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538
TYPOGRAPHY
[HISTORY

casting instrument whereby the letter with the staff became independent, that is movable. The early Dutch printing letter, which could only be used by being firmly footed on a plate, would have missed its real value for printing, its free movability.

Zedler, for want of data, cannot say where and when Gutenberg learnt the technics of early Dutch printing, though the Cologne Chronicle tells us that from this printing his work began. But he thinks that the secret arts which occupied Gutenberg at Strassburg, and which, when the documents are impartially (!) considered, can be regarded as nothing but experiments in the printing of books, are earlier than 1440. He will not decide whether Gutenberg has been in Holland, or whether this historical kernel is the foundation of the Coster legend (!) of Adrianus Junius which is independent of the Cologne Chronicle. Anyhow, Gutenberg still required ten years of hard work and troublesome experiments, before he, basing himself on the early Dutch printing, whatever this may have been, could become the inventor of the present mode of printing books.

We here see how Enschedé's theories give rise to Zedler's structure of theories. When the former says that Gutenberg chose for his first work the large letters of B36 and B42, because the Abklatsch-method (invented [?] by him) was only fit for large letters, he forgets that the printers of these Bibles, wishing to apply their new art to the production of copies of the Bible in a speedier way than the scribes of their time were able to do, had, of necessity, to design their types from the large ornamental church-hand then in vogue for Bibles, Psalters, Missals, &c. For the same reason they prepared different, much smaller, types for the Indulgences of 1454, as the manuscript copies of these Indulgences, handed to them as “copy,” were written in the bastard Roman book-hand, used for such documents. When the arts of casting types and of printing with them found their way to Mainz they were new in that city, but they came there already well-developed, and the printers, whoever they were, knew how to prepare themselves for any book or document which it was thought desirable to print. But of these questions Enschedé takes no account. He ascribes the two Bibles to Gutenberg, because Dziatzko has done so, without inquiring whether Gutenberg (not Pfister) had, after all, anything to do with B36.

Zedler's theories, partly developments, partly corrections of those of Enschedé's, are based on the misapprehension that a peculiarity in the Costerian types, i.e. the connexion of the signs of contractions by a fine stroke with the letters over which they stand, does not occur either in the Dutch blockbooks or in the Dutch MSS. This connexion, however, far from being not found, is a conspicuous feature, in the Dutch blockbooks and MSS., and being faithfully reproduced in the Costerian types, shows how near these types stand to the block-printing and MS. periods. Zedler does not explain how he would print with the plate-footed types, pasted on strong paper, which he ascribes to Coster. Nor does he say whether he ever examined the Costerian editions of the Speculum, Donatuses, &c., to see whether they showed any traces of such awkward contrivances.

After having done justice, we hope, to these latest theories, which, in spite of their great length, leave many things unexplained, it is a pleasure to read once more Junius's unvarnished account of the Haarlem tradition, which contains no intricate theories, but a simple explanation of the rise and progress of printing with movable (metal) types in that city. The reading of it shows that real facts can be explained in a few words, while theories require long explanations, first for explaining away the real facts, and then for explaining the theories, which after all lead us astray.

The shape and manufacture of the types used as early as c. 1470 do not seem to have differed materially from those of the present Shape of Earliest Type. types. This is evident (1) from the shape of the old types which were discovered in 1878 in the bed of the river Saône, near Lyons, opposite the site of one of the 15th-century printing-houses of that city, and which there is reason to believe belonged once to one of those presses, and were used by the early printers of Lyons; (2) from a page in Joh. Nider's Lepra moralis, printed by Conrad Homburch at Cologne in 1476, which shows the accidental impression of a type, pulled up from its place in the course of printing by the ink-ball, and laid at length upon the face of the forme, thus leaving its exact profile indented upon the page; (3) from an entirely similar page (fol. 4b) in Liber de laudibus ac festis gloriosae Virginis (Cologne, c. 1468). From the small circle appearing in the two last-mentioned types, it is presumed that the letters were pierced laterally by a circular hole, which did not penetrate the whole thickness of the letter, and served, like the nick of modern types, to enable the compositor to tell by touch which way to set the letter in his stick. The fact that in these two cases the letter was pulled up from the forme seems to show that the line could not have been threaded.

Vinc. Fineschi, Notizie Storiche sopra la stamperia di Ripoli, p. 49 (Florence, 1781), gives an extract from the cost-book of the Ripoli press, about 1480, which shows that steel, brass, copper, tin, lead and iron wire were all used in the manufacture of types at that period.[1]

History of the Earliest Types.—The history and nomenclature of the earliest types are practically a continuation of the history and nomenclature of the characters figured in the earliest blockbooks, wood-engravings and MSS. For instance, Gothic type was first used, say, about the year 1445; but Gothic writing, of which that type was an imitation, was already known and used about the second half of the 12th century and can be traced still farther back (see above). Again, the pure Roman type, which appeared about 1464, is nothing but an imitation of what in palaeography is called the Caroline minuscule, a handwriting which was already fully developed towards the end of the 8th century (see Palaeography).

