An Essay on Colophons with specimens and translations

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	INTRODUCTION		ix
I.	THE COLOPHON’S REASON FOR EXISTENCE		3
	Homer. Florence: [B. Libri,] 1488	5
	Breslau Missal. Mainz: P. Schoeffer, 1483	8
II.	COLOPHONS AT MAINZ		9
	Latin Bible. Mainz: Fust and Schoeffer, 1462	10
	Balbus. Catholicon. Mainz: [J. Gutenberg,] 1460	14
	Cicero. De Officiis. Mainz: Fust and Schoeffer, 1465	18
	S. Jerome’s Epistles. Mainz: P. Schoeffer, 1470	20
	Tritheim. Chronicarum opus. Mainz: Joh. Schoeffer, 1515	27
III.	COLOPHONS AT VENICE		30
	Cicero. Epistolae ad Familiares. Venice: John of Speier, 1469	32
	Cicero. Epistolae ad Familiares. Second Edition. Venice: John of Speier, 1469	33
	Pliny. Historia Naturalis. Venice: John of Speier, 1469	35
	Dante. Divina Commedia. Venice: Wendelin of Speier, 1476	40
	Cicero. Rhetorica. Venice: N. Jenson, 1470	42
	Decor Puellarum. Venice: N. Jenson, 1461 for 1471	45
	Cicero. De Oratore. Venice: C. Valdarfer, 1470	49
	Cicero. Orationes. Venice: C. Valdarfer, 1471	50
	Caracciolus. Quadragesimale (and several other books). Venice: Bartolommeo of Cremona, 1472	52
IV.	PRINTERS’ COLOPHONS IN OTHER TOWNS		57
	Meissen Missal. Freiberg: C. Kachelofen, 1495	66
	Bononia illustrata. Bologna: Plato de Benedictis, 1494	73
	Guido de Baysio. Super Decretis. Venice: John of Cologne and Nicolas Jenson, 1481	78
	Boniface VIII. Decretals. Basel: M. Wenssler, 1477	82
	Fasciculus Temporum. Louvain: Veldener, 1476	84
	Ioh. Faber. Breuiarium super codice. Louvain: John of Westphalia, c 1475	84
	S. Cyprian. Epistulae. Rome: Sweynheym and Pannartz, 1471 (and in many other of their books)	87
	Cicero. Orationes Philippicae. Rome: Ulrich Han [1470] (and in several other of Han’s books)	88
V.	PUBLISHERS’ COLOPHONS		91
	Latin Bible. Vicenza: Leonardus Achates, 1476	94
	Laurentius Valla. Elegantiae. Rome: Arnold Pannartz, 1475	96
	Gasparo Visconti. Rithmi. Milan: Ant. Zarotus, 1493	103
	Journal Spirituel. Paris: Vérard, 1505	105
	Statius. Achilleis. Parma: Steph. Corallus, 1473	109
	Franciscus Curtius. Consilia. Milan: U. Scinzenzeler, 1496	116
VI.	COLOPHONS OF AUTHORS AND EDITORS		123
	Georgius Natta. Repetitiones. Pavia: C. de Canibus, 1492	126
	Henricus Bruno. Super Institutionibus. Louvain: Aeg. van der Heerstraten [1488?]	128
	Petrus de Ancharano. Repetitio. Bologna: Jo. Jac. de Benedictis for Benedictus Hectoris, 1493	141
	Roman Missal. Venice: G. Arriuabenus and P. de Paganinis, 1484	147
	Cicero. Epistolae Familiares. Milan: Lauagna, 1472	150
	Homiliae. Basel: N. Kessler, 1498	155
VII.	REPETITIONS, THEFTS, AND ADAPTATIONS		159
VIII.	DATES IN COLOPHONS		170
	INDEXES		185

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Leaving the Colophon in its bibliographical aspects to the able hand by which these are about to be treated, it may not be amiss to preface Mr. Pollard’s researches by a brief inquiry into the origin and significance of the term itself, and the reason why the colophon for so long performed the office of the title-page.

Colophon originally meant the head or summit of anything. It is clearly cognate with κορυφή, but is a word of far less importance, for while thirteen derivatives from κορυφή are given in Liddell and Scott’s Dictionary, κολοφών has not one. The former word is continually used by Homer; the latter is first met with in Plato, and then and afterwards only in a figurative sense. Yet it is clear that the word must from the first have borne the signification of “summit” or “crest,” for such is the position of the city of Colophon, which must have derived its name from its elevation, just as a modern house may be called “Hilltop.” Names of this kind, if not given at the first, are rarely given at all; we must suppose, then, that colophon was a recognized Greek word for “summit” when the city was founded about the tenth century B.C., according to Strabo by a Pylian colony, though this seems difficult to reconcile with the fact of Colophon being an Ionian city. In any case, the word has long survived the place.

According to the information supplied by the New English Dictionary, colophon made a brief appearance in English, in the first half of the seventeenth century, in its secondary classical sense of a “finishing stroke” or “crowning touch,” being used thus in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” and again in 1635 by John Swan, who writes in his “Speculum Mundi” of how God “comes to the Creation of Man and makes him the colophon or conclusion of all things else.” Of the use of the word colophon in the particular significance elucidated in this essay—the end or ultimate paragraph of a book or manuscript—the earliest example quoted in the New English Dictionary is from Warton’s “History of English Poetry,” published in 1774. A quarter of a century before this it is found as a term needing no explanation in the first edition of the “Typographical Antiquities” of Joseph Ames, published in 1749. How much older it is than this cannot lightly be determined. The bibliographical use appears to be unknown to the Greek and Latin lexicographers, medieval as well as classical. Pending further investigation, it seems not unlikely that it may have been developed out of the secondary classical sense already mentioned sometime during the seventeenth century, when the interest in bibliography which was then beginning to be felt would naturally call into existence new terms of art. The Latin word subscriptio, which is used in a not very dissimilar sense, could hardly have been modernized without ambiguity. The Greek κορωνις, used for a flourish at the end of a manuscript, had not entered into any modern language. It is possible that it was thus only at a comparatively late date that a need was felt for a special word to denote the final paragraph of a book, and that the metaphorical use of colophon for a “finishing touch” caused it to be specialized in this sense. But whenever this use of the word colophon may have arisen, it is manifest that if this paragraph is to convey any description of the book, it fulfils the office of a title-page; and when we examine the manner in which colophon came to bear this special connotation, we shall see that the printer’s colophon could not, except for a very short period while men’s ideas were still indefinite, have coexisted with the title-page.

The idea especially implied in the Greek proverbial phrase “to put on the colophon” is that of putting the finishing stroke to anything, as when a building is completed by the addition of the coping-stone, or a discourse is summed up by a recapitulation of its general gist. Is the word simply used in the sense of a crowning peak? or has it a special connection with the city of Colophon? Ancient writers assert the latter, and assign two reasons, one of which at least seems fanciful. Strabo says that the allusion is to the decisive charges of the Colophonian cavalry, which were made at the last moment. There seems no other indication of Colophon having possessed a high military reputation. The Scholiast on the “Theaetetus” of Plato gives a more probable derivation; he says that, on account of their having received the Smyrnaeans into their city, the people of Colophon were allowed a casting-vote in the Panionium, or congress of the twelve Ionian cities, and hence the expression was equivalent to “turn the scale.” There would be nothing unreasonable in this supposition if we were sure that the Colophonians actually had this casting-vote; but the notion may well have been invented to explain the proverb; and, after all, if κολοφών has the sense of “crest,” no historical explanation seems necessary.

We have, however, solely to consider here the application of the term colophon to books, and must ask, What portion of a book would embody that final touch which we have seen to be essential to the idea of a colophon? In modern times we should probably say the imprint, for although the printer’s name, as well as the publisher’s, may be given at the bottom or on the reverse of the title-page, it is more usual to find it at the end. The ancient colophon also gave this information, but it commonly gave much more. To understand the part it played in early printing, we must go back to its predecessor, the manuscript.

Manuscripts, as the parents of printed books, have necessarily exercised the greatest influence on their development. A step which might have been very important was taken when, probably early in the fifth century, the form most convenient for the printed book was established by the definitive supersession of the roll form of manuscript by the codex, or manuscript in modern book form. Codices are of sufficient antiquity to be figured in the paintings at Pompeii, but the derivation from caudices, thin leaves of wood, shows that they were not at first much used for literary purposes, but rather for accounts or memoranda. When they began to compete with the roll, a step in the direction of convenience which may be appreciated by us if we can imagine that all our books had at one time been printed in newspaper form, we find the colophon already installed under the title of index. This did not denote the key to the contents of a book, thought so indispensable in modern times, but to the title, giving generally the subject and author of the book with the utmost brevity, and written at the end, precisely like a colophon, which in fact it was, though not bearing the name. As the papyrus roll was not bound, there could be no lettering upon a cover unless when, as was sometimes the case, a fine manuscript was inclosed within a case or wrappage for its protection; and the inconvenience of having to open every roll to find the title soon suggested the idea of hanging the index outside the roll on a separate slip, brightly dyed so as to attract attention. Examples may be seen in paintings from Pompeii. The general, though as yet by no means universal, displacement of papyrus by parchment led to the introduction of binding, early in the fifth century, as the best method of preserving codices. It had, of course, been practised before, but could not make much progress while the majority of books were papyrus scrolls; and even in the case of codices it seems to have been chiefly employed for the opportunity it afforded of adorning a valued manuscript with a splendid exterior. The disuse of the roll, however, soon made binding universal. In the Customs of the Augustinian priory at Barnwell it is distinctly laid down: “As the books ought to be mended, printed, and taken care of by the Librarian, so ought they to be properly bound by him.”

The question of binding, as it concerns the colophon, is chiefly interesting from the point it raises whether the colophon, representing as it certainly did the title-page, was the sole clue to the contents of a manuscript, or whether the binding was lettered by a label affixed, or by the author’s name being written on it. The books represented in the picture of “Ezra Writing the Law,” the frontispiece to the Codex Amiatinus, reproduced in Mr. Clark’s work on “The Care of Books,” show no signs of lettering; and centuries later, in the Augustinian Customs, we find the librarian enjoined not to pack the books too closely together, “ne nimia compressio querenti moram invectat.” Delay, therefore, in finding a book on the shelf was recognized as an evil to be guarded against: it is scarcely likely that this would have been so manifest if the books had been distinctly lettered, or that the librarian would not have been enjoined to supply lettering if lettering had been the practice.

It would seem, then, that the colophon of a manuscript would be the principal means of affording information respecting its contents; but, if we may so far extend the signification of the term as to cover any addition made at the end by the transcriber, and having no reference to the subject-matter of the book, it was capable of conveying much beside. How touchingly the feelings of the copyist, “all with weary task fordone,” craving to be assured that he has not labored in vain, are portrayed in this final note to a volume written in the ninth century!

Very moving, too, is the injunction of some tender spirit in a manuscript of the fourteenth century:

On the other hand, manuscripts frequently contain anathemas against the pernicious race of book thieves, which can hardly be deemed uncalled for when we remember the frank admission innocently volunteered by a Sicilian knight, in a ballad translated by Rossetti, that he had stolen his Bible out of a church, “the priest being gone away.” Sometimes additional force is sought to be given to these imprecations by the assertion that the book is to be regarded as the personal property of the patron saint of the church or monastery—St. Alban, for example.

We have dwelt at some length upon the question of colophons, or inscriptions corresponding to colophons, in manuscripts, as these have been little investigated, and form the groundwork of the more important inquiry concerning the development of the colophon in the printed book, which is the subject of Mr. Pollard’s essay. It would be interesting to collect from medieval manuscripts and bring together in one corpus the ejaculations of medieval scribes, whether minatory, hortatory, or simply expressive of gratitude or relief at the termination of their irksome labors. How far this latter sentiment may have been qualified by the artist’s pleasure in his calligraphy must be matter of conjecture. If he was illuminator as well as transcriber, he must frequently have had ample ground for complacency. It would be a proof how little the conception of painting as an art independent of every other was developed if we could suppose the illustrator of a fourteenth-century Dante, for example, whose talent would in this age have made his fortune as a painter of pictures, condescending to the humble labors of a copyist, exquisite as his calligraphy might be. Yet the craft of the illuminator was destined to be absolutely obliterated by printing, while that of the transcriber exercised an important influence on early printing, as evinced by the care which the first printers took to adapt their types to the forms of letters prevalent in the manuscripts of their respective countries.

The same adaptation is observable in the use of the colophon by the early printers in the place of a title-page, when, as was not always the case, they thought fit to give a title at all. To us this seems almost incomprehensible. The immense advantage of a book bearing a title on its front and manifesting its nature from the first is so apparent that our practical age cannot comprehend how it could have been less obvious to our predecessors than to ourselves. It further seems in accordance with common sense and general usage in all similar matters that proclamation should be made at the beginning and not at the end, at the entrance and not at the exit, as the dedication of the temple is inscribed above the portico. The neglect of this apparently self-evident rule is perhaps to be explained by the influence of the “traditions of the scribes,” which affected early printing in many ways. We have alluded to the manner in which types were modelled upon the style of handwriting in use in the respective countries, the beautifully clear Italian type contrasting so markedly with the massive and imposing ruggedness of the Gothic. We also see how the tradition of illumination long induced printers to leave blank spaces for capital letters, especially at the beginnings of chapters, to be filled in by the artist, and to employ the services of a “rubricator” to preserve at least some phantom of the wealth of color which the printing art was destroying as effectually as in our day the photograph has killed the woodcut. The elegant border, also, was a legacy from the manuscript to the printed book, and this, fortunately lending itself to engraving, admitted of preservation. The service rendered by printing to engraving, it may be parenthetically remarked, is a great set-off against the injury it inflicted upon art in the shape of pictorial illustration. All these circumstances indicate the strong influence of the scribe upon the printer; and it is perhaps not surprising that the latter should for some time have followed the example of his predecessor, and given no title except occasionally the brief heading which frequently precedes the first chapter of a manuscript. This was never set out on a distinct leaf, an indispensable condition of a title-page, until many years after printing had effectually dethroned transcription as the method of the reproduction of books. The first title-page did not appear until some twenty years after the invention of printing. Title-pages became the rule about 1490, but it was not until 1493 that the announcement of the printer or publisher, hitherto buried in the colophon, began to appear upon them.

