in the Sorbonne by two of its professors, Guillaume Fichet and Jean Heynlin, of Stein, better known in his own day as Johannes de Lapide. Between the summer of 1470 and the autumn of 1472 eighteen works were printed at the Sorbonne, mostly of the kind which would be of use to its students. Among them was Sall.u.s.t, three works of Cicero, Virgil's Bucolics and Georgics, the Satires of Juvenal and Persius, Terence, some text books, the _Speculum Humanae Vitae_ of Bishop Roderic of Zamora, and the Orations of Fichet's patron, Cardinal Bessarion. In August, 1472, the Cardinal arrived in France on a fruitless mission to rouse the king to a crusade against the Turks. He was rebuffed and ordered to leave France. Fichet accompanied him, and never returned to Paris. As early as the previous March Heynlin seems to have been called away, and now the imported German printers, Michael Freiburger, Ulrich Gering, and Martin Crantz, were left wholly to their own devices. Thus abandoned they printed four books of a less special character, for which they sought princely instead of scholarly patronage, and then in April, 1473, moved from the Sorbonne and set up for themselves at the sign of the Soleil d'Or in the Rue S. Jacques.

Here they printed still in Latin, but a much more popular cla.s.s of books, and soon had to contend with two rival firms, that of Pieter de Keysere and Johann Stol, and the printers at the sign of the "Soufflet Vert" or Green Bellows. The finest of the subsequent printers was Jean Dupre, who used excellent capitals and issued many ill.u.s.trated books, but three prolific printers, Antoine Caillaut, Gui Marchand, and Pierre Levet, along with many dull books issued some very interesting ones.

Towards the end of the century an enterprising publisher, Antoine Verard, kept many of the Paris printers busy, and Paris became noted typographically for its fine ill.u.s.trated editions of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin, issued by Verard, Dupre, Pigouchet (and his publisher, Simon Vostre), and Thielman Kerver. But these with the publications of Verard belong to another chapter.

At Lyon printing was introduced by the enterprise of one of its citizens, Barthelemi Buyer, who engaged Guillaume Leroy (a native of Liege) to print for him, and subsequently employed other printers as well. The first Lyon book was a little volume of popular religious treatises, containing among other things the _De miseria humanae conditionis_ of Pope Innocent III. It was completed 17 September, 1473.

Until nearly 1490 the books printed at Lyon were mainly popular in character with a considerable proportion of French books, many of them ill.u.s.trated. From 1490 onwards learned Latin books occur more frequently, and printing rapidly became as general or miscellaneous as at Paris itself, although only a single attempt was made, unsuccessfully, to rival the Paris _Horae_. The two cities between them probably produced more than three-fourths of the three thousand incunabula, which at a rough guess may be attributed to French presses, the share of Paris being about twice as great as that of Lyon. According to the stereotyped phrase, printing was introduced into no fewer than thirty-seven other French towns during the fifteenth century, but as a rule the printers were but birds of pa.s.sage, and it was only at Poitiers (1479) and Rouen (1487) that it took root and flourished continuously, though on but a small scale. In other towns the struggle to maintain a press continued for several years, as at Toulouse, or was abandoned after the fulfilment of a single commission.

In Holland the first books which bear the name of their printer and date and place of imprint are those produced at Utrecht by Nicolaus Ketelaer and Gerardus Leempt, who began work in 1473. It is tolerably certain, however, that some of the so-called "Costeriana" (see Chap. II) preceded this date, and they are at least as likely to have been printed at Haarlem as at Utrecht, there being no decisive evidence in favour of either place. No namable printer appears at Haarlem until the end of 1483, when Jacob Bellaert set up a short-lived press there. For some seven years (1477-84) excellent work was done at Gouda by Gerard Leeu, who then moved to Antwerp. At Delft, where a fine Bible was printed by Jacob Jacobszoen and Mauricius Yemantszoen in 1477, printing was kept up continuously by Jacobszoen, Christian Snellaert, and Hendrik Eckert till the end of the century, though there seems to have been only work enough for one firm at a time. At Zwolle, Pieter van Os, who began work in 1479, was able to maintain himself, with a brief interval about 1482, till past the magic date 1500. Lastly, at Deventer, where Richardus Pafraet started in the same year, an output was speedily attained greater than in any other Dutch town, and for the latter years of the century a rival firm, that of Jacobus de Breda, shared Pafraet's prosperity. The great majority of the Deventer books, however, belong to the minor literature of ecclesiasticism and education, and are far from exciting.

