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Five Hundred Years of Printing

Dover Publications, Inc.

THE FIRST CENTURY OF PRINTING 1450–1550

1. THE INCUNABULA PERIOD

All historical periods are makeshift expedients: people did not go to bed in the Middle Ages and wake up in modern times. Few of these arbitrary breaks, however, can have been more detrimental to a real understanding of an important section of human progress than the restriction of the term incunabula to the time from Gutenberg's first production to 31 December 1500. This date cuts right across the most fertile period of the new art, halving the lives of some of its greatest practitioners such as Anton Koberger (1450–1513), Aldus Manutius (1450–1515), Anthoine Vérard (d. 1512), Johannes Froben (1460–1527), Henri Estienne (1460–1520), and Geofroy Tory (1480–1533).

The word incunabula was first used in connexion with printing by Bernard von Mallinckrodt, dean of Münster cathedral, in a tract, De ortu et progressu artis typographicae (Cologne, 1639), which he contributed to the celebration of the second centenary of Gutenberg's invention. Here he describes the period from Gutenberg to 1500 as 'prima typographiae incunabula', the time when typography was in its swaddling-clothes. The French Jesuit, Philippe Labbé, in his Nova bibliotheca librorum manuscriptorum (1653), already equated the word incunabula with 'period of early printing up to 1500'. In the course of the eighteenth century men whose Latin was considerably shakier applied the term to the books printed during this period, and nineteenth-century writers with no Latin at all eventually coined the singular 'Inkunabel', 'incunable', 'incunabulum', to denote the individual item that emanated from the printing presses of the fifteenth century.

The delimitation of the incunabula period has made research workers everywhere concentrate on the fifteenth century to the grievous neglect of the early sixteenth century. Thus the impression has been created that the turn of the century signified the end of one and the beginning of another era in the history of printing, publishing, and the trade in general. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

The main characteristics which make a unit of the second half of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries are these: the functions of typefounder, printer, publisher, editor, and bookseller are little differentiated; the same man or the same firm usually combines all or most of these crafts or professions. Claude Garamond of Paris (d. 1561) and Jacob Sabon of Lyons and (from 1571) Frankfurt were the first to separate type-designing, punch-cutting, and type-founding from printing, while Robert Estienne (d. 1559) consummated the era of the great printer-scholars. Moreover, by 1540 printing and publishing had barely outgrown the restlessness of the early practitioners to whom knowledge of the craft and an adventurous spirit had sufficed to set up shop anywhere and to move about with the ease permitted by a small equipment and a smaller purse. The number of printers is increasing, but the day of the small, itinerant man is past. Printing, publishing, and bookselling had become established industries requiring stability and capital and foresight. The German Diet of 1570 only tried (in vain, of course) to put into a legal straitjacket what had become an economic fact when it limited the setting up of printing presses to the capitals of princely states, university towns, and the larger imperial cities, and ordered all other printing establishments to be suppressed. For by this time, business concentration had advanced so far that the French book-trade can almost be equated to that of Paris, Lyons, and Geneva; the Italian to that of Venice, Rome, and Florence; that of the Low Countries to Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Leiden, while the edict of the German Diet faithfully reflects the conditions prevailing in the Holy Roman empire.

From the typographical point of view, too, the first half of the sixteenth century is still part and parcel of the creative 'incunabula' period, with its wealth of different types. The italics of Antonio Blado and the roman letters of Claude Garamond – both cut about 1540 – still show the forceful imagination of the pioneer type-designers. From that time onward experiments with new types were rather frowned upon: for instance, the excellent cursive gothic which Joachim Louw cut in Hamburg about 1550 came too late to find acceptance, so that every gothic type-face has been confined to one set of letters – a contributory factor for its disappearance in favour of 'Latin' faces with their 'roman' and 'italic' alternatives.

In the middle of the sixteenth century the geography of printing also underwent a change. Both Germany and Italy ceased to be of much importance in the printing and publishing world. At the same time France entered upon her heyday of fine printing and publishing; and Christophe Plantin, a Frenchman by birth, inaugurated the golden age of Netherlands book production. The Charter granted to the Stationers' Company in London 1557 may be taken as an outward sign that by then the shades of restrictive planning had fallen across the path of hitherto unfettered expansion.

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2. GUTENBERG

The available evidence about the invention of printing with movable types cast from matrices is unfortunately less conclusive than might be wished; but the following facts may be considered well established.

Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg (born between 1394 and 1399), a Mainz goldsmith of a patrician family, began experimenting with printing work towards 1440 when he was a political exile at Strasbourg. At that time other people too were engaged in discovering some method of producing an 'artificial script' as it was called. Avignon, Bruges, and Bologna are mentioned as places where such experiments were carried out, and the names of a goldsmith and a book-illuminator are extant who thus tried their hands. The general climate of the age was undoubtedly propitious for Gutenberg's achievement. He returned to Mainz between 1444 and 1448 and by 1450 had perfected his invention far enough to exploit it commercially. For this purpose he borrowed 800 guilders from the Mainz lawyer, Johannes Fust. In 1452 Fust advanced another 800 guilders and at the same time secured for himself a partnership in the 'production of books'. In 1455, however, the financier foreclosed upon the inventor. The bulk of Gutenberg's presses and types went to Peter Schöffer of Gernsheim, who was in Fust's service and later married his daughter (and her dowry). Another printer of unknown name obtained a number of inferior types with which he printed calendars, papal bulls, Latin grammars, and the like. Gutenberg himself seems to have saved very little from the wreck of his fortune – perhaps only the type in which the 42-line and 36-line Bibles and the Catholicon were printed.

The Catholicon, compiled by Johannes Balbus of Genoa in the thirteenth century, deserves mention for three reasons. Its type is about a third smaller than that of the 42-line Bible; it is therefore considerably more economical and thus marks an important step towards varying as well as cheapening book-production by the careful choice of type. Secondly, the Catholicon was a popular encyclopaedia, and with its publication Gutenberg pointed the way towards a main achievement of the art of printing, namely the spread of knowledge. Lastly, the book contains a colophon which it is difficult to believe to have been written by anybody but the inventor of printing himself. It therefore affords the solitary, precious glimpse of Gutenberg's mind; it reads:

With the help of the Most High at whose will the tongues of infants become eloquent and who often reveals to the lowly what he hides from the wise, this noble book Catholicon has been printed and accomplished without the help of reed, stylus or pen but by the wondrous agreement, proportion and harmony of punches and types, in the year of the Lord's incarnation 1460 in the notable city of Mainz of the renowned German nation, which God's grace has deigned to prefer and distinguish above all other nations of the earth with so lofty a genius and liberal gifts. Therefore all praise and honour be offered to thee, holy Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God in three persons; and thou, Catholicon, resound the glory of the church and never cease praising the Holy Virgin. Thanks be to God.

After 1460 Gutenberg seems to have abandoned printing – possibly because of blindness. He suffered further loss in the sack of Mainz in 1462 but received a kind of pension from the archbishop in 1465. He died on 3 February 1468 and was buried in the Franciscan church which was pulled down in 1742. A humanist relation later dedicated an epitaph 'to the immortal memory of Johannes Gensfleisch, the inventor of the art of printing, who has deserved well of every nation and language'.

Only one major work can confidently be called a product of Gutenberg's own workshop – the 42-line Bible which was set up from 1452 and published before August 1456. Moreover, there is no doubt that Peter Schöffer was superior to Gutenberg as a typographer and printer; the quality of his work made amends for the equivocal practices which made him reap where he had not sown.

What is perhaps Gutenberg's greatest claim to fame is the fact that, after the early experimental stage of which we know nothing, he reached a state of technical efficiency not materially surpassed until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Punch-cutting, matrix-fitting, type-casting, composing, and printing remained, in principle, for more than three centuries where they were in Gutenberg's time. Some remarkable technical improvements of the press made by Leonardo da Vinci remained in the drawing-board stage and were never put to the test. The only advance of any significance was made about 1620 by the Dutchman, Willem Janszoon Blaeu, who somewhat extended the efficiency and printing area of the screw-and-lever press; but no journeyman of Gutenberg and Schöffer would have found any difficulty in operating Blaeu's press which, moreover, never became widely known. Until the end of the eighteenth century Gutenberg's original design was still regarded as the 'common' press.

To nine out of every ten readers the sentence that 'Gutenberg invented printing' is a shortened form of 'Gutenberg invented the printing of books'. The inevitable association of Gutenberg's name with the 42-line Bible tends to strengthen this fallacy. For it is not – certainly not primarily – the mechanical production of books which has made Gutenberg's invention a turning point in the history of civilization.

