Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/66

54 THE CHUR BREVIARY OF 1490 from Peter von Weissenburg. Weissenburg, we are elsewhere told, was a ' Kramer/ and David and Winter appear to have been not infrequently taken into financial partnership by the printers of their city. The presses were no doubt set up in one of Adam's two houses in the Weisse Gasse, but they were under the superintendence of Jacob von Pforzheim, whose experience had been acquired during several years of association with Amerbach, and who probably brought his own plant with him. It is a pity that the ' Regesten ' give us very little information about either Adam or Pforzheim during the period immediately preced- ing, so that we can say nothing as to a possible connection of the former with the 1489 e Niuicel- lensis ' and the undated ' Aesop/ which, as men- tioned above, are typographically akin to the Breviary, and are now proved by the last-named to be the handiwork of Pforzheim. In particular, it would be very gratifying to be able to assign the numerous woodcuts of the c Aesop ' to Adam's studio, but this is more than the evidence will warrant, and we must rest content with possessing at any rate two authentic examples of his crafts- manship in the Breviary the conventional heraldic frontispiece with its background of three or four unpretentious tufts of grass and flowers, and the very tasteful combined capital and border which em- bellishes the beginning of the section c de tempore.' l 1 The herbage on the frontispiece is drawn very much in the same manner as that found in the woodcuts of Lienhart Ysenhut, who also issued an illustrated German 'Aesop' in a similar style to that of Pforzheim's Latin one, but the comparison cannot of course