This it is which gives the colophon such extraordinary importance in the history of early printing. Wherever one exists, the question of place and printer, and frequently the question of date, is entirely solved. Where there is no colophon, we are left to conjecture. The problem is, indeed, generally soluble by a really scientific investigation, but it is only of late that science has been thoroughly brought to bear upon it by a Bradshaw and a Proctor. It is no unimportant matter, for every determination of the locality of an early book is a paragraph added to the history of the culture of the country where it originated. The beginnings of printing, as of other arts, were obscure, and we must be most grateful for any information which has been afforded us by men who assuredly no more thought of posterity than does any tradesman who advertises his wares without reflecting that he too is contributing something to the history of culture or of industry. The ancient printers had no more notion than Shakspere had what interesting figures they would appear in the eyes of posterity.

The colophon, however, does much more than reveal matters of fact. It admits us in a measure into the intimacy of the old printer, shows us what manner of man he was, and upon what he rested his claims to esteem as a benefactor of the community. We find him very decided in asserting his superiority to the copyist, a reaction, perhaps, against a feeling entertained in some quarters that the new art was base and mechanical in comparison with the transcriber’s, with which, in the estimation of the devotee of calligraphy, it could only compare as a motor-car may compare with an Arab steed. That such a feeling existed in highly cultivated quarters we learn from the disdain for printing expressed by the eminent scholar and educator Vespasiano da Bisticci, who had collected the library of the Duke of Ferrara, and who looked upon the manuscripts he had gathered with such joy and pride as an admiral of the old school may have looked upon his lovely frigates in comparison with the ugly, but undeniably more powerful, ironclad. Such printers as Jenson might have replied that their typographical productions were hardly inferior in beauty to the manuscript, but we are not aware that they ever took this line. They rather lay stress upon a more tangible advantage—their superior accuracy. They also affirm, and with truth, that their work is easier to read. “As plain as print” is a proverb which has grown up of itself. They might also have dwelt upon the various sorrows and afflictions which copyists prepared for their employers, so graphically described by Petrarch. Petrarch’s lamentation must have been a rare enjoyment to the first printer who published it, if he understood it and had professional feeling.

Much more might be said about the old printer as revealed by the colophon—his trade jealousies, his disposition to monopolize, his deference to patrons, his joy at having carried his work through the press, his conviction that his labors have not been unattended by the divine blessing. That inferior person, the author, too, occasionally gets a good word, especially when his authorship assumes the form of translation or commentary. But our business is mainly with the colophon in its literary and bibliographical aspects, and it is time to make way for Mr. Pollard, whose monograph upon it will, we believe, be found the fullest, the most entertaining, and the most accurate extant.

R. Garnett.

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The interest of individual colophons in early printed books has often been noted. The task which, under the kind auspices of the Caxton Club, is here to be assayed is the more ambitious, if less entertaining, one of making a special study of this feature in fifteenth-century books, with the object of ascertaining what light it throws on the history of printing and on the habits of the early printers and publishers. If, instead of studying each colophon singly for the sake of the information it may give us as to the book which it completes, or for its own human interest,—if it chance to have any,—we compare the same printer’s colophons in successive books, and the colophons of different printers in successive editions; if we group those which have similar characteristics, and glance also at the books which have no colophons at all, or quite featureless ones, then if there is anything to be learnt from colophons, we ought to be by way of learning it; and if there is only very little to be learnt, that also is a fact to be noted.

The existence, incidentally referred to in our last paragraph, of books which have no colophons, or colophons from which all positive information is conspicuously absent, is a point which may well be enlarged on. In Mr. Proctor’s “Index of Early Printed Books” the one unsatisfactory feature is the absence of any distinguishing mark between the books which themselves contain a statement of their printer’s name, and those of which the printer was discovered by the comparison of types, or ornaments, or other inferential evidence. Mr. Proctor used humorously to excuse himself for this omission on the ground that he had already used so many different symbols that if he had added one more to their number the camel’s back would have broken. But the omission, while occasionally vexatious to the student, is regrettable chiefly as obscuring the greatness of Mr. Proctor’s own work. If all books gave full particulars as to their printers and dates, there would have been little need of Bradshaw’s “natural-history” method, or of Mr. Proctor’s almost miraculous skill in applying it. It is the absence of colophons in so many books that calls into play the power of identifying printers by their types, and of dating books by the appearance of new “sorts,” or the disuse of old ones. A single instance will suffice to illustrate the secrets thus revealed. To Ludwig Hain, Bartolommeo di Libri of Florence is the printer of four books. In Mr. Proctor’s Index he is credited with no fewer than one hundred and twenty-six in the collections of the British Museum and the Bodleian alone, among these being the famous first edition of Homer and some of the finest Florentine illustrated books. He is thus raised from obscurity to the front rank of Italian printers, an example of a man who, though he did excellent work, hardly ever troubled himself to take credit for it. In the face of such an instance the partial nature of the information we can gather from colophons is at once plain. And yet from this very absence of Libri’s name we glean some really characteristic evidence. For, to begin with, the great Florentine Homer is not without a colophon. On the contrary, it possesses this very explicit one:

Here Demetrio Damilas, the Cretan of Milanese descent, is anxious enough to advertise himself: perhaps all the more anxious because his name seems to have been suppressed in the case of some previous Greek books in which he may have had a share. He compliments also, as in duty bound, the brothers Nerli, without whose munificence the book could not have been produced. But the craftsman at whose press the Homer was printed was too insignificant a person for a scholar of the very self-regarding type of the first professors of Greek to trouble to mention him, and thus Libri is ignored by Damilas as completely as the later printers were ignored by the publishers. In some of his larger works of a less learned kind,—books by Boccaccio, the Florentine Histories of Bruni and Poggio, and the Logic of Savonarola,—Libri, when left to himself, was at the pains to print his name. But in the mass of “Rappresentazioni,” Savonarola pamphlets, and other seemingly ephemeral books which he made attractive by procuring for them delightful woodcuts, he did not take sufficient pride to claim the credit which Mr. Proctor after four centuries recovered for him. The scribes who preceded the printers were by no means forward in naming themselves. Though not to the same extent as Libri, the early printers largely imitated their reticence. More especially with vernacular books they were careless of connecting themselves, because vernacular books were as yet despised. Hence, though we shall have to quote some in the chief languages of Western Europe, the comparative rarity of vernacular colophons. Hence, on the other hand, the comparative frequency of the Latin ones, which can be culled from all kinds of learned books, more especially from the laborious legal commentaries which now possess so few attractions beyond their beautiful, though crabbedly contracted, typography. It is a pity, because the Latin found in colophons is often far from classical, and occasionally so difficult that our renderings will be offered in fear and trembling. But it was in Latin that literary distinction was mainly to be won in the fifteenth century, and it was therefore with Latin books that the printers desired their names to be associated. Colophons, in fact, are the sign and evidence of the printer’s pride in his work, and this is the main clue we have in seeking for them.

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It was said at the end of our first chapter that the presence of a colophon in an old book is to be taken as a sign of its printer’s pride in his work. This being so, it would seem only reasonable to expect that the very earliest books of all, the books in which the new art made its first appearance before the book-buying world, should be found equipped with the most communicative of colophons, telling us the story of the struggles of the inventor, and expatiating on the greatness of his triumph. As every one knows, the exact reverse of this is the case, and a whole library of monographs and of often bitterly controversial pamphlets has been written for the lack of the information which a short paragraph apiece in three of the newly printed books could easily have given. What was the reason of this strange silence we are left to guess. It will be thought noteworthy, perhaps, that all three of these too reticent books are Latin Bibles—the 42-line Bible variously assigned to Gutenberg and to Fust and Schoeffer, the 36-line Bible variously assigned to Gutenberg and Pfister, and the 48-line Bible known to have proceeded from the press of Johann Mentelin of Strassburg. It is indeed a curious fact, and it is surprising that the folly of Protestant controversialists has not leapt at it, that not merely these three but the great majority of Latin Bibles printed before 1475 are completely silent as to their printers, place of imprint, and date. Of the fourteen editions which in the catalogue of the British Museum precede that which Franciscus de Hailbrun and Nicolaus of Frankfort printed at Venice in 1475, only three reveal their own origin—those printed at Mainz by Fust and Schoeffer in 1462 and by Schoeffer alone ten years later, and the edition of 1471, printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome. On the other hand, the three editions printed before 1462, as well as those of Eggestein and the “R-printer” at Strassburg and of Ruppel and Richel at Basel, are all anonymous. We might imagine that there was a fear that the natural conservatism of the church would look askance at the new art, and that therefore in printing the Bible it was thought best to say nothing about it. But, as a matter of fact, it was not only in their Bibles that these printers showed their reticence. Gutenberg never put his name in any book at all. Bertold Ruppel never dated one; Eggestein dated nothing till 1471, Mentelin nothing till 1473, Richel nothing till 1474. Most of their books are anonymous. When we remember that Mentelin was printing at Strassburg, a city with which Gutenberg had many relations, as early as 1458, and Eggestein not long after; that Ruppel was Gutenberg’s servant and Richel was Ruppel’s partner and successor, it would almost seem as if all this reticence were part of a distinct Gutenberg tradition, an attempt to keep the new art as secret as possible, either in order to lessen competitors and keep up prices, or (to take another alternative) because some of these printers may have broken promises of secrecy imposed on them with this object, and were thus less anxious to advertise themselves.

In strong contrast to the almost furtive behavior of this group of printers is the insistent glorification of themselves and the new art by Johann Fust the goldsmith and Peter Schoeffer the scribe, his son-in-law. The contrast is so great that it must certainly be reckoned with by those who hold that to Fust and Schoeffer must be assigned the production of the anonymous 42-line Bible, though in the tangled relations of the Mainz printers about 1454 there may have been reasons for silence at which we cannot guess. As printers in their own names the known career of Fust and Schoeffer begins with the publication, in 1457, of the famous Psalter in which we find our first colophon:

A few notes on some of the words in this colophon may be offered. “Codex,” which has been paraphrased “copy,” meant originally a collection of tablets waxed over for writing on, and so any book in which the leaves are placed one on another instead of being formed into a roll. “Capital letters” must be understood of large initials, not merely, as the phrase is often used to mean, majuscules, or “upper-case” letters. “Adinventio” appears to mean simply invention, and not, as with our knowledge of stories of “prefigurements” of printing in Holland afterward completed in Germany we might be inclined to think, the perfecting of an invention. The epithet “artificiosa” probably only means skilful, without emphasizing the contrast between the artificial methods of printing as compared with the natural use of the hand. About “caracterizandi” it is not easy to feel quite sure. Does it complete “imprimendi” by adding to the idea of pressing the further idea of the letter (χαρακτήρ) impressed, or is “imprimendi” already fully equivalent to printing, while “caracterizandi” refers to engraving the letters on the punches? Lastly, it may be noted that in calamus, “reed,” and exaratione, “plowing up,” which properly refers to the action of the “stilus” of bone or metal on the waxed surface of a tablet, we have reference to two different methods of writing, one or other of which must necessarily be slurred. Not all colophons present so many small linguistic difficulties as this, but few are wholly without them, and many of the renderings which will be offered in ensuing chapters must be accepted merely as the best paraphrases which could be attained.

This first colophon was repeated by Fust and Schoeffer with very slight alterations in the Psalter of 1459 (in which were added the words “et honorem sancti iacobi,” “and to the honour of S. James,” the patron of the Benedictine monastery at Mainz, for whose use the edition was printed), in the “Durandus” of the same year, the Clementine Constitutions published in 1460, and the Bible of 1462.

Meanwhile, in 1460, there had been published at Mainz an edition of the “Catholicon,” a Latin dictionary compiled by Joannes Balbus of Genoa, a Dominican of the thirteenth century. The colophon to this book, instinct with religious feeling and patriotism, and interesting for its pride in the new art and use of some technical terms, yet lacks the one important piece of information which we demand from it—the name of the printer.

In addition to the “Catholicon,” the British Museum possesses three books in the same type, which are, therefore, ascribed to the same press—a “Tractatus racionis et conscientiae” of Matthew of Cracow, and two editions of the “Summa de articulis fidei” of S. Thomas Aquinas; but these, perhaps because they are only little books, have no printer’s colophon. On November 4, 1467, a Latin-German vocabulary known as the “Vocabularius Ex Quo” was finished at Eltville, near Mainz, by Nicolaus Bechtermünze and Wigandus Spiess of Ortenberg, having been begun by Heinrich Bechtermünze, brother of Nicolaus. It is printed in the same type as the “Catholicon,” reinforced by some slight additions, and it is noteworthy (as illustrating what we may call the hereditary or genealogical feature which runs through many colophons) that in taking over the type used in the “Catholicon,” part of the wording of its colophon was taken over also, though a few words appear to be borrowed from Fust and Schoeffer. To show this we may quote the colophon to the 1467 “Vocabularius” as transcribed by Mr. Hessels (“Gutenberg: was he the inventor of printing?” p. 141):

The omission of the third line of the “Catholicon” quatrain, obviously because the word “Catholice” no longer had especial import, makes the construction even more mysterious than in the original, nor is this the only instance we shall find of such mauling.

While the Eltville colophon thus mainly takes its phrasing from that of the “Catholicon,” with a few words from Fust and Schoeffer’s thrown in, the latter firm were themselves not above borrowing a happy phrase, since in the “Liber Sextus Decretalium Bonifacii VIII” not only do we find an antithesis introduced to the “artificiosa adinuentio,” but in some copies, if Maittaire is to be trusted, the praise of Mainz is bodily taken over, so that the full colophon now reads:

By this time even a patient reader may well be weary with this ringing of the changes on the two colophons first printed, respectively, in 1457 and 1460. But, without pushing the suggestion too far, we may at least hazard a guess as to how they came thus to be amalgamated in December, 1465. For it was in this year that Gutenberg, who, when all is said, is the most probable printer for the “Catholicon” and the other books which go with it, became a pensioner of Adolph II, Archbishop of Mainz, and presumably gave up printing. The two small books in the “Catholicon” type (i.e. the “Tractatus racionis et conscientiae” and the “De articulis fidei”) appear in Schoeffer’s catalogue of 1469-70. Whether he bought the stock of them as early as 1465 cannot be proved, but it would seem reasonable to connect his taking over the “Catholicon” colophon in that year with the disappearance of Gutenberg from any kind of rivalry. As between printers in different cities, there was certainly no copyright in colophons any more than there was in books. We shall see presently how, when books of Schoeffer’s were reprinted at Nuremberg and Basel, his colophons, with slight alterations, were taken over with them. But in Germany at this time, between citizens of the same town, trade rights, I fancy, were much more respected than at Venice, for instance, or at Paris, where the editions of Caesaris and Stoll were impudently pirated by two other firms in the very same street. At all events, it is worth noticing that the “Catholicon” printer’s colophon seems to have been taken over by Schoeffer, who bought some of his stock, and by the brothers Bechtermünze, who had the use of his types.