Books were printed before Gutenberg, and there is no reason why printing from wood-blocks, engraved metal plates, drawings or photographs on stone, and other media should not have gone on with ever greater refinement – as it has actually done. The books 'printed' by William Blake and photo-composition come readily to mind as examples of printing without movable types. What was epoch-making in Gutenberg's process was the possibility of editing, sub-editing, and correcting a text which was identical in every copy: in other words, the uniform edition preceded by critical proof-reading. The identity of each copy of each edition extends even to the misprints which, in turn, can be atoned for by identical 'errata' slips.

Moreover, it was not the production of books that was revolutionized by the use of movable types or its application to the machine-made edition. In fact, printed books were at first hardly distinguishable from manuscripts, and the title-page is virtually the one feature which printers have added to the products of the scribes – and one which scribes, too, would sooner or later have hit upon, as did Vespasiano da Bisticci. It is in two vastly different spheres that Gutenberg has changed the aspect of reading matter in its widest sense. When he and Fust preceded and accompanied their great adventure of book-printing with the issue of indulgences, calendars, and pamphlets on ephemeral topics, the proto-typographers created what came to be known as job-printing. With it they laid the foundations of modern publicity through the printed word, which is dependent on the identical mass-production of freely combinable letter-units in almost infinite variety of composition – the very characteristics of Gutenberg's invention.

At the same time, when Gutenberg made it feasible to put on the market a large number of identical copies at any given time, he thereby foreshadowed the possibility of ever increasing the number of copies and ever reducing the length of time needed for their issue. The principle once established, it was a matter of technical progress to develop the turning out of ten thousand identical indulgences within a month into the turning out of a million identical newspapers within a few hours. Thus Gutenberg can also be acclaimed as the progenitor of the periodical press.

Again, while it is easy to say that 'Gutenberg invented printing', it requires a long treatise to say what actually constituted Gutenberg's 'invention'. Down to Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, that is to say, for 250 years, the literary allusions to the 'mystery' are vague or ambiguous, and the representations of printers at work are pictorial rather than technical. The only tangible sources therefore are the products of Gutenberg's press, from which the process by which he achieved them must be inferred.

In order to remove popular misunderstandings, we may perhaps proceed by a series of negative propositions.

Gutenberg was not the first to grasp the need for, and the potentialities of, large-scale production of literature. On the contrary, his invention was largely prompted by the fact that the multiplication of texts was not only a general want but had, by the middle of the fifteenth century, become a recognized and lucrative trade. Professional scribes catered for the wealthy collector of classical manuscripts as well as for the poor student who needed his legal and theological handbooks. The Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci employed up to fifty scribes at a time; in the university towns, of which Paris was the most important, the copyists of learned texts were numerous enough to form themselves into guilds. The religious congregation of the Brethren of the Common Life in Deventer specialized in copying philosophical and theological books for which they established a market all over northern Europe. Diebold Lauber ran a veritable 'book factory' in the Alsatian town of Hagenau; he, like any later publisher, produced books for the open market; 'light reading' was Lauber's speciality, and illustrations, also produced by rote, added to the popular appeal.

Nor was 'printing' from a negative relief a new invention. The Chinese had practised it for about a thousand years (the legendary date of its inception is A.D. 594), and their method of rubbing off impressions from a wood-block had spread along the caravan routes to the west, where block-prints and block-books were well known at the time of Gutenberg.

From China, too, had come the invention of paper, which was to prove the ideal surface for printing. Vellum, it is true, was and still is occasionally used for luxury printing; but paper had, and has, the advantage over vellum of being available in virtually unlimited quantities and thus allows mass-production which is the distinguishing feature of printing.

Again, Gutenberg followed precedent when he replaced wood by metal, and the block by the individual letter. In this respect he stood in the tradition of his own trade of goldsmith, for goldsmiths and kindred artisans had always cut punches for their trade-marks or the lettering with which they struck inscriptions on cups, bells, and other metalware.

Gutenberg also found at hand an instrument suitable for compressing and flattening a moist and pliable substance (such as printing paper), namely the winepress which the Romans had introduced in his native Rhineland a thousand years earlier.

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Excerpted from Five Hundred Years of Printing by S. H. Steinberg. Copyright © 2017 S. H. Steinberg. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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