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HISTORY]
TYPOGRAPHY
535

remain in one of the copies, in the other they were regarded as a fault and replaced by a rubricated L and M.

In the second place the initials of books or the chapters of books in MSS., and again in blockbooks and the earliest products of printing, Initials. were always, or at least in most cases (they are printed in the Indulgences of 1454), omitted by the scribe and the printer and afterwards filled in by the rubricator. As the latter artists were sometimes illiterate and very often filled up the gap by a wrong initial, we find in many MSS. as well as early printed books small letters written either in the margin or in the blank left for the initial, to guide the rubricator. In most cases where these letters (now called initial directors) were written in the margin, they were placed as much as possible on the edges of the pages in order that they might be cut away by the binder as unsightly; but in many incunabula they have remained till the present day.[1] Later on these initial directors were in many books printed in (in lower-case type) with the text. In all cases, whether written or printed, they were meant to be covered by the illuminated initial; but, as a matter of fact, the latter very seldom covers the initial director so completely as to make it invisible, and in various cases the intended illumination was never carried into effect. With respect to the hyphens, which Hyphens. were used in the 1454 Indulgences and the 36-line and 42-line Bibles, always outside the printed margin, some of the earliest printers did not employ them at the moment that they started their presses, and in the case of some printers the non-use or use of hyphens, and their position outside or inside the printed margin, serve as a guide to the dating of their products. After about 1472 they become more uniform in their shape and more generally used.

The use of signatures was confined in MSS. mostly to mark the quires (with a numeral or a letter of the alphabet), sometimes also Signatures. the leaves; in many cases they were written close to the bottom of the leaf, so that they might be cut off by the binder, which has happened in many cases, wholly or in part, as may be seen in many MSS.; in blockbooks they are usually printed with the picture on each sheet or page; they are not printed in incunabula close to the bottom line of the page before 1472 (at least in no earlier book with a date), when they appear in Joh. Nider's Praeceptorium Divinae Legis, published by Johan Koelhoff at Cologne. Caxton did not adopt them till 1480. In the books printed before 1472 they were written by the rubricator or the binder, in the same way as in the MSS.

Catchwords (custodes) were used for the first time about 1469 by Catchwords. Johannes of Spires, at Venice, in the first edition of Tacitus.

Pagination or rather foliation was first used by Arn. Ther Hoernen, at Cologne in 1471, in Adrianus's Liber de remediis fortuitorum Pagination. casuum, having each' leaf (not page) numbered by figures placed in the end of the line on the middle of each right-hand page.

The practice among early printers of imitating and reproducing MSS. was not abandoned till many years after the first dated document Slowness of Progress at First. (1454) made its appearance; and, looking at the books printed, say from 1454 to 1477, from our present standpoint, the printing of that period may be said to have been almost wholly stagnant, without any improvement or modification. If some printers (for instance, Sweynheym and Pannarts at Subiaco and Rome, and Nicolas Jenson at Venice) produced handsomer books than others, this is to be attributed to the beauty of the MSS. imitated and the paper used rather than to any superior skill. Generally speaking, therefore, we shall not be far wrong in saying that the workmanship of Ketelaer and De Leempt's first book, published at Utrecht c. 1473, and that of Caxton's first book issued at Westminster in 1477, exhibit almost the same stage of the art of printing as the 1454 Indulgences. If, therefore, any evidence were found that Ketelaer and De Leempt and Caxton had really printed their first books in 1454, there would hardly be anything in the workmanship of these books to prevent us from placing them in that year. And conversely, if the indulgences of 1454 had been issued without a date or without any names to indicate their approximate date, their workmanship might induce bibliographers to ascribe them to c. 1470, if not somewhat later. Even after 1477 alterations in the, mode of printing books came about slowly and almost imperceptibly. It was no longer a universal system for printers to begin business by casting a type for themselves, but some received their types from one of their colleagues. And, though there were still many varieties of types, one sort began to make its appearance in two or three different places. The combinations of letters were the first to disappear; but the contractions remain in a good many books even of the 17th century.