Passing now to other of Schoeffer’s colophons, we find in the edition of the “Officia et Paradoxa” of Cicero of this same year, 1465, a more personal form of the colophon, which gives us an explicit statement that Fust, the capitalist of the business, probably owing to failing health, now left the actual superintendence of the printing to his son-in-law Schoeffer, the quondam scribe. It runs:

“Presens Marci tulii clarissimum opus Iohannes Fust Moguntinus ciuis, non atramento plumali, canna neque aerea, sed arte quadam perpulcra, Petri manu pueri mei feliciter effeci finitum, Anno 1465.” This statement, that “I, Johann Fust, citizen of Mainz, completed the book by the labor or instrumentality (manu) of my son Peter,” was repeated in the reprint of February 4, 1466, and thenceforth the name of Fust disappears from the annals of printing.

In 1467 we find the colophon attributed by Maittaire to some copies of the “Sextus Decretalium” repeated (with the omission of Fust’s name) in the “Secunda Secundae” of S. Thomas Aquinas and the second edition of the Clementine Constitutions, and this became for some time Schoeffer’s normal colophon. In 1470, however, he varied it in his edition of S. Jerome’s Epistles in order to introduce a compliment paid by the saint to the city of Mainz, which made it peculiarly appropriate that his work should be popularized by a Mainz printer. This colophon runs:

In 1472, in the “Decretum Gratiani cum glossis,” we get another variant and an addition of some importance:

A similar colophon was used in the “Nova compilatio Decretalium Gregorii IX” of 1473, and the phrase “suis consignando scutis” occurs again in Schoeffer’s edition of S. Bernard’s Sermons (1475) and in several books of the three following years. In 1479, in an edition of the “Decretals of Gregory IX,” the phrase is varied to “cuius armis signantur,” after which Panzer records it no more. This first mention of the shields has for us far more interest than the pompous recital of how Sixtus IV was pope, and Frederick of Austria king of the Romans, and Adolph of Nassau archbishop of Mainz when this “Decretal of Gratian” was printed “in the noble city of Mainz, which our ancestors used to call the golden city, and which has been so highly favored by its preëminence in printing.” Needless discussions have been raised as to what was the use and import of printers’ devices, and it has even been attempted to connect them with literary copyright, with which they had nothing whatever to do, literary copyright in this decade depending solely on the precarious courtesy of rival firms, or possibly on the rules of their trade-guilds. But here, on the authority of the printer who first used one, we have a clear indication of the reason which made him put his mark in a book—the simple reason that he was proud of his craftsmanship and wished it to be recognized as his. “By signing it with his shields Peter Schoiffer has brought the book to a happy completion.” When Wenssler of Basel copied Schoeffer’s books, he copied him also in affixing their marks and in drawing attention to them in the same way. Wenssler, too, was a good printer, and though he was certainly not claiming copyright in books which he was simply reprinting, he was equally anxious to have his handiwork recognized.

If yet further evidence be wanted, we can find it in the colophon to Schoeffer’s 1477 edition of the “Tituli Decisionum antiquarum et nouarum,” which reads as follows:

Some other features which occur in the wording of this will be noted later on. For our present purpose it is of interest to find the mark of the shields attached to a book which is distinctly stated to have been printed “Romanam post impressionem,” “after the edition printed at Rome,” and for which, therefore, no literary copyright is conceivable.

In the 1473 reprint of the “Sextus Decretalium” we note that Schoeffer now considered himself venerable, or perhaps it would be fairer to say “worshipful” (“per venerandum virum Petrum schoiffer de Gernshem feliciter est consummatum”), but in his edition of S. Augustine’s “De Ciuitate Dei,” of the same year, we find a more important variant. This reads:

The struggles of the fifteenth-century Latinists to express the technicalities of printing are always interesting, and the phrase “caracterum apicibus elementatum” is really gallant. Following the Greek στοιχεῖα, the Romans used the word “elementa” originally for the component sounds of speech and then, by transference, for the letters of the alphabet. “Elementatum,” therefore, is strictly appropriate, and might be rendered “with the letters built up or put together,” while “caracterum apicibus” of course refers to the engraving in relief which forms the face of the type.

In 1475, perhaps as an echo of some verses in the “Noua compilatio Decretalium Gregorii IX” of 1473, we find a new phrase tacked on to the “arte impressoria” in an edition of Justinian, noting the fact that though Providence did not consider antiquity worthy of the art, it had been granted to our times (“qua quidem etsi antiquitas diuino non digna est visa indicio, nostra nichilominus tempestate indulta”). In 1476 again Schoeffer advertises that his edition of Justinian’s Institutes was printed “in the noble city of Mainz am Rhein, the inventress and first perfectress of the printing art” (“In nobili urbe Maguncia Rheni, impressorie artis inuentrice elimatriceque prima”), while in the Clementine Constitutions of the same year he substitutes “alumnaque” for “elimatriceque,” presumably in the sense of pupil or practiser, reverting subsequently to “elimatrice.” In 1478 he once more varies the praises of Mainz by calling her “domicilium Minerve firmissimum,” “the most stable home of Minerva.” With this year 1478, which closes the period of Schoeffer’s chief activity, we may bring our survey of his colophons to an end. Thereafter he printed more intermittently, and, if the absence of colophons may be trusted, as I think it may, with less interest in his work. But during these twenty-two years from 1457 to 1478, inclusive, he had made his books bear continual testimony to one great fact, that the art of printing had been invented and brought to perfection in Germany, in the city of Mainz; and in any weighing of the comparative claims that have been advanced on behalf of Germany and Holland, I think that the evidence of Schoeffer’s colophons alone would suffice to give the priority to Germany and Mainz.

Of the clearness and energy of the claim made in these Mainz colophons, we have already given abundant illustration, nor can there be any doubt that it obtained wide publicity. Schoeffer printed at least one advertisement of his books, and he had an agency for their sale in Paris. Besides this, his editions were copied by other printers. So far as publicity could be insured in the fifteenth century, it was insured by Schoeffer, aided by the printer of the “Catholicon,” for the statement that printing was invented at Mainz; and despite the rivalry between city and city, and between country and country, during all the years that this assertion was being repeated in one colophon after another, no printer in any other book ventured to challenge it. No doubt there are facts on the side of Holland which have to be explained as best we may, but in the face of these Mainz colophons the explanation must be of such a kind as to leave undisputed the fact that it was at Mainz that printing with movable types—“mira patronarum formarumque concordia proporcione et modulo”—first became a practicable art. On the other hand, as to the individual inventor of this art the fifteenth-century colophons are absolutely silent. There is nothing in any Mainz colophon answering to the boast of John of Speier at Venice, “primus in Adriaca formis impressit aenis,” by which he asserted his individual priority over any other firm. The only statement of the kind is in the extraordinarily crabbed verses added by the corrector Magister Franciscus, after the colophon, to the “Institutiones Justiniani” of 1468, and reprinted in that of 1472, and in the Decretals of 1473, but omitted in 1476. This states that two Johns, both of whom the town of Mainz produced (genuit), were the renowned first stampers of books (librorum insignes protocaragmaticos), and that with them was associated a Peter; and the natural interpretation of these allusions identifies the “protocaragmatici” (though the “proto” may refer to preëminence quite as well as to priority) with Johann Gutenberg, Johann Fust, and Peter Schoeffer.

So far as they are intelligible, therefore, these verses in the Institutes of Justinian confirm and extend the evidence of the colophons, and may be cheerfully accepted. Our last colophon in this chapter is not quite in the same case. This famous and ingeniously arranged addendum to the edition of the “Compendium de Origine regum et gentis Francorum” of Johann Tritheim, printed by Johann Schoeffer at Mainz in 1515, is shown as one of our illustrations, but may nevertheless be transcribed here for the sake of expanding its contractions:

This may be rendered:

It would be too much to call this colophon untruthful, inasmuch as the term “primarius auctor,” like “protocaragmaticus,” does not necessarily claim primacy in point of time; nevertheless, it certainly suggests this primacy and generally assigns to Fust a more decisive part than we can easily believe that he played. We need not censure too hardly John Schoeffer’s family feeling, even though it led him to ignore Gutenberg in a way which earlier testimony forbids us to believe to be just; but it seems evident that family feeling was so much to the fore as to place this long historical colophon on quite a different footing from that of the earlier ones written by Schoeffer himself.

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While to Mainz belongs the supreme credit of having brought printing to the position of a practical art, the city in which it attained its highest perfection and popularity in the fifteenth century was undoubtedly Venice. The output from the Venetian presses represented some forty per cent. of the entire book production of Italy, and its quality was at least as remarkable as its quantity. It is natural, therefore, to turn from Mainz to Venice in our quest for interesting colophons, as wherever printers did good work and took pride in it we may expect to find correspondingly good colophons. Certainly at Venice we have no ground for disappointment in this respect. The Venetian colophons are plentiful and full of information, though chiefly about the publisher’s side of printing. What makes them a little alarming to the pedestrian editor is that so many of the earliest and most interesting specimens are in verse. The books most favored by the first Venetian printers were editions of the Latin classics and Latin translations of the Greek ones. To see these through the press each printer had to retain the services of a corrector, who filled a position half-way between the modern proof-reader’s and editor’s. The printers, not being able to write Latin themselves with any fluency, naturally left their colophons in the hands of their correctors, and these gentlemen preferred to express themselves in verse. The verse, even allowing for the fact that it is generally intended to be scanned by accent rather than quantity, is often of a kind which would get an English school-boy into considerable trouble; and it would be a nice question as to whether Omnibonus Leonicenus and Raphael Zovenzonius, who wrote it for John and Wendelin of Speier; Antonius Cornazanus, who was in the pay of Jenson; or Valdarfer’s corrector, Lodovicus Carbo, should be held the most successful. Just, however, because its poetic ornaments are commonplace, to render this verse into prose seems more than usually unsportsmanlike. Good poetry can stand the test of prose, and the poetaster meddles with it at his peril, as witness the uniform inferiority of metrical renderings of the Psalms to the prose of the Great Bible or Prayer-Book version. But mediocre poetry when turned into prose becomes simply ridiculous, and so the present translator, without reckoning himself as even a “minimus poeta,” has wrestled manfully with these various verse colophons and “reduced” them, as best he could, into English rhymes, since these, poor as they are, misrepresent the originals less than any attempt he could make in prose. Here, then, without more apology, are the colophons from the earliest Venetian books, which fall into an interesting sequence.

The first printer at Venice, it will be remembered, was John of Speier, who obtained a special privilege for his work which would have cramped the whole craft at Venice had not his death removed the difficulty. In his first book, an edition of Cicero’s “Epistolae ad Familiares,” printed in 1469, the colophon is cast into these verses:

Of this first Venetian edition of Cicero’s letters we know from a subsequent colophon that only one hundred copies were printed, one twenty-fifth part of the whole edition now being preserved in the four copies at the British Museum. It was obviously sold out very rapidly, and in some three or four months’ time the printer had got out a second edition, to which he added a new colophon.

The puzzle here is to determine how many copies there were of the second edition. Mr. Horatio Brown, in “The Venetian Printing Press” (p. 10), courageously asserts that “the second edition of the Epistulae consisted of six hundred copies, published in two issues of three hundred each; and that the whole six hundred took four months to print.” This is clearly inadmissible, as everything we know of fifteenth-century printing forbids us to suppose that John of Speier kept the whole book standing in type and printed off a second “issue” when he found there was a demand for it. The fourth month must be reckoned from the date of the first edition, and we have to choose, as to the number of copies in the second, between supposing that the three hundred, the “tercentenum opus,” refers to this alone, and that the poet did not intend to make any statement about the number of the first edition at all, or else that the second edition consisted of two hundred copies, and that these, with the hundred of the first, made up a total of three hundred. In either case his language is ambiguous, as the language of poets is apt to be when they try to put arithmetic into verse.

I have followed Mr. Proctor in making the second edition of Cicero’s letters precede the Pliny, but—as, in common with many other students of old books, I am made to feel daily—to be no longer able to go to him for information is a sore hindrance. I should have thought myself that the Pliny, a much larger book, was begun simultaneously with the first edition of Cicero, and that Wendelin’s colophon to the “De Civitate Dei” obliged us to link the Pliny with the first rather than the second edition. Perhaps, however, this arithmetic in verse is once more a little loose. Certainly the Pliny colophon, which is free from figures, is all the better poetry for that reason. It is the book here that speaks:

The aspersion on the scribes was undeserved. If truth be told, either because they used too thin an ink, or else from too slight pressure, the early Venetian printers seldom did full justice to their beautiful types; and though their vellum copies are really fine, those on paper are no easier to read than the average fifteenth-century manuscripts which they imitated. We must, however, forgive John of Speier his little boastings, as this was the last colophon he was to print; and our next, which comes at the end of S. Augustine’s “De Civitate Dei,” contains his epitaph:

The business which thus passed into his hands was certainly carried on by Wendelin vigorously, for during the next three years he turned out over a dozen folios or large quartos a year. He seems, indeed, to have outrun his resources, for as early as 1471 his colophons tell us that some of his books were financed for him by John of Cologne, and after the summer of 1473 his type passed into the possession of this John and his “very faithful partner, Johann Manthen.” As Wendelin’s name disappears from colophons for three years, it is probable that his services were taken over with his types; in 1470, however, he was his own master and the object of much praise from his colophon-writer. In his Sallust of this year we read:

The Livy of the same year ends with a poem of forty-six lines, which praises Wendelin for bravely rescuing such of Livy’s Decads as remained, “saevis velut hostibus acri Bello oppugnatas,” and by multiplying copies saving them from the fate which had befallen the rest. A poem like this, however, must be reckoned rather with congratulatory verses than as a colophon, though the line in these Venetian books is not always easy to draw. Two more of Wendelin’s publications in 1470 may be pressed into our service—a Virgil and a Petrarch. Of these the Virgil ends:

The colophon to the Petrarch claims credit for the restoration of a true text, a point on which the scholars of the Renaissance were as keen, up to their lights, as those of our own day, and which is often emphasized in their laudatory verses as the one supreme merit:

In 1471 Wendelin, or his correctors, lest their inspiration should be too hard worked, invented a simple couplet which would apply to any book equally well.

This is found in the “Apophthegmata” of Plutarch, the “Memorabilia” of Valerius Maximus, the “Singularia” of Pontanus, the “Aureae Quaestiones” of Bartolus de Saxoferrato, etc.; and must have been a welcome second string in case of need. Nevertheless, when a second edition of Sallust was called for, Wendelin’s private poet was equal to the occasion, producing the quatrain:

The verses are so incredibly bad, not merely in their entire disregard of quantity, but in grammar as well, that it would be pleasant to reproduce the peculiar iniquity which makes their charm. What the writer meant to say was something to the effect that:

Faithfully to reëcho the discords of the original is above the present translator’s skill.