The beginnings of printing are much more interesting in the Southern Netherlands, which correspond roughly to what we now call Belgium. Here also the first positive date is 1473, the year in which Johann of Paderborn in Westphalia, best known to English collectors as John of Westphalia, printed three books at Alost. A fourth followed in May, 1474, but by the following December John had removed to Louvain, a University town, where he remained doing excellent and abundant work till nearly the end of the century. At Louvain he had found another printer, Jan Veldener, already in the field, and seems to have hustled him away not very honourably. Veldener, however, was not ruined, but is subsequently found at Utrecht and Kuilenburg, and again for a short time at Louvain.

At Bruges the first printers were Colard Mansion and William Caxton, names well known to English book-lovers, though not all the labours of Mr. William Blades and Mr. Gordon Duff have made it quite clear which of the two was the leader. Only two English books were printed, the _Recuyell of the Histories of Troy_ and _The Game and Play of the Chess_, when Caxton returned to England and set up his presses in the Almonry at Westminster. Whether he had any pecuniary interest in the French _Recueil_ and the _Quatre Dernieres Choses_, and whether printings at Bruges began with the _Recuyell_, or, as Mr. Proctor contended, with the French Boccaccio _De la ruine des n.o.bles hommes et femmes_ of 1476, are points of controversy. From 1477 till his flight from Bruges to avoid arrest for debt in 1484, Mansion worked steadily by himself, and the total output of his press amounts to twenty-five French works and two in Latin.

At Brussels the Brothers of the Common Life, who worked also as printers in other places, published numerous popular Latin works between 1476 and 1487, about which time their press seems to have stopped. But the removal of Gerard Leeu's business from Gouda to Antwerp in 1484 soon gave that town a typographical importance which (except for a few years at the end of the century) it long maintained.

The true incunabula of the Netherlands are, of course, the "Costeriana."

Whatever view we may take of their date and birthplace, they were undoubtedly home products, with a strongly marked individuality.

Ketelaer and Leempt, however, at Utrecht, Veldener at Louvain and elsewhere, Caxton and Mansion at Bruges, were real pioneers. In a sense this is true also of John of Westphalia and Gerard Leeu, notably of the former, who had learnt his art in Italy and by the type which he had brought thence raised the standard of printing in his new home. It is, indeed, almost exclusively at Deventer that we get the dull commercial work which has nothing primitive or individual about it, and thus, perhaps because their grand total is so much smaller than in the case of Germany, Italy, or even France, the special interest of incunabula attaches to rather a high proportion of the early books of the Netherlands.

If this be true of the Netherlands, it is even truer of the two countries with which we have still to deal in this rapid survey, Spain and England. Of Spanish incunabula about seven hundred are now registered; of English, three hundred is a fairly liberal estimate of the grand total still extant. Within the limits of the fifteenth century neither country reached the purely mechanical stage of book production to which so many German and Italian books belong after about 1485. In England, indeed, this stage was hardly reached until the general downfall of good printing towards the end of the sixteenth century.

The first book printed in Spain was a thin volume of poems in honour of the Blessed Virgin, written by Bernardo Fenollar and others on the occasion of a congress held at Valentia in March, 1474. It offers no information itself on any bibliographical point, but it was presumably printed not long after the congress, at Valentia where the congress was held, and by Lambertus Palmart (or Palmaert), who on 18 August, 1477, completed there the third part of the _Summa_ of S. Thomas Aquinas and duly described it as "impressa Valentie per magistrum Lambertum Palmart Alemanum, anno M.CCCC.LXXVII, die vero xviii. mensis Augusti." Palmart is supposed to have been a Fleming (a nationality to which the description _Alemannus_ is often applied), but nothing is known of him.