Some theories have been based on, and others have been considered to be upset by, the supposition that the early printers always required as much type as printers of the present day, or at any rate so much as would enable them to set up, not only a whole quire of 4 or 5 sheets (= 8 or 10 leaves = 16 or 20 pages), but even two quires (= 40 pages). Consequently calculations have been made that, for instance, the printer of the 42-line Bible required a fount of at least 120,000 characters. See Bernard, Orig. de l'impr. i. 164, who was a printer himself and speaks very strongly on this point. But there are numerous proofs that many early books were printed page by page, even when in small 4to. For instance, in some books it has been observed that portions of the types with which the text of the first, second or third pages of a quire had been printed, were used to “lock up” the types employed for the later pages of the same quire, as is evident from the blank impressions of such portions being found on these later pages. Again, in some small books, two, three or four blank leaves are found at the end, showing a miscalculation of the printer at the commencement. Moreover, numerous itinerant printers of the 15th century established a press for a short time wherever they went, which proves that the furniture of the earliest printing-offices cannot have been of any great extent.

Early Types and their Fabrication.—We must now take notice of two theories or traditions which have been current for a long time as to some intervening stage between the art of block-printing and the art of printing with movable cast metal types.[2] One theory or tradition would have it that the inventor of printing, after the idea of single, individual, movable types had arisen in his mind, practised his new invention for some time with wooden types, and that he came only gradually to the idea of movable types cast of metal.

Junius gives us to understand that the Dutch Speculum was printed with such wooden types. Of Johann Gutenberg it was Wooden Types. asserted that he printed his first Bible with wooden types. The Mainz psalter, printed in 1457 by Joh. Fust and Peter Schoeffer, was alleged to have been printed with wooden types, in which case the 4th edition, published in 1502, and even the 5th edition of 1516, would be printed with wooden types, the same being used for them as for the editions of 1457 and 1459. Theod. Bibliander was the first to speak (in 1548) of such types and to describe them: first they cut their letters, he says, on wood blocks the size of an entire page; but, because the labour and cost of that way was so great, they devised movable wooden types, perforated and joined one to the other by a thread.[3] Bibliander does not say that he had ever seen such types himself, but Dan. Speckle or Specklin (d. 1589), who ascribed the invention to Mentelin, asserts that he saw some of these wooden types at Strassburg.[4] Angelo Roccha asserted in 1591 that he had seen at Venice types perforated and joined one to the other by a thread, but he does not say whether they were of wood or of metal.[5] In 1710 Paulus Pater asserted that he had seen wooden types made of the trunk of a box-tree, and perforated in the centre to enable them to be joined together by a thread, originating from the office of Fust at Mainz.[6] Bodman, as late as 1781, saw the same types in a worm eaten condition at Mainz; and Fischer stated in 1802 that these relics were used as a sort of token of honour to be bestowed on worthy apprentices on the occasion of their finishing their term.

Besides those who believed in these wooden types from the fact that the letters (especially in the Speculum) vary among themselves in a manner which would not be the case had they been cast from a matrix in a mould, there were authors and practical printers who attempted to cut themselves, or to have cut for them, some such wooden types as were alleged to have been used by the early printers. Some of them came to the conclusion that such a process would be quite practicable; others found by experiment that it would, in the case of small types, be wholly impossible. Nearly all the experiments, however, were made with the idea that the inventor of printing, or the earliest printers, started, or had to start, with as large a supply of type as a modern printer. This idea is erroneous, as it is known that, for a good many years after the first appearance of the art, printers printed their books (large or small) not by quires (quaternions or quinternions) but page by page.[7] Therefore, all considerations of the experimenters as to the impracticability of such wooden types, on account of the trouble and length of time required for the cutting of thousands of types, fall to the ground in face of the fact that the earliest printers required only a very small quantity of type, in spite of the peculiar forms (combined letters, letters with contractions, &c.) which were then in vogue. Up to

  1. The university library of Basel possesses a collection of the earliest Paris books still bound in their original binding, in which these initial directors are written not only on the outer edges, but on the inner sides of the pages, and so close to the back that they can only be seen by stretching the books wide open.
  2. We do not allude to Tritheim's assertion that the Catholicon of 1460 was printed from wooden blocks; for this story, which he declares he had heard from Peter Schoeffer, if it were true, would belong to the history of block-printing. Nor need we speak of Berellanus's verses (1541), in which he distinctly alludes to carved blocks.
  3. Commentatio de ratione communi omnium linguarum et literarum, p. 80 (Zurich, 1548).
  4. Chron. Argent. MS. ed. Jo. Schilterus, p. 442.
  5. De Bibliotheca Vaticana, p. 412 (Rome, 1591).
  6. De Germaniae miraculo, p. 10 (Leipzig, 1710).
  7. See, for instance, W. Blades, Life of Caxton, i. 39.