As money troubles thickened about him, Wendelin’s colophons became less buoyant and interesting; but in 1473, when the transfer of his business to John of Cologne and Manthen of Gerresheim was impending, we find these verses in one of the huge law-books in which the early printers were so bold in investing their money—the “Lectura Bartoli de Saxoferrato super secunda parte Digesti Veteris”:

When Wendelin resumed business on his own account in 1476, he published very few books; but one of these, the “Divina Commedia” of Dante, printed in that year, has an Italian colophon in the ambitious form of a sonnet:

This putting of dates into verse is sad work. In Jenson’s early colophons, instead of dates (which are added in prose), we have the name of the reigning doge to wrestle with. Thus, in his edition of the “Rhetorica” and “De Inuentione” of Cicero we find the following verse and prose colophon:

So again in an edition, of the same year, of the Letters to Atticus we have a similar colophon, the poetical portion of which might easily have led a reader to believe that he was invited to buy a work by Atticus himself instead of letters mainly addressed to him:

In the next year we have to deal with the little group of vernacular books printed by Jenson, to one of which the omission of an X from the date in the colophon has given such notoriety. The three which are correctly dated are: (i) “Una opera la quale se chiama Luctus Christianorum ex Passione Christi, zoe pianto de Christiani per la Passione de Christo in forma de Meditatione.”

(ii) “Parole devote de lanima inamorata in Misser Iesu.”

(iii) “Una operetta la quale si chiama Palma Virtutum zioe triumpho de uirtude: la quale da Riegola forma et modo a qualunque stato,” etc.

It will be noticed that the second colophon is shorter than the first, and it should be mentioned that in yet another book of the same kind, the “Gloria Mulierum,” Jenson did not trouble to put his name at all, doubtless thinking, according to the view propounded in our first chapter, that these little vernacular books of devotion would bring him no particular credit. If we look now at the book with the misprinted date, “Una opera la quale si chiama Decor Puellarum, zoe Honore de le Donzelle: la quale da regola forma e modo al stato de le honeste donzelle,” we find this colophon:

Just as the subjects of all the books are of the same class, and just as they are all printed in the same types and the same size, so we find a general agreement in the colophons (as compared with those used by Jenson in the books issued in 1470), tempered with modifications which seem to fall into an orderly sequence. In subject the “Pianto de Christiani” and “Parole devote de l’anima inamorata” seem to pair best together, and the “Decor Puellarum” (regola de le honeste donzelle) with the “Palma Virtutum” (regola a qualunque persona). The first two are exactly dated within three days of each other, the second pair have only the date of the year. Probably there were two sets of compositors, one of whom printed the first pair, the other the second, and we see them starting by calling Jenson a “most famous engraver of books,” dropping these flowers in the “Decor Puellarum,” and quickly getting down to the curt formula of the “Palma Virtutum.” The typographical evidence, without further corroboration, would entitle us to feel sure that the omission of a second X in the date MCCCCLXI was purely accidental,[4] but it is satisfactory to find that the form of the colophon itself makes it impossible to separate it from its fellows and unreasonable to place it earlier than the fuller and more boastful form used in the “Pianto de Christiani.”

Though the colophons of his vernacular books were thus already tending to curtness in 1471, Jenson still paid some attention to those of his Latin publications. Thus, in an edition of Suetonius’s “Lives of the Caesars” of that year we find the quatrain:

In the “De Bello Italico aduersus Gotthos” of Leonardo Aretino, printed in the same year, we find this sentiment expressed more concisely in a couplet which could be inserted in any book:

Lastly, in this same year, we have two variants of a prose colophon which contains a fine phrase of epigrammatic brevity. In an edition of the “Familiar Letters of Cicero” it runs:

The phrase, but slightly enlarged, recurs in the “Institutes of Quintilian” of the same year.

After this, until he joined John of Cologne, Jenson’s colophons become short and featureless. Meanwhile, however, a third printer, Christopher Valdarfer of Ratisbon, had set up a press at Venice, and toward the close of 1470 joined in the contest of poetical colophons. His first contribution to it appears to be these three couplets in praise of his edition of Cicero’s “De Oratore”:

In the following year he issued another volume of Cicero, containing thirty orations, and added to it, doubtless by the hand of “Lodovico Carbo,” his corrector, seven couplets of verse whose phrasing has somehow impelled me to render them into disgracefully jingling rhymes:

After 1471 Valdarfer moved from Venice to Milan, where books from his press began to appear in 1474. Adam of Ammergau made some original contributions to the poetical tradition, but in his 1472 edition of Cicero’s Orations conveyed, and very clumsily, a couplet from Valdarfer’s edition of the previous year:

The Venetian verse tradition seems now to have settled down into a convention that a new printer should announce his arrival in Latin elegiacs, but need not continue the practice. Franciscus de Hailbrun complied with it to this extent in some dull lines in an edition of the “Quadragesimale” of Robertus de Licio in 1472; and it is in another edition of the same work that Panzer first records three couplets which, with the addition of a prose sentence, also constant in form, occur in numerous books printed by Bartolommeo de Cremona:

There is nothing very remarkable in these lines, but they are better than most of those with which I have been wrestling, and shall be dignified, therefore, by being rendered into prose instead of doggerel; for which also there is another reason in the fact that the meaning, just when it becomes interesting, is not as clear as could be wished. The best version I can make is as follows:

“Chalcographi,” which I have rendered literally as “writers in brass,” is, of course, no more than “typographers,” which means literally “writers with type.” But what exactly were the “notas archetypas,” the well-known models? And how did Bartolommeo of Cremona use them so as to distinguish himself from other “chalcographi”? For a moment the obvious answer appears to be that Bartolommeo is claiming credit for himself, not as a printer, but as a type-founder. The explanation, however, cannot stand in any sense which would differentiate Bartolommeo from his fellows in the way in which a modern type-founder differs from the printers who buy their types of him. For we know that Bartolommeo was himself a printer; and, on the other hand, it was the rule at this period for every printer to cast his own types, so that in doing this he would not be accomplishing anything exceptional. If he had been a type-seller in the modern fashion, we may be assured that he would have addressed the chalcographers, his presumable customers, much more respectfully. I can only imagine, therefore, that the “notas archetypas” was simply a good font of type which Bartolommeo thought that other printers were likely to copy.

In the editions of Virgil which he printed at Padua in 1472 (unless there is a mistake in the date), and again in 1473, Leonardus Achates announces himself very concisely:

The verse tradition was also complied with by Jacobus de Fivizano in a Virgil of 1472, by Jacobus Rubeus in an Ovid of 1474, and by Erhard Ratdolt and his companions on the title-page of the Calendar of Johannes de Monteregio in 1476. Two years later, when printing was becoming so great an industry at Venice that such toys as colophons in verse must have begun to appear a little undignified, an editor in the service of John of Cologne, ordinarily a man of quite commercial colophons, burst out into this song in his praise, at the end (of all places in the world) of the Commentary of Bartolus de Saxoferrato on a section of the Justinian Code:

With these lines, certainly more poetical than those of most verse colophons, we may bring this chapter to a close.

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The examples already quoted from books printed at Mainz and Venice will have sufficiently illustrated some of the general features which run through early colophons—the professions of religious thankfulness and devotion, and the desire of the printer to glorify not only the new art but himself as its most expert practitioner. These features will recur in other colophons we shall have occasion to quote, but there is no need to pick out many examples from books printed in other towns specially to illustrate them. The piety of German printers frequently prompted such devout colophons as this which Johann Zainer at Ulm added to his edition of the “Quodlibet” of S. Thomas Aquinas, and the one example may serve for all:

As to boasting, there is more than enough of it to be found wherever we turn; but it will not be amiss to collect some instances of the special vaunts of the prototypographers,—the men who claimed to have been the first to practise their craft in any particular town,—as these are sometimes of importance in the history of printing. Thus, in the “Lectura super Institutionum libros quatuor” of Angelus de Gambilionibus de Aretio, printed by Joannes de Sidriano of Milan, we have a most precise statement of the day on which the first printed book was finished at Pavia:

Equally precise is Bartolommeo de Cividale in the short colophon he adds to his edition of Petrarch’s Trionfi, the first book printed at Lucca:

In the “Manuale” or “Liber de salute siue de Aspiratione Animae ad Deum” of S. Augustine, printed at Treviso in 1471, we find Gerard de Lisa boasting, with more poetry, but less precision:

Curiously enough, a year before Joannes de Sidriano issued the first book at Pavia, printing had been inaugurated at Mantua with another work by the same not very illustrious author—Gambiglioni’s “Tractatus Maleficiorum.” In this Petrus Adam de Michaelibus writes:

All these claims seem sufficiently well established, but that of Filippo of Lavagna in the “De medicina” of Avicenna (translated by Master Gerard of Cremona) is much less tenable. Here he says distinctly at the end of Book II:

We know that Antonio Zaroto had printed at Milan a “Festus de Verborum significationibus” on the 3d August, 1471, while the earliest date credited to Lavagna is that of his edition of the “Epistolae ad Familiares” of Cicero, 25th March, 1472. It is true that the pretty colophon to his “Miraculi de la Vergene Maria” tells another tale:

But this is another instance of the risks of using Roman numerals (compare the three “1468” colophons cited in Chapter III), since the V in this date is clearly a misprint for a second X, which in some copies correctly takes its place.

A possible explanation of Lavagna’s boast in 1473 lies in the fact that he was by birth a Milanese, while Zaroto came from Parma; so that if we may take the latter half of the colophon to mean “the first man in this town who introduced and discovered this art of printing,” it would be literally correct—that is, if we can be sure that Lavagna was actually a printer at all, a point on which Mr. Proctor was very doubtful. But to raise this question is perhaps only a modern refinement, since without the help of the doctrine qui facit per alium facit per se we must accuse many worthy fifteenth-century tradesmen of lying in their colophons.

Another dubious statement, which may perhaps be explained, was introduced, amid some very vainglorious boasting, in the colophon to the Oxford edition of the Epistles of Phalaris. This runs:

This is certainly not a truthful colophon, for we cannot believe that any foreign students would have sent to Oxford to buy the letters of the pseudo-Phalaris or any other books there printed, while the assertion that Britons learnt printing by their mother-wit accords ill with the fact that Theodoric Rood came from Cologne to practise the art on their behalf. Mr. Horatio Brown, however, perhaps presses the fifth line a little too hard when he asserts that “these verses prove that public opinion abroad assigned the priority of printing in Venice to Jenson.” John of Speier had died so early in his career, and the work of Jenson is to this day so universally recognized as the finest which was produced at Venice, that the Frenchman may fairly be said to have taught the Venetians printing, without claiming for him priority in order of time. It should, perhaps, also be noted that while Hain and Mr. Brown print the important word as docuit, Mr. Madan gives it as decuit, from which it might be possible to extract the assertion, not that he taught the Venetians the art, but that he graced them with it. It would need, however, a fifteenth-century Orbilius to do justice upon the perpetrator of such vile Latin, while e for o is an easy misprint, and docuit is confirmed by the obvious antithesis of didicit in the next line.

More important, because more detailed than any of the boasts we have yet quoted, are the claims and pleas put forward in the colophons to the edition of the commentary of Servius on Virgil, printed by Bernardo Cennini and his son Domenico, at Florence, in 1471-72. The first of these occurs at the end of the Bucolics, and is repeated, with the substitution of “Georgica” for “volumen hoc primum,” after the Georgics. The second comes at the end of the book.

The references to the leaving of blank spaces for the Greek quotations (a common practice of the earliest printers in Italy) and to the trouble caused by the accents are particularly interesting, and by ill luck were not noticed by Mr. Proctor, who would have been delighted to quote them in his admirable monograph on “The Printing of Greek.”

Difficulties were natural in the early days of the art, and must often have beset the path of the wandering printers who passed from town to town, or from monastery to monastery, printing one or two books at each. As late as 1493 one such printer, not yet identified, who started his press at Acqui, though he was engaged on only a humble school-book, the “Doctrinale” of Alexander Gallus, found himself in sore straits owing to the plague raging in the neighboring towns.

All these promises may have been carried out, but we know of no other book from this press, and it is more than likely that no other was issued. Nor was this the only press which was inconvenienced by the plague, since two years later the disease interrupted Conrad Kachelofen in the pious task of printing a missal at Leipzig, and caused him to become the first exponent of the art at Freiberg, as we duly learn from the colophon:

From Hain 10425 we learn that a Machasor, or Compendium of Prayers, for the use of the Italian synagogues was begun at Soncino in September, 1485, and finished at Casal Maggiore in August, 1486; but to what this change of scene was due the colophon does not say. One would have thought that in the fifteenth century war as well as pestilence must often have interrupted the printer at his work; and indeed the sack of Mainz in 1462 was a very notable event in the history of printing. Yet the only two references to war I can remember in contemporary colophons hardly view it as an interruption—the first Paris printers (Gering, Krantz, and Friburger), indeed, tried to use it as an advertisement for their Sallust, where the verses at the end run:

The other allusion takes the form of sympathy with the sufferers from Turkish oppression and invasion, and comes at the end of an edition of the story of Attila, in a colophon which leads up to the statement that the book was printed at Venice by showing how it was the fear caused by Attila which brought about the foundation of the island city.

Printers—though Pynson’s head was broken in a street riot, and Pierre le Dru took part in a Paris brawl during his prentice days—have usually been men of peace; but despite this and any care they may have taken in avoiding the plague, they died like other men, and several colophons record the death of the master craftsman while engaged on the work. We have already seen the rather businesslike lamentation of Wendelin of Speier for his brother John. In the edition of Boccaccio’s “Genealogiae Deorum gentilium” printed at Reggio in 1481, Bartholomeus Bruschus (or Bottonus) mourns rather more effusively for Laurentius:

But neither do these verses come anywhere near the simple pathos of the colophon to the “Cronycles of the londe of England,” printed at Antwerp in 1493, which records the death of the famous printer Gerard Leeu.

A man whose death is great harm for many a poor man must needs have been a good master, and a king need want no finer epitaph, though the phrase is full of the one thought which makes the prospect of death terrible.[5] One rather wonders what the workmen of Plato de Benedictis had to say about him when he died; for, if the colophon to his edition of “Bononia illustrata” (Bologna, 1494) was worded with his consent, he had a nasty readiness to take all the credit to himself and leave all the blame for his workmen.