He printed a work called _Comprehensorium_ and the _Bellum Jugurthinum_ of Sall.u.s.t in February and July, 1475, without putting his name to them, and these with the Fenollar and other anonymous books now attributed to him are in roman type. In 1478 he completed a Catalan Bible in conjunction with a native Spaniard, Alonzo Fernandez de Cordoba, and thereafter worked by himself until 1490, using gothic types in these later books. Seven other firms worked at Valentia during the fifteenth century, but none of these attained much importance.

Another Fleming, of the name of Matthew or Matthaeus, printed the _Manipulus Curatorum_ of Guido de Monte Rotherii at Saragossa in October, 1475, and five other presses were established there before 1500, that of Paul Hurus being the most prolific. At Tortosa a single book (the _Rudimenta Grammaticae_ of Perottus) was printed by Nicolaus Spindeler and Pedro Brun early in 1477, and in August of the same year Antonio Martinez, Alonso del Puerto, and Bartolome Segura completed the first fully dated book (the _Sacramental_ of Sanchez de Vercial) at Seville, where printing subsequently throve as much as anywhere in Spain. The following year Spindeler and Brun, having moved from Tortosa, introduced printing into Barcelona, a date MCCCCLXVIII in a treatise by Bartholomaeus Mates, _Pro condendis orationibus_, being obviously a misprint, though to what it should be corrected cannot positively be shown.[26]

At Salamanca printing was introduced as early as 1481, and continued more actively after 1492, mainly for the production of educational works. At Burgos Friedrich Biel, who had been trained under Michael Wenssler at Basel, began printing in 1485, and a native of the place, Juan de Burgos, brought out his first book in 1490, both of these firms doing excellent work. Altogether, twenty-four towns and places in Spain possessed presses during the fifteenth century, but in many cases only for a short time.

The outline of the story of printing in England during the fifteenth century may be very quickly sketched, fuller treatment being reserved for a later chapter. At Michaelmas, 1476, Caxton rented premises in the Almonry from the Abbot of Westminster, and here he stayed till his death in 1491, printing, as far as we know, about a hundred books and doc.u.ments. In 1478 a press was set up at Oxford, presumably by Theodoric Rood of Cologne, whose name, however, does not appear in any book until 1481. By 1485 Rood had been joined by an English stationer, Thomas Hunte, but in 1486 or the following year the press was closed after printing, as far as we know, only seventeen books.

The few books printed at Oxford were all more or less scholastic in character, and six out of eight works printed by Caxton's second rival (apparently a friendly one), the Schoolmaster-Printer at St. Albans, belonged to the same cla.s.s, his two more popular books being Caxton's _Chronicles of England,_ with a new appendix, and the famous _Book of St. Albans_. Of these eight works, the earliest bearing a date was issued in 1480, the latest in 1486.

A more formidable compet.i.tor to Caxton than either the Oxford or the St.

Albans printer began work in the City of London in 1480. This was John Lettou, i.e. John the Lithuanian, who, as Mr. Gordon Duff notes, used type identical save in a single letter with a fount used at Rome in 1478 by Johann Bulle of Bremen. Lettou appears to have been financed in the first instance by a Londoner, William Wilc.o.c.k. In 1482 he was joined by William Machlinia (presumably a native of Malines), and after five law books had been printed in partners.h.i.+p, Lettou dropped out, and Machlinia continued working by himself, possibly until as late as 1490 or 1491, when his stock seems to have been taken over by Richard Pynson, a Norman, from Rouen. On Caxton's death in 1491 his business pa.s.sed into the hands of his foreman, Wynkyn de Worde, a native of Lorraine. The only other press started in the fifteenth century was that of Julyan Notary, who worked at first with two partners, I.B. and I.H. Of these I.B. was certainly Jean Barbier, and I.H. probably Jean Huvin of Rouen.

We have no information as to the nationality of Notary, but if, as seems probable, he was a Frenchman, printing in England for some twenty years after Caxton's death was wholly in the hands of foreigners.