The broad outlines of the history of the earliest types are as follows:—

Gothic type, of the angular or pointed kind, was first used by the Haarlem printer of the Speculum, Donatus, &c. (see specimen Gothic. No. 1, taken from the British Museum copy of the Speculum humanae salvationis, mixed Latin edition), presumably c. 1445. An entirely similar but larger type (No. 2, taken from the British Museum copy of Ludovicus [Pontanus] de Roma, Singularia) was used, presumably by the same printer, c. 1465-1470. Gothic type appeared in Germany as a church type in 1454, in the 31-line Indulgence, presumably printed by Johan Gutenberg at Mainz (No. 3, from the Göttingen copy), and in the 30-line Indulgence (No. 4, taken from the British Museum copy), printed by Peter Schoeffer at Mainz. Type No. 3 was also used about the same time for the 36-line Bible, and type No. 4 for the 42-line Bible. Two much larger Gothic types appeared in the Psalter of 1457, published by Fust and Schoeffer (see Bernard, Origine, pl. vii.). In Italy Gothic type appears in 1468 (No. 5, taken from the British Museum copy of Cicero, De oratore, published at Rome by Ulr. Hahn, the 15th of December 1468, in small Roman type, with imprint in Gothic), but in a more rounded form; it is practically the ordinary Italian writing influenced by the Gothic. In France Gothic began, to be used in 1473; in England it appears first in Caxton's type about the year 1480.[2] It was employed extensively in a great many of the earliest presses all over Europe, and continued to be used largely at all times, especially for Bibles, law books, royal proclamations, &c., and even to this day it is the national character of Germany. It is now usually called lettre de forme, black letter or English in English-speaking countries, lettre flamand in Holland, and fractur in Germany.

Bastard Italian or bastard Roman was introduced in 1454 at Mainz in the 31-line (No. 6) and 30-line (No. 7) Indulgences. It is Bastard Italian or Roman. also called lettre de somme, some think from the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, printed in the type of the Bible of Bastard 1462 by Fust and Schoeffer. Varieties of this kind of type were, like the Gothic, much used by the earliest printers, as, for instance, the printer of the 1460 Catholicon, Mentelin of Strassburg, c. 1460, and Ulrich Zell at Cologne, c. 1466, &c. In England it appeared in the first three books printed (1478, 1479) at Oxford (No. 8, taken from the British Museum copy of Jerome's Expositio in Simbolum Apostolorum wrongly dated 1468 for 1478).

Roman type, the Caroline minuscule of palaeography, was first used in Germany about 1464, Strassburg, by the printer whose Roman. fount of type is known by a peculiarly shaped R, and R an who on that account is usually called “the R printer” (No. 9, taken from the British Museum copy of Durandus, Rationale, of which the Basel library possesses a copy which was bought in 1464).[3] In Italy it appears in 1465 at Subiaco (see Bernard pl. xii. No. 19), at Rome in 1467 (op. cit. pl. xii. No. 20), but in all its purity at Venice in 1469, used by Johannes of Spires (op. cit. pl. xii. No. 25), and at Paris in 1470 (op. cit. pl. xiii. No. 25). In England it was not used before 1518, when Richard Pynson printed Pace's Oratio in Pace nuperrima (see facsimile in Reed's Type Foundries, p. 92).

Burgundian type, or gros batarde or secretary, was first used about 1470-1472 by Colard Mansion at Bruges (No. 10, taken from the Burgundian. British Museum copy of La Controversie de Noblesse, c. 1471-1472). With a somewhat similar type (No. 11, taken from the British Museum copy of the Recuyell) William Caxton is presumed to have printed, likewise at Bruges, a set of five books, of which the Recuyell of the History of Troye, a translation of a work by Raoul le Fèvre, is the best known and was probably printed c. 1471.[4] To this same class belong the first type (No. 12, from the British Museum copy of the Dictes) used in England by William Caxton for the printing of Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (Nov. 18, 1477), and that used by the printer of St Albans (No. 13, taken from the Cambridge University Library copy of Aug. Dactus, Elegancie). It was an imitation of the manuscript hand of the English and Burgundian scribes of the 15th century, and, after having figured for a long time in several of the early London and provincial presses, was about 1534 entirely superseded by the English black letter. To this class of type

  1. On the above theories and types consult T. B. Reed, Old English Letter Foundries, pp. 3-26.
  2. See Blades, Life of Caxton, pl. xvii.
  3. See Jules Philippe, L'Imprimerie à Paris, p. 219.
  4. Cf. Blades, Life of Caxton.