Better than this is the frank plea that misprints in a learned book are very hard to avoid, put forward by Anima Mia at the end of a book by Raphael Regius containing discussions on a letter of Pliny’s and on passages in Persius and Quintilian:

From the colophon of the Lecture of Antonius de Alexandro “super secundo codicis Iustiniani,” printed at Naples by Sixtus Riessinger in 1473-74, we learn, though only by mysterious hints, that at least some printers had other enemies besides war and pestilence to contend against. This colophon appears to have been written by the literary partner in the firm, Francesco Tuppo, since no one but himself would have used the Chinese humility of the phrase “inter trecentos studentes minimus.” From the books which he took up, Tuppo must have been a man of some culture; but his Latin, if we may judge by this colophon, was not his strong point.

One would like to hear something more about the traitors, malignants, and shifty rogues (perfidos, maliuolos ac versutos) against whom the colophon declaims; but I have failed to discover any other references to them. The phrase “cum fido sodali,” used of Tuppo’s relations to Riessinger, raises the question as to whether any real partnership existed between them. In the colophons to three other books their names appear conjointly; three more of later date (1480-89), of which Riessinger appears to have been the actual printer, are stated to have been printed by Tuppo. The point is of some little interest as possibly throwing some light on the vext question of who were the “fidelissimi Germani” who printed Tuppo’s Aesop in 1485, and also in the same year the account of the process of King Ferdinand against his rebellious nobles. As to this Mr. Proctor wavered between the claims of Johann Tresser and Martin of Amsterdam on the one hand, and “Matthias of Olmutz and his German workmen” on the other. (See his Index, p. 450, and “CCC Notable Books,” pp. 107 sq.) But Riessinger also was a German, and from his relations both to Tuppo and to the king (of whom he calls himself, in the “Super feudis” of Andreas de Ysernia in 1477, the “devotus atque fidelis servus”) seems to have some claim to consideration. The phrase “fidelissimi Germani” is in itself a very curious one, as it leaves us wondering whether they were “fidelissimi” in the abstract, or to one another, or to the king. If to one another, we may find a parallel in the frequency with which John of Cologne and Manthen of Gerretzem proclaim their loyalty to each other. Thus in their first dated book, the Sallust of 23d March, 1474, we find them writing:

As another example we may take their Bartolus of 1476, where a phrase of the same kind is followed by another of some interest:

While many publishers pure and simple took to themselves the credit of being their own printers, these careful statements on the part of the loyal partners, that their function has been that of superintendence and finance (ductu et impensa), and as to the hiring of the workmen (laboratores conduxerunt), are rather notable. When John of Cologne joined with Jenson and others as publishers in employing Johann Herbort of Seligenstadt to print for them, he still carried with him one of his old phrases—witness this typical colophon from the “Super Decretis” of Guido de Baysio, 1481:

Herbort was fond both of the phrase about the Olympiads (which might be more idiomatically translated by “in the Christian era”) and also of his eulogy on himself, and several others of his colophons run on the same lines. The pride which many of the early printers took in their work was indeed immense. Of some of its manifestations we have already had more than enough; but we may stop to note two colophons which show that they sometimes expected their customers to recognize the origin of a book by its types, though they can certainly never have anticipated the scientific investigations of Mr. Proctor in this field. The first of these is from Hain *10614, a Mandeville, of which I have never seen a copy.

A good many literary mistakes, and the investigations needed to correct them, would have been spared if this quite accurate statement of the supremacy of the French Mandeville as compared with the Latin (and also the English) had been generally accepted. What we are here concerned with is the attention called to the fact that it is printed in the Venetian letter. Of course, even before the invention of printing a school of handwriting would have grown up at Venice sufficiently distinct for experts to distinguish it; but this expectation that any buyer of the book would recognize at once where it was printed is interesting, and would be made much more so if a copy of the edition could be found and the press identified. In our next colophon the printer expects his capital letters to serve his readers instead of his name. This is from the first Augsburg edition of the “Catholicon” of Joannes Balbus, about the Mainz edition of which we have already had to speak. The Augsburg colophon runs:

Not every one could be expected, even at a time when interest in the new art must have been very keen, to identify the printer of a book from the type or initials used in it; and, as has already been noted, the whole reason for the existence of printers’ colophons was to identify the master-craftsman with any book of which he was proud, and so to advertise his firm. To make this advertisement more conspicuous many printers add their device at the end of the colophon, and five or six of them call special attention to this in their colophons, Peter Schoeffer leading the way in this, as already noted. Suis consignando scutis and cujus arma signantur are the phrases Schoeffer used (see Hain, 7885, 7999, 8006), and Wenssler of Basel, who was often on the lookout to follow Schoeffer’s leads, followed him also in this. The elaborate praise of his own work, which we find in his 1477 edition of the Sixth Book of the Decretals by Boniface VIII, is of a piece with this desire to hall-mark it as his own by affixing his device:

So, in 1475, Sensenschmidt and Frisner at Nuremberg issued their Latin Bible “suis signis annotatis”; and at Cologne, in 1476, Conrad Winters ends an edition of the “Fasciculus Temporum”: “Impressum per me Conradum de Hoemberch meoque signeto signatum” (printed by me, Conrad de Hoemberch, and signed with my signet); and in the same year we find Veldener at Louvain using nearly the same phrase (proprio signeto signata) in his edition of the “Fasciculus Temporum.”[7] As an amusing variation on this we have the custom adopted by John and Conrad of Westphalia, in some of the books they printed at Louvain, of placing their own portraits after their colophons and referring to them as their “solitum signum.” Thus in an edition of Laet’s “Pronosticationes euentuum futurorum anni lxxvi” John of Westphalia writes in this very interesting fashion:

Laet’s Prognostications were the Moore’s Almanacs of the fifteenth century, and by putting his new device (which he used again about the same time in the “Breviarium super codice” of Iohannes Faber) on such a publication John of Westphalia secured a wide advertisement.

The arts of advertisement must assuredly have been needed by the early printers when they came as strangers and aliens to a new town and began issuing books at their own risk. Even with the help of Latin as a universal language, and with the guidance of native patrons and scholars, pushing their wares must have been a difficult matter. Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome tried to make their names known, and to express at the same time their obligations to their patron, by a set of verses which recur frequently in their books:

Ulrich Han, another German printer at Rome, advertised himself in many of his books in another set of verses, perhaps the only instance of a colophon deliberately intended to raise a laugh, which recall the part played by the Sacred Geese in defending the Capitol against the Gauls (Galli), Gallus being also the Latinized form of Han’s name (Cock).

In addition to their colophons, the printers, at least in Germany, used many modern forms of advertisement. When he returned to Augsburg from Venice, Ratdolt issued a splendid type-sheet with specimens of all his different founts. Schoeffer, the Brothers of the Common Life, Koberger, and other firms printed lists of their new books as broadsides, and gave their travellers similar sheets in which purchasers were promised “bonum venditorem” (a kindly seller), and a space was left for the name of the inn at which he displayed his wares, to be filled in by hand. We have all heard of Caxton’s advertisement of his Sarum Directory (most indigestible of “Pies”) and its final prayer, “Please don’t tear down the bill.” In 1474 Johann Müller of Königsberg (Iohannes Regiomontanus), the mathematician-printer, issued what I take to be the first fully developed publisher’s announcement, with a list of books “now ready” (haec duo explicita sunt), “shortly” (haec duo opera iam prope absoluta sunt), and those he hoped to undertake. Its last sentence is not strictly a colophon, but I am sure that I shall be forgiven for quoting it. “Postremo omnium,” it runs, “artem illam mirificam litterarum formatricem monimentis stabilibus mandare decretum est (deus bone faueas) qua re explicita si mox obdormierit opifex mors acerba non erit, quom tantum munus posteris in haereditate reliquerit, quo ipsi se ab inopia librorum perpetuo poterunt vindicare.”—“Lastly it has been determined to commit to abiding monuments that wondrous art of putting letters together (God of thy goodness be favorable!), and when this is done if the craftsman presently fall asleep death will not be bitter, in the assurance that he has left as a legacy to posterity this great gift by which they will forever be able to free themselves from lack of books.” Shortly after writing these words Müller was called to Rome by Sixtus IV to give his help in reforming the calendar, but his foreboding was not unfulfilled, for death came to him in 1476, only two years after this announcement was written.

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The heading adopted for this chapter is not intended to imply that the colophons here grouped together are separated by any hard line from those already considered, only that they deal with the publishers’ side of book-making, the praises by which the printers and publishers recommended their wares, the financial help by which the issue of expensive and slow-selling books was made possible, the growth of competition, and the endeavors to secure artificially protected markets.

If colophons could be implicitly believed, the early printers would have to be reckoned as the most devout and altruistic of men. As a matter of fact, books of devotion and popular theology were probably the safest and most profitable which they could take up. Yet we need not doubt that the thought that they were engaged on a pious work, and so “accumulating merit,” gave them genuine satisfaction, and that colophons like this of Arnold therhoernen’s were prompted by real religious feeling:

Examples of colophons in this vein could be multiplied almost indefinitely. That appended by the Brothers of the Common Life, at their convent of Hortus Viridis (Green Garden) at Rostock, to an edition of the “Sermones de Tempore” of Johannes Herolt is much more distinctive. Herolt’s name is duly recorded in editions printed at Reutlingen and Nuremberg, but his work was usually quoted as the “Sermones Discipuli,” and the good brothers begin by commenting on his modesty.

Of the dated editions of the Sermons this of Rostock is the earliest, so that the claim of the brothers to have rescued it from neglect was apparently justified. Their praise of printing as “chief of all arts for the advantage of holy church” is very notable, though quite in accordance with German feeling. In the sixteenth century the doctors of the Sorbonne were much more doubtful on the subject. The brothers printed a few secular works at Rostock, e.g. the Metamorphoses of Ovid and Guido delle Colonne’s History of the Destruction of Troy. But the bulk of their work was theological or devotional, and their desire to improve their own sermons seems touchingly genuine and by no means commercial.

In the same year as the Rostock brothers printed the “Sermones Discipuli,” Leonardus Achates of Basel issued at Vicenza a Latin Bible to which was appended a lengthy colophon in praise of the study of the Scriptures, almost the only eulogy of the kind with which I have met.

As a rule, the books chosen for praise were of less self-evident merit, notably grammatical works by which a royal road was promised to the mysteries of Latin. Thus an unidentified Strassburg printer (possibly Husner, but known only as the “Printer of the 1493 Casus breues Decretalium”) recommended his “Exercitium Puerorum Grammaticale” not only to boys, but to friars, nuns, merchants, and every one else who needed Latin, in these glowing terms:

So, again, Arnold Pannartz, one of the prototypographers at Rome, vaunted the “De Elegantia Linguae Latinae” of Laurentius Valla as affording diligent students (they are warned that they must bring care and zeal to the task) a chance of making rapid progress.

Perhaps the eulogies of their own wares by publishers reaches its climax in the praises by Paulus Johannis de Puzbach of his edition of the “Expositio Problematum Aristotelis,” of which it is said that it will be useful to every creature in the universal world, though with the wise proviso that the said creature must use great diligence in its study (cuius utilitas erit omni creature in universo orbe que apponet huic operi studium summa cum diligentia).

Publishers who offered their readers a chance of buying books like these naturally posed as public benefactors, and in the colophon to a collection of the works of various illustrious men (Diui Athanasii contra Arium, etc.) printed at Paris in 1500 the reader is informed categorically that he owes four several debts of gratitude which apparently no such trifling consideration as the price demanded for the book could affect.

In this book, printed at the very end of the century in Paris, where the book trade had for centuries been highly organized, it is natural to find printer and publisher clearly separated, both being tradesmen working for gain. The lines for such a distinction already existed in the days of manuscripts, the scribes and the stationers belonging to quite separate classes, though they might assume each other’s functions. In the earliest days of printing the craftsmen were, as a rule, their own publishers; but the system of patronage and the desire of well-to-do persons in various ranks of society to get special books printed led to divers bargains and agreements. We find the Earl of Arundel encouraging Caxton to proceed with his translation of the “Golden Legend,” not only by the promise of a buck in summer and a doe in winter by way of yearly fee, but by agreeing to take “a reasonable quantity” of copies when the work was finished. The “Mirrour of the World” was paid for by Hugh Brice, afterward Lord Mayor of London. Whether William Pratt, who on his death-bed bade Caxton publish the “Book of Good Manners,” or William Daubeney, Treasurer of the King’s Jewels, who urged him to issue the “Charles the Great,” offered any money help, we are not told. Caxton was probably a man of some wealth when he began printing, and could doubtless afford to take his own risks; but other printers were less fortunate, and references in colophons to patrons, and to men of various ranks who gave commissions for books, are sufficiently numerous. Thus at Pescia we find two brothers, Sebastian and Raphael dei Orlandi, who subsidized works printed at two, if not three or even four, different presses. Most of the books they helped to finance were legal treatises, as for instance the Commentaries of Accoltus on Acquiring Possession, printed by Franciscus and Laurentius de Cennis, 1486.

Another law-book was printed for them by the same firm also in 1486, and three others in that year and in 1489 by firms not yet identified. But their interests though mainly were not entirely legal, and in 1488, from the press of Sigismund Rodt, there appeared an edition of Vegetius, in the colophon to which their views on the physical degeneration question of the day were very vigorously set forth.

Between 1471 and 1474 Ulrich Han printed a dozen or more books at Rome with Simon Chardella, a merchant of Lucca, whose help, if we may trust the colophon to the Commentary of Antonio de Butrio on the Decretals, was given from the purest philanthropy.

Single books, of course, were financed by people of many classes and ranks, from kings, princesses, and archbishops down to the Spanish bell-ringer who paid for a Lerida Breviary, as its colophon very explicitly sets forth.

We might have imagined that, a bell-ringer being sometimes equivalent to a sacristan, and the sacristan being often responsible for the choir-books, the commission to print this Breviary was given by Palares only in the name of the chapter. We are, however, so distinctly informed that he caused the book to be printed “propriis expensis” (at his own cost), that no such explanation is tenable, and we must imagine either that the bell-ringer was actuated by very creditable motives, or else that he saw his way to dispose of the books. On either view of the case, this bell-ringer’s edition may, perhaps, rank for strangeness with that of the poems of Gasparo Visconti, printed to the number of a thousand copies by Franciscus Corniger, a Milanese poet, to whom he presumably stood in the relation of a patron.

No doubt Gasparo Visconti duly repaid the admiration thus shown for his poems; but though the admiring friend or patron was not without his uses in the fifteenth century, and even now is occasionally indispensable, when all is said and done the success of a book depends on the reception it meets from an unbiased public, and it is to the public, therefore, that its appeal must finally be made. Colophons recognize this in different ways—sometimes, as we have seen, by praising the book, sometimes by drawing attention to its cheapness, very often by the care with which they give the exact address of the publisher at whose shop it can be bought. Vérard’s colophons are particularly notable in this respect. What could be more precise than the oft-repeated directions which we may quote from his edition of “Le Journal Spirituel” because of the careful arrangement of its lines?

Occasionally a verse colophon would be employed to tempt a purchaser to come to the publisher’s shop, as in the case of the French translation of the “Ship of Fools” by Jodocus Badius from the German of Sebastian Brant, printed by Geoffroy de Marnef in 1497. This ends:

As to advertisements of cheapness, in addition to instances already incidentally noted we may take as our example another colophon partly in verse—that to the edition of the “Liber cibalis et medicinalis pandectarum” of Matthaeus Silvaticus printed at Naples by Arnold of Brussels in 1474.

No doubt in this instance the book was much obliged to its editor for his care in revising it, and the great medical school of Salerno might justly be expected to be grateful for the publication of an important medical work: the trouble of the situation was that there were so many of these not wholly disinterested benefactors in the field at the same time. Editions, it is true, were mostly small, owing to the slowness of the presswork; and, no doubt, each several printer reckoned that he had all literary Europe for his market. But when Rome was vying with Venice, and the rest of Italy with both, and almost every important press was turning out classical editions, the market quickly became overstocked, and great printers like Wendelin of Speier at Venice and Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome found that they had burnt their fingers. Hence a commercial motive reinforced that natural self-esteem which still causes every editor to assume that his method of crossing a t or dotting an i gives his edition a manifest superiority over every other. In the next chapter we shall see how editors persistently depreciated their predecessors; but we may note here how, even when he had Chardella to help his finances, Ulrich Han could not help girding at rival firms. Thus in his edition of the Decretals of Gregory IX he bids his readers buy his own text with a light heart and reckon its rivals at a straw’s value.

If Han relied on the superiority of his work to defeat his rivals, other publishers preferred to have the advantage of coming earlier to market, and we find Stephanus Corallus, at Parma, actually apologizing with a very vivid metaphor for misprints in his edition of the “Achilleis” of Statius on the ground that he had rushed it through the press to forestall rivals. Of course, the rivals were envious and malevolent,—that might be taken for granted,—but the assumption that a purchaser was to acquiesce in bad work in order that Corallus might hurry his book out quickly only for his own profit was merely impudent.

When publishers were as ready as this to forestall each other, a cry for some kind of regulation of the industry was sure to be raised, and at Venice, the greatest book-mart in the world, regulation came in the form of the privilege and spread thence to various countries of Europe. I do not at all agree with the opinion which Mr. Gordon Duff has expressed so strongly, that the power of freely importing books given by Richard III was by any means an unmixed blessing, or that its revocation by Henry VIII fifty years later had disastrous effects on English printing. Printing started late in England and was handicapped by the impoverishment wrought by the Wars of the Roses. The facility with which all learned books were supplied from abroad quickened the growth of English learning, but restricted the English printers to printing and reprinting a few vernacular books of some literary pretensions and an endless stream of works of popular devotion and catch-penny trifles. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge could support a permanent printer, and English scholars were obliged to have their books printed abroad. Nevertheless, free trade, however hardly it might press on a backward industry, was infinitely better than the privilege system, which was altogether haphazard and liable to gross abuse. For the story of its introduction and development at Venice, the reader must be referred to Mr. Horatio Brown’s “The Venetian Printing Press” (Nimmo, 1891), a book which leaves a good deal to be desired on its purely typographical side, but which is quite admirable as regards the regulation of the industry. Our concern here is only with the privileges in so far as they make their appearance in colophons. The earliest colophon in which I have found allusion to them is six years later than the first grant which Mr. Brown records, that to Marc’ Antonio Sabellico in September, 1486, for his “Decades rerum Venetarum,” printed by Andrea de Torresani in 1487 (Hain *14053). By 1492 the system must have been in full swing, as is shown by this colophon to the “Liber Regalis” of Albohazen Haly, printed by Bernardinus Ricius:

The three points as to the duration of the privilege, the amount of the fine, and the charity to which it was to be applied are here stated quite plainly, but many publishers preferred to leave the amount of the penalty mysterious by substituting a reference to the grace itself, as for instance is the case in the edition of Hugo de S. Caro’s “Postilla super Psalterium,” printed by the brothers Gregorii in 1496.

The Gregorii followed the same course, in their 1498 edition of S. Jerome’s Commentary on the Bible, a work (rather condescendingly praised by the printers) which it is amazing to find on the privileged list at all.

The instances we have quoted so far are of references in colophons to privileges granted to the printer-publishers. They were granted also (as in the case of Sabellico) to authors, and from his translation of Seneca’s plays we learn that Evangelio Fossa obtained from the Senate protection for all his writings.

Privileges were obtainable not only by publishers in Venice itself, but also by those in the towns under Venetian rule, and the two following examples are taken respectively from a Quadragesimale printed by Angelus Britannicus at Brescia in 1497, and a Martianus Capella printed by Henricus de Sancto Urso at Vicenza in 1499.

As publishers went on applying for these privileges, it is to be presumed that they found them profitable; but they were certainly sometimes contravened, and the fines do not appear to have been enforced. Nevertheless they soon spread beyond the Venetian dominions. Thus in 1496, for instance, we find Scinzenzeler obtaining one at Milan, and warning other booksellers, with effusive friendliness, not to incur these dreadful penalties by ignorant piracy.

Without attempting to follow the subject of Privileges all over Europe, it may be worth while to note a few other instances of them in different countries. Thus they begin to make their appearance in Vérard’s colophons at Paris in 1508, the earliest I can find set forth in Mr. Macfarlane’s Bibliography being that in the “Epistres Saint Pol” of 17th January of that year, called 1507 because of the Paris custom of reckoning from Easter. This reads:

From this date onwards an allusion to a privilege is found in most of Vérard’s books, but it will be noted that its term is the very moderate one of three years. In England, in the earliest instance I have noted,—Pynson’s edition of the Oration of Richard Pace in 1518,—it is shorter still. The colophon here reads:

Herbert notes of this book, “this is the first dated book, wholly in the Roman or white letter, that I have seen of his [Pynson’s] printing, or indeed printed in England.” The foreign custom of privileges seems to have made its appearance with the foreign type.

In Spain the duration of the earliest privilege I have found (in an edition of the “Capitulos de governadores” printed in June, 1500, with the types of Pegnitzer and Herbst of Seville) is the same as in those granted to Vérard in France, and the benevolent Spanish government accompanies it by a stipulation as to the price to be charged to purchasers.

In Germany, on the other hand, the longer period favored in Italy seems to have been adopted. Here the earliest privileges I have come across are those granted to the Sodalitas Celtica of Nuremberg—i.e., to Conrad Celtes and his partners or friends—for printing books in which he was interested. In the first of these privileges—that for the Comedies of the nun Hroswitha—the period for which it held good is not specified;[9] but in that granted to Celtes in the following year for his own “Quatuor Libri Amorum” it is distinctly stated, “ut nullus haec in decem annis in Imperii urbibus imprimat”; i.e., that under the terms of the privilege no one might print the book in any town of the Empire for ten years.

The instances of privileges here quoted may not be the very earliest in their several countries, but they at least show how quickly the demand for this form of protection spread from one country of Europe to another. It seems to me a little remarkable that while publishers were at the pains to obtain such legal monopolies (which presumably cost money), and advertised all the other attractions of their books so freely, they should have said so little about the illustrations which often form so pleasant a feature in the editions of this period. In the colophon, as on the title-page, of the “Meditationes” of Cardinal Turrecremata printed by Ulrich Han at Rome we are informed where the woodcuts were copied from:

So again the colophon[10] of the Verona Valturius notes not only that John of Verona was the first printer in his native town, but also that the book appeared with most elegant types “et figuratis signis,” by which we must understand the pictorial representations of the numerous military engines he describes. In some of the French Horae the illustrations are just alluded to in the titles or colophons, and in Meidenbach’s “Ortus Sanitatis” there is a fairly long reference, in the Address to the Reader, to the “effigies et figuras” with which the book is so successfully adorned. But the only colophon which really does justice to the illustrations of a fifteenth-century book is that to Hartmann Schedel’s “Liber Chronicarum,” or “Nuremberg Chronicle.”

Out of all the hundreds of fifteenth-century books with interesting pictures, this is the only one I can call to mind which gives explicit information as to its illustrations. Perhaps the publishers thought that the woodcuts were themselves more conspicuous in the books than the colophons. But it is certainly strange that when authors, editors, press-correctors, printers, patrons, and booksellers all get their due, the illustrators, save in this one instance, should have been kept in anonymous obscurity.

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Booksellers are a much more learned body than they used to be, but few readers of second-hand catalogues can have failed to meet with ascriptions of dates for the printing of books long anterior to the invention of the art, on the ground of colophons which they know at once to have been written by the authors. Where only a few years separate the dates of composition and publication the mistake is easily made and not always easily detected. The retention of the author’s original colophon is, however, common enough for cataloguers to be prepared for it; and there are plenty of cases in which a book possesses two quite distinct colophons, the first by the author, the second by the printer or publisher. Thus, to take a simple example from a famous book, we find at the end of the text of the “Hypnerotomachia” the author’s colophon:

That of the printer is thirty-two years later:

A more interesting instance of a double colophon occurs in an equally famous book, the “Morte d’Arthur” of Sir Thomas Malory. In this Malory writes:

This colophon was written between Malory’s outlawry in 1468 and his death on March 14, 1471, and its request for the reader’s prayers for his “delyuerance” and for the repose of his soul after death is made all the more pathetic when we remember the author’s declaration that by sickness “al welthe is birafte” from a prisoner (Book ix, ch. 37). Caxton’s preface as editor, printer, and publisher, on the other hand, is purely businesslike, and gives us no more information about the author.

Despite outlawry, sickness, and probably imprisonment, Malory finished his book. In the troublous days of the fifteenth century war and disease must often have proved sad interruptions to authors, and in his “Repetitio de verborum significatione” (Hain 11679) Georgius Natta is evidently as proud of having triumphed over these hindrances as of his official position. Thus he writes:

Less contented with his lot, Henricus Bruno, in his lectures “Super Institutionibus” published at Louvain, after writing the formal colophon takes up his pen anew to give eloquent expression to the woes of the professional man who devotes his leisure not to rest but to literature.

Even as late as 1580 an author, a musician this time, used the colophon to pour out the griefs of which nowadays we disburden ourselves in prefaces. It is thus that, in his “Cantiones seu Harmoniae sacrae quas vulgo Moteta vocant,” Johann von Cleve took advantage of the tradition of the colophon to bespeak the sympathy of students and amateurs of music for his troubles in bringing out his book:

An earlier author, Bonetus de Latis, when he came to the end of his “Annulus astronomicus siue de utilitate astrologiae” (Rome, Andreas Freitag, c. 1496; Hain 9926), dedicated to the Pope, had no complaints to make of his printer or of working after office hours, but used the colophon to ask for lenient criticism of any flaws in his Jewish Latin.

Jacobus Bergomensis, when he finishes his “Supplementum Chronicarum,” can boast proudly of promises performed, and gives not only the dates of its completion and printing, but his own age.

When the “Supplementum Chronicarum” was reprinted in 1485-86, Bergomensis duly altered his statement as to his age to fifty-one and fifty-two. In the 1490 edition the author’s colophon still reads:

That of the printer, on the other hand, is duly brought up to date:

It is thus evident that with this and later editions Bergomensis, though he lived to be eighty-six, did not concern himself.

An author’s colophon must often have been omitted by the scribe or printer who was copying his book precisely because a double colophon seemed confusing, and the scribe or printer wished to have his own say. Nicolaus de Auximo in his Supplement to the Summa of Pisanella ingeniously forestalled any such tampering by linking his remarks to his exposition of the word “Zelus,” the last which he had to explain. After quoting from the Psalms the text “Zelus domus tue comedit me,” “The zeal of thy house has eaten me up,” he proceeds:

The submission of a book, more particularly a theological one, to the correction of the learned and the church was of course “common form” while the Roman dominion was undisputed, and many colophons containing such phrases could be collected. We must pass on now, however, from authors to editors, taking William Caxton, by the way, as an editor and translator who put so much of himself into his work that he deserves honorary rank among authors. That he was his own printer and publisher as well has certainly rather hindered the appreciation of his literary merits, but gives to his colophons, prologues, and epilogues a special flavor of their own. As to which of these opportunities of talking to his readers he should use, Caxton seems to have cared little; but even if we confine ourselves fairly strictly to colophons properly so called, there is no difficulty in finding interesting examples, as, for instance, this from his “Godefroy of Boloyne”:

Here, it will have been noticed, Caxton runs epilogue, colophon, and dedication all into one after his own happy and unpretentious fashion. Our next example is from a book which had indeed a royal patron in France, but in England was brought out at the request of an unnamed London merchant, though its name, “The Royal Book,” has probably had something to do with its high pecuniary value among Caxton’s productions. This colophon runs:

Our third Caxton colophon belongs to another book which had no royal or princely patron, only Master William Daubeney, keeper of the jewels. There are certainly, however, no lack of kings in the colophon to “Charles the Great”; for Caxton, who had good reason to be attached to the House of York, alludes very ceremoniously to “his late master Edward IV,” while chronology compels him to name also both Richard III and Henry VII, though in neither case does he bestow any complimentary epithets.

The double dating which the worthy translator and printer gives so calmly has here a special interest as (unless indeed he began setting up the translation before it was finished) it shows that he was able to print a book of considerable size between June 18th and December 1st, and also because between these two dates Bosworth Field was lost and won, and the English throne had passed to a new king, on whom Caxton was perhaps at first inclined to look with rather critical eyes. If this was so, however, Henry VII found a sure way to conciliate him, for in the “Fayts of Arms” of Christine de Pisan we find that the translation and printing of the book were undertaken at the king’s request, and there is now no lack of honorific epithets attached to the mention of him.

Passing now from authors and semi-authors (if we may invent such a class to do honor to Caxton) to editors of a more ordinary stamp, we shall find that they, or the printers who hired them, in their anxiety to magnify their achievements, have frequent recourse to the opportunities offered by colophons. For unflinching and pretentious self-advertisement the palm, as far as my experience reaches, must be given to Bartolommeo Cepolla, who collected and edited the “consilia,” or counsel’s opinions, of Paulus de Castro, a celebrated jurist:

A more normal example of the custom of blaming previous printers and editors—and it must be owned that the accusations hurled at them are, as a rule, much better justified than the vituperator’s assertions of his own superiority—may be taken from another law-book, a lecture or commentary by Petrus de Ancharano, printed and, as he asserts, edited by Benedictus Hectoris at Bologna.

Legal works are usually crabbed reading in themselves, and in the fifteenth century were made infinitely more so by the multiplicity of contractions used in printing them. It might seem natural, therefore, that there should be a special difficulty in obtaining correctness in these texts. But, as a matter of fact, to whatever department of knowledge we turn, we shall still find the fifteenth-century editor exclaiming against the wickedness of his predecessors. Thus, if we go to divinity, we may find as loud complaints as any law lecturer could formulate in the colophon to the Hagenau edition of Gabriel Biel’s sermon on the Lord’s Passion.

To print a book (i) carelessly, (ii) from a faulty copy, and (iii) under a wrong title was really reprehensible, yet after all this detraction there is something quite pleasing in coming across a colophon like that to S. Augustine’s Exposition on the Psalms, in which Johann von Amerbach of Basel, instead of vilifying his predecessors, is content to appeal to the judgment of experts in matters of editing and textual criticism.

Perhaps even more cheering than this pleasant and reasonable self-confidence is the mild shadow of an oath, a simple “Hercule,” with which Heinrich Quentell asseverates that his edition of the De Veritate of S. Thomas Aquinas truly rejoices in the true title of truth! We may note also the little arrangement by which the printer contrived to bring his work to an end on the very day of the saint’s festival.

In all these books editors could have had no difficulties to deal with save those which arise when texts are copied and recopied with the inevitable introduction of small errors at every stage, and perhaps some even more dangerous attempts to correct those already made. But in one class of printing, that of liturgical books, in which absolute accuracy of text and punctuation was of supreme importance, the need for careful supervision was really very great,—so much so, indeed, that the great bulk of liturgical printing was entrusted to firms who made a specialty of it. It is not surprising, therefore, to find some special insistence on the editorial virtues of a missal-printer; and the colophon to the Salzburg Missal printed by Georg Stuchs at Nuremberg in 1498 is interesting for its detailed account of the system of punctuation.

In a Roman missal printed by G. Arrivabenus & P. de Paganinis at Venice in 1484 the colophon alludes to the common practice of correcting the text of a printed missal by hand, sometimes to bring it up to date, but also for the elimination of the printer’s errors. In this case the printers make bold to say that their text is so correct that any one who tampers with it rashly is as likely to turn right into wrong as wrong into right.

Somewhat in the same spirit as the boast of the Venetian missal-printers, we find Koberger declaring—let us hope, after consulting ecclesiastical authorities—that his edition of the Revelations of S. Bridget is so complete that if any one produces additional revelations they may be dismissed as spurious.

Of the views of the editors of classical texts we have already had some specimens in some of the early Venetian colophons. That of Filippo da Lavagna to his edition of the Epistolae Familiares of Cicero (Milan, 1472) is, however, of considerable interest, and tells us, moreover, the number of copies printed, besides conveying a stray hint to the students of the day that the production of further editions of the same excellence would depend on the liberality of their support.

Even better than this, however, is the colophon to the Brescia Lucretius, in which we see the editor dismayed at first by the obvious defects of his copy, but resolving at length to print it on the ground that his inability to find any other was the best proof of its rarity.

The name of Lucretius seldom appears in any of the medieval catalogues, and the number of manuscripts of his “De Rerum Natura” now extant is so small that his first printer’s plea may well be received. Even in comparatively modern books, indeed, a satisfactory text was not always to be obtained for the asking. Chaucer has had no more devout lover than William Caxton, and yet when Caxton printed the “Canterbury Tales” he only succeeded in obtaining a manuscript of the worst class to work from, and when a friend offered him a better text for his second edition the improvement was very slight. In the same way we find the anonymous Florentine editor of two tracts of Domenico Cavalca (we cannot be wrong in assuming that the same editor worked on both) apologizing for the bad text from which he printed the first few pages of the “Frutti della Lingua,” and telling how in the case of the “Specchio di Croce” he had to collate a number of copies in order to replace them by a good printed edition.

No doubt the early printers and the editors whom they employed made the most of all these difficulties; yet they must have been real enough, so that, despite the affected language in which it is phrased, the colophon of Nicolas Kessler of Basel to his edition of the “Homeliarius Doctorum” may well command our sympathy.

It is to be feared that the pay of a fifteenth-century “corrector,” when he was paid at all, was far from princely. It is pleasant, therefore, to find that at least one printer, the veteran Ulrich Zell, was so genuinely grateful to a friendly priest who had helped him in seeing Harderwyck’s “Commentaries on Logic” through the press as to make most handsome acknowledgment in his colophon and in verses added to it.

And the Epitaph duly follows, though it need not be quoted here.

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In our opening chapter it was suggested that if all early books were provided with colophons the work of bibliographers would be much simplified. Some qualifying epithet ought, however, to have been inserted; for there are some colophons which, instead of simplifying the task of assigning to every book its place, printer, and date, greatly aggravate the bibliographer’s troubles. Of deliberately untruthful colophons I can, indeed, only think of a single fifteenth-century example—that in the “Incunabulum of Brescia hitherto ascribed to Florence,” which the late Mr. R. C. Christie tracked down so neatly in the fourth volume of the Bibliographical Society’s Transactions. This occurs in a copy of some of the works of Politian, and reads:

As a matter of fact, the book, as Mr. Christie showed (and Mr. Proctor accepted his conclusions), was printed with the types of Bernardinus Misinta of Brescia, and the colophon which looks so simple and straightforward deceived bibliographers for some four centuries. Even the increased study of types would by itself hardly have sufficed to detect the fraud, but the fact that it was alluded to, though without mention of the name of the book, in the petition of Aldus to the Venetian Senate (17th October, 1502) put Mr. Christie on the track, and he ran it down with his accustomed neatness and precision. The fraud, of course, was the direct outcome of the first imperfect attempts to give the producers of books a reasonable copyright in them by means of privileges. As Brescia was subject to the Venetian Senate, Misinta, had he put his name in the colophon, could have been punished, and he therefore used a false imprint in order to divert suspicion. When restrictions, right and wrong, multiplied during the sixteenth century, false imprints became increasingly common, and they form a subject by themselves with which we must not here meddle farther. While Misinta’s “Politian” stands by itself, as far as I know, in deliberately trying to mislead purchasers as to its place of imprint, there are quite a considerable number of early books which reprint the colophons of previous editions, and thus tempt the unwary to mistake them for the originals which they copied. Since the decision in the case of Parry v. Moring and another, English publishers and those they employ are likely to be much more careful; but in the years immediately preceding it the carelessness with which one “editor” used the text of his predecessor to print from was often extraordinary, one reprint even including a number of duly initialled and copyright notes from another which had appeared only a year or two earlier. If this could be done in our own day, despite the existence of reviewers and the law courts, we may easily imagine that the smaller printers and publishers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who could not afford to keep their own scholarly “corrector,” simply handed over existing texts to their workmen and printed them as they stood. In most cases, of course, they had the sense to stop when they came to the colophon; but they did not always do so, and, more especially, when the colophon was in verse an unlearned compositor might easily imagine that it formed an essential part of the book. Thus twelve Latin couplets from the Milan edition of the “Confessionale,” of Bartholomaeus de Chaimis, though they end with the clear statement that Christopher Valdarfer of Ratisbon came to the help of the Milanese and printed this book (October, 1474), were reprinted as they stood in several anonymous Strasburg editions, while Creusner at Nuremberg and Schoeffer at Mainz compromised by leaving out the last six lines, which contain Valdarfer’s name.

Occasionally this careless reprinting leads to a book possessing a double colophon, as in the 1478 Naples edition of the “De Officiis” and other works of Cicero, which uses for his “Letters to Atticus” Jenson’s text of 1470. The colophon begins exactly (save for differences in contractions, punctuation, etc.) as in the Jenson edition already quoted (Chapter III):

and then proceeds:

Such an instance as this shows clearly enough that colophons could be copied verbatim without any intention to make the purchaser believe that he was purchasing the original edition, though it must be owned that many printers took no pains to inform him that he was not purchasing it. It is thus a matter of opinion as to whether they deserve the severest condemnation, or whether this should not rather be reserved for the pirates—for such they really were—who seized another printer’s book, colophon and all, merely substituting their own name for his, and thus claiming in some cases all the credit for the preparation of an original edition.

A striking instance of piracy of this kind, with a curious after-story to it, is that of Conrad of Westphalia’s appropriation of Veldener’s edition of Maneken’s “Epistolarum Formulae,” and of the colophon attached to it. Though a wordy and dull composition, this colophon is certainly distinctive enough:

As Veldener’s device is here added, the meaning of the last cryptic sentence appears to be either that authors with books to print who had not found his shop in April might find it by its sign in May, or that readers would be able to recognize the printer’s handiwork in the future books they would have a chance of purchasing, as well as in those already sold out. What Conrad of Westphalia made of it is doubtful, since, without affixing his own mark, he cribbed this sentence with all the rest of the colophon, only substituting his own name and address (“in platea Sancti Quintini”—“in St. Quentin’s Street”) for Veldener’s, altering the date of the inception of the book from April to December, and saying nothing as to when it was completed. A more disgraceful trick for one printer to play another living in the same town can hardly be imagined, and Holtrop may be right in considering it a deliberate attempt to annoy Veldener and the cause of his leaving Louvain the next year. Strange to say, however, the history of the colophon does not stop here. M. Claudin has shown, in the first volume of his “Histoire de l’imprimerie en France,” that a copy of Maneken’s “Formulae” exists printed in the types of Guillaume Balsarin of Lyons, but with the name of the Paris printer Caesaris substituted for that of Veldener in the colophon. It is clear, therefore, that in an edition now lost to us Caesaris must have played Veldener the same trick as Conrad of Westphalia had already played him, and that this Paris edition must have been reprinted by Balsarin at Lyons without troubling to alter the colophon. Truly there are pitfalls for the unwary in dealing with early books!

Perhaps one reason why colophons were sometimes reprinted as they stood was that a printer without a scholarly “corrector” to aid him had a wholesome dread of plunging into the middle of a Latin sentence. Those who rushed in hastily sometimes left very obvious footprints in the wrong places. Thus Ulrich Han, in printing from one of Schoeffer’s editions of the “Liber sextus decretalium,” changed his well-known “Alma in urbe Maguntina inclyte nacionis germanice quam dei clemencia tam alti ingenii lumine donoque gratuito ceteris terrarum nacionibus preferre illustrareque dignatus est” (see Chapter II), into “Alma in urbe Roma Totius mundi regina et dignissima Imperatrix [sic] que sicut pre ceteris urbibus dignitate preest ita ingeniosis uiris est referta.”

To call Rome “the Queen and most worthy Empress of all the world, which, as it takes precedence of all other cities in dignity, so is it filled with men of wit,” was quite a pleasing variation on Schoeffer’s tune. Unluckily Han did not note that his Queen and Empress ought to be in the ablative, and thus printed “Imperatrix” instead of “Imperatrice.” So again, when we look at the colophon to the third and fourth parts of the “Speculum” of Durandus printed at Venice in 1488, we find reason for suspicion:

The slip of “Brixiensis” for “Brixiensem” is not reproducible in English, but the reader who notes how the two partners are treated as singular instead of plural will easily see that this colophon could not have been written for them. It appears, indeed, to have been borrowed from Bernardinus de Tridino.

Sometimes the inaccuracies introduced are not of a merely verbal kind. Thus at the end of an edition of the “Fasciculus Temporum” printed by Heinrich Wirzburg at the Cluniac monastery at Rougemont in 1481 we have the following colophon:

Save that he substituted the address, “by the humble Bernhard Richel, citizen of Basel, in the year of the Lord 1482, on February 20,” this colophon was taken over in its entirety the following year by Richel. To us, until we compare it with the Rougemont version, there may seem no reason for suspicion. But if any one in those days remembered that the year of the great floods was 1480, and not 1481, his doubts may easily have been awakened. A Genevese printer was much more wise, for, while he doubtless kept the Rougemont colophon in his mind, he adapted its local coloring very skilfully, informing us that the book was:

Even when a colophon was in verse it was not safe from emendation, for when Giovanni da Reno of Vicenza in 1478 reprinted the Valdarfer Boccaccio we find him substituting for the line and a half, “Christofal Valdarfer Indi minprese Che naque in Ratispona,” the variant, “Giovanne da Reno quindi minprese Cum mirabile stampa.”

For other instances of more than one printer following the same leader we may note how Koberger in 1496, and Pierre Levet in 1497, both adopt the colophon[11] of the 1485 Cologne edition of the “Destructorium Vitiorum,” with its curious phrase “ad laudem summe Monadis”; how Han in his editions of the Clementine Constitutions in 1473 and 1476, and Wenssler in those of 1476 and 1478, copy the colophon of Schoeffer’s editions, substituting the praises of Rome and Basel for those of Mainz; and how in editions of the Gregorian Decretals Paganinus de Paganinis in 1489, and Johann Hamann de Landoia in 1491, adopted the favorite tag of Jenson and John of Cologne:

Not to be able to boast with originality is sad indeed, but to the students of early types and of the manners of the men who used them these traces of borrowing may at any point of an investigation prove useful. A printer who borrowed the wording of a colophon probably borrowed something else as well. In most cases this was the text, with which students of early printing seldom concern themselves as much as they should, but sometimes also typographical peculiarities which may be worth some attention.

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Dates form such an important feature in colophons that this essay cannot be brought to a close without some attempt to explain the difficulties which arise in connection with them. As regards the method of expressing the year there is very little to say. Theodoric Rood (see page 61) preferred to speak of 1485 as the 297th Olympiad from the birth of Christ, being under the impression that Olympiads consisted of five years instead of four. Other printers showed great ingenuity in finding elaborate synonyms for what we are now content to express in the two words “Anno Domini,” and among other phrases employed “Olympiades Dominicae” (see page 79), but without any attempt to introduce the intervals between the Olympic Games into the Christian reckoning.

As an additional method of dating we occasionally find a reference to the year of the indiction, a method of dating by cycles of fifteen years, instituted by the Emperor Constantine in 312. To find the indictional year, 312 must be subtracted from the year of the Lord (the same results will be obtained by adding 3), and then after dividing by 15, the remainder will give the number of the year in the indiction. Thus (1488-312)/15 or (1488+3)/15 in each case leaves a remainder of six, and A.D. 1488 was thus the sixth indiction.

According to different methods of reckoning, indictions began in September or October, at Christmas or on January 1st. In colophons, I believe, they are always used in conjunction with years of the Lord reckoned from January 1st, and they have only the effect of a chronological flourish.

A much more important supplementary method of dating is that by the names of ruling popes, emperors, sovereigns, or princes, or still better by their regnal years. I have long cherished an ambition to compile a kind of “Bibliographer’s Vade-mecum,” one section of which would be devoted to exhaustive lists of the smaller as well as the greater sovereigns of Europe during the period when their names in old books are of chronological value. Here, however, it must suffice to offer lists of popes, kings of England and France, and doges of Venice, for the periods which concern us, and to use these as illustrations of the way in which such information can be brought to bear on the dating of early books.

POPES

Pius II.	19	Aug.	1458	-	15	Aug.	1464.
Paul II.	31	Aug.	1464	-	28	July	1471.
Sixtus IV.	9	Aug.	1471	-	13	Aug.	1484.
Innocent VIII.	29	Aug.	1484	-	25	July	1492.
Alexander VI.	11	Aug.	1492	-	18	Aug.	1503.
Pius III.	22	Sept.	1503	-	18	Oct.	1503.
Julius II.	1	Nov.	1503	-	21	Feb.	1513.
Leo X.	11	March	1513	-	1	Dec.	1521.
Adrian VI.	2	Jan.	1522	-	24	Sept.	1523.
Clement VII.	19	Nov.	1523	-	26	Sept.	1534.

KINGS OF ENGLAND

Edward IV.	4	March	1461	-	9	April	1483.
Edward V.	9	April	1483	-	22	June	1483.
Richard III.	26	June	1483	-	22	Aug.	1485.
Henry VII.	22	Aug.	1485	-	21	April	1509.
Henry VIII.	22	April	1509	-	28	Jan.	1547.
Edward VI.	28	Jan.	1547	-	6	July	1553.
Mary,	6	July	1553	-	24	July	1554.
Philip and Mary,[12]	25	July	1554	-	17	Nov.	1558.
Elizabeth,	17	Nov.	1558	-	24	March	1603.

KINGS OF FRANCE

Louis XI.	22	July	1461	-	30	Aug.	1483.
Charles VIII.	30	Aug.	1483	-	7	April	1498.
Louis XII.	7	April	1498	-	1	Jan.	1515.
François I.	1	Jan.	1515	-	31	March	1547.
Henri II.	31	March	1547	-	10	July	1559.
François II.	10	July	1559	-	5	Dec.	1560.
Charles IX.	5	Dec.	1560	-	30	May	1574.
Henri III.	30	May	1574	-	2	Aug.	1589.
Henri IV.	2	Aug.	1589	-	14	May	1610.

DOGES OF VENICE

Cristoforo Moro,	12	May	1462	-	9	Nov.	1471.
Nicolò Tron,	23	Nov.	1471	-	28	July	1473.
Nicolò Marcello,	13	Aug.	1473	-	1	Dec.	1474.
Pietro Mocenigo,	14	Dec.	1474	-	23	Feb.	1476.
Andrea Vendramino,	6	March	1476	-	6	May	1478.
Giovanni Mocenigo,	18	May	1478	-	4	Nov.	1485.
Marco Barbarigo,	19	Nov.	1485	-	14	Aug.	1486.
Agostino Barbarigo,	30	Aug.	1486	-	24	Sept.	1501.
Leonardo Loredano,	2	Oct.	1501	-	26	June	1521.
Antonio Grimani,	6	July	1521	-	7	May	1523.
Andrea Gritti,	20	May	1523	-	28	Dec.	1538.

As our first example of how these tables may be used we will take a colophon where no year of the Lord is given, and sovereigns are mentioned without their regnal years. We shall find that even the mere names may help us to a close approximate date. Our instance shall be Wendelin of Speier’s edition of the “Supplementum” of Nicolaus de Auximo, the colophon to which ends:

Sixtus IV became pope early in August, 1471, Nicolò Tron was elected doge on November 23d of the same year, and died in July, 1473. We can thus date the book as “about 1472” with absolute confidence.

Writers of poetical colophons are naturally more inclined to use regnal dates than the year of the Lord, which it is seldom easy to get into a verse. In the “Moral Prouerbes of Cristyne” Caxton gives us the month, the day, and the regnal year, together making a precise date. This colophon runs:

The seventeenth year of Edward IV ran from 4th March, 1477, to 3d March, 1478, so that the “Moral Proverbs” were finished on February 20th of the latter year.

When a change of sovereigns occurred in the year in which a book was printed, the mere name of the earlier or the later of the two shows in which part of the year the colophon was written, and regnal dates supply the same information for years in which no change of sovereigns took place. Thus the colophon to Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of the “Vitas Patrum” ends: “Enprynted in the sayd towne of Westmynstre by me Wynken de Worde, the yere of our lorde M.cccc.lxxxxv. and the tenthe yere of our souerayne lorde Kyng Henry the seuenth.” As Henry VII’s reign began 22d August, 1485, its tenth year would cover the twelvemonth, August, 1494, to August, 1495, and we are thus told not only that the book was issued in 1495, but that it was printed before August 21st of that year.

A subsidiary date, of course, as a rule loses its usefulness when the printer explicitly mentions also the month and day on which the book was completed. It may, however, have a special value as furnishing a means of fixing the day from which the printer reckoned his year. In the fifteenth century the year could be reckoned as beginning on Christmas day, on January 1st, on March 1st, on March 25th, or at Easter. In arranging the books issued from any press in chronological order, it is of vital importance to know which reckoning the printer followed, and we may now give some examples to show how regnal years can be used to settle this.

The fourth year of Sixtus IV began on 9th August, 1474, and ended 8th August, 1475; therefore January, 1475, in his fourth year must be January, 1475, according to our modern reckoning, not January, 1476, as it would be had the year been calculated from March 25th or Easter day—two similar examples will be found in Hain’s “Repertorium Bibliographicum” under the numbers 255* and 2050*.

On the other hand, Caxton’s colophon to the “Mirrour of the World” ends:

As the twenty-first year of Edward IV ran from 4th March, 1481, to 3d March, 1482, Caxton’s 8th March, 1480, must clearly be 1480, old style, or 1481 of our reckoning, and Caxton is thus shown to have begun his year on March 25th.

So again the long colophon or epilogue to the “Cordyale” tells us that the book “was deliuered to me William Caxton by my saide noble lorde Ryuiers on the day of purificacion of our blissid lady, fallyng the tewsday the secund day of the moneth of feuerer. In the yere of our lord M. cccc. lxxviij for to be enprinted.… Whiche werke present I begann the morn after the saide Purification of our blissid Lady, whiche was the daye of Seint Blase Bisshop and Martir, And finisshed on the euen of thannunciacion of our said blissid Lady, fallyng on the Wednesday the xxiiij. daye of Marche in the xix yere of Kyng Edwarde the fourthe.”

Earlier bibliographers got very confused over this book and made absurd mistakes as to the time which Caxton took to print it. But Mr. Blades had no difficulty in showing that the different dates follow closely on each other. Caxton received the book on February 2d, began printing it on February 3d, and finished it on March 24th, all in the same year 1479. We have a double method of proving this, by the two week-days mentioned and by the regnal year, which covered the period March 4, 1479, to March 3, 1480. The only March 24th in this twelvemonth was that in 1479, and in 1479 March 24th, as Caxton says, fell on a Wednesday. In 1479, moreover, February 2d fell on a Tuesday, in 1478 on a Sunday. It is thus clear that the Tuesday, February 2, 1478, of the colophon must be an old-style date, answering to 1479 of our reckoning.

The occasional mention of the day both of the week and the month in German colophons offers us, in the absence of regnal years, almost the only proof we can obtain that German printers began their year either at Christmas or on January 1st,—I am not prepared to say which. Thus the colophon of an edition of the “De remediis utriusque fortunae” of Adrianus Carthusiensis reads:

In 1471 February 8th fell on a Friday, in 1472 on a Saturday. Therefore it is clear that in therhoernen’s reckoning January and February were the first months of the year, as they are with us.

Before inquiring as to what printers reckoned the year as beginning at Easter, we must give the following table:

EASTER DAY, 1470-1521

1470	April 22
1471	April 14
1472	March 29
1473	April 18
1474	April 10
1475	March 26
1476	April 14
1477	April 6
1478	March 22
1479	April 11
1480	April 2
1481	April 22
1482	April 7
1483	March 30
1484	April 18
1485	April 3
1486	March 26
1487	April 15
1488	April 6
1489	April 19
1490	April 11
1491	April 3
1492	April 22
1493	April 7
1494	March 30
1495	April 19
1496	April 3
1497	March 26
1498	April 15
1499	March 31
1500	April 19
1501	April 11
1502	March 27
1503	April 16
1504	April 7
1505	March 23
1506	April 12
1507	April 4
1508	April 23
1509	April 8
1510	March 31
1511	April 20
1512	April 11
1513	March 27
1514	April 16
1515	April 8
1516	March 23
1517	April 12
1518	April 4
1519	April 24
1520	April 8
1521	March 31

That Pierre Gerard and Jean Dupré at Abbeville reckoned the year from Easter to Easter, we get a broad hint in the colophon to their magnificent edition of Augustine’s “De Ciuitate Dei” in French. This is in two volumes, the colophon to the first of which is dated “le xxiiii jour de Nouembre l’an mil quatre cens quatre vingt et six,” while the second runs:

That the second volume of so large a work must have been printed after the first is so nearly certain that this alone might have caused us to look out for a means of making April 12, 1486, later than November 24th of the same year. The words “auant pasques” put the matter beyond doubt, for Easter in 1486 of our reckoning fell on March 26th, but in 1487 on April 15th. Clearly, therefore, the book was finished on Holy Thursday, 1487, and Easter was the date from which Dupré and Gerard reckoned their year.

We can obtain an equally neat proof of the French year beginning at Easter from a copy of Pierre Gringore’s “Chasteau de Labour,” in which, underneath the name of Philippe Pigouchet, appears the colophon:

This edition consists of sixty leaves and does actually contain a long interpolation not found in the first edition of 22d October, 1499, or the second, which is dated 31st December, 1499, or in yet another edition dated 31st May, 1500, all three of which have only fifty leaves instead of sixty. Thus it would appear at first sight that Pigouchet and Vostre printed Gringore’s additions in March, 1500, and omitted them again two months afterwards in May. Inasmuch, however, as the French year 1500 ran from Easter Sunday, 19th April, 1500, to Easter Sunday, 11th April, 1501, it is obvious that the only 31st March in it fell in 1501 according to our reckoning, and that the edition of 31st March, 1500, was really produced in March, 1501, and is ten months later than that of May, 1500. We thus get an orderly sequence of three unaugmented editions of fifty leaves, followed by an augmented one of sixty, and all difficulties vanish.

In Italy the year appears generally to have begun on January 1st, but in Florence on Lady day, March 25th. At Venice the legal year is known to have begun on March 1st, and most writers on Aldus have asserted positively that this was the date to which he conformed. That other Venetian printers observed January 1st as the first day of the year can be proved from the mention of Pietro Mocenigo as doge in the colophon to an edition of the “Istoria Fiorentina” of Leonardo Aretino. This ends:

As our table of Venetian doges shows, Mocenigo died on February 23, 1476, eleven days after this colophon was printed; and it is thus clear that February, 1476, meant the same to “Maestro Iacomo de Rossi” as it does to us.

That the antiquarian Aldus troubled his head about the beginning of the Venetian legal year seems a strange inconsistency. But the late Mr. R. C. Christie, who proved conclusively, in an article in “Bibliographica,” that in his later books Aldus began his year on January 1st, was yet obliged to admit that the Lascaris, which is dated “M.cccc.lxxxxiiii ultimo Februarii,” was probably finished only a few days before the Supplement, which bears date March 8, 1495, and that the Theodore Gaza of January, and the Theocritus of February, 1495, both really belong to 1496. I would suggest that in adopting March 1st as his New Year’s day in these three volumes, Aldus pleased himself with the idea that he was reckoning not “more Veneto” but “more antiquo Romano,” since (as the names of our last four months still testify) the Roman year originally began in March, and it was only the fact that after B.C. 153 the consuls entered office in January that caused our present reckoning to come into use, the sacerdotal year continuing to begin on March 1st. If Aldus, after adopting the Venetian legal year because it agreed with the earliest Roman reckoning, was convinced that he was being a little more Roman than the Romans themselves, it is easy to understand his change of practice.

It would appear, then, that the only books for which we must reckon the year as beginning later than January 1st are a few early books of Aldus (March 1st), all English books of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and books printed at Florence (March 25th) and in France (Easter). I strongly suspect, moreover, that in Florentine and French editions of learned works written in Latin there would be a tendency toward January 1st, but I cannot offer any proof of this at present, though it is a question which I hope some day to work out.

As the examples quoted in our text will have abundantly shown, the days of the month are expressed either according to our present use or by the Roman notation, reckoning from the Calends, Nones, and Ides. The Calends were always the first day of the month, the Nones fell on the 5th, and the Ides on the 13th, except in March, May, July, and October, when they were each two days later. Days were counted backwards from the Nones, Ides, and Calends, both the day from which and the day to which the reckoning was made being included in the calculation. Thus March 2d was called the sixth day before the Nones (ante diem sextum Nonas Martis), and March 25th the seventh before the Calends of April (ante diem septimum Kalendas Aprilis, or a. d. vii. Kal. Apr.). July and August are sometimes called by their old names Quintilis and Sextilis.

In Germany, more especially at Strassburg, and in Strassburg more especially by an unidentified craftsman known as the “Printer of the 1483 Jordanus de Quedlinburg,” we often find books dated on such and such a day of the week before or after a festival of the church or a particular Sunday, the Sunday being indicated by quoting the first word of the introit used at high mass. Thus in 1485 the anonymous printer of the Jordanus finished a “De Proprietatibus Rerum” on S. Valentine’s day (in die Valentini, February 14th), the “Historia Scholastica of Petrus Comestor” after the feast of S. Matthias (post festum Matthie, February 24th), the “Postilla” of Guillermus on Thursday (March 9th) before the feast of S. Gregory (quarta feria ante festum Gregorii), a “Casus breues decretalium” on the day of SS. Vitus and Modestus (in die Viti et Modesti, June 15th), and Cardinal Turrecremata’s “Gloss on the Psalter” on S. Michael’s eve (in profesto Michaelis, September 28th). To another edition of the “Postilla” of Guillermus he adds the imprint:

“Reminiscere” is the beginning of the introit for the second Sunday in Lent, and as Easter in 1493 (see our table) fell on April 7th, this was March 3d, and the “Postilla” were finished on Monday, March 4th.

The colophon to a Strassburg edition of the sermons known by the title “Dormi secure” tells us that it was issued “secunda feria post Laetare” in the same year 1493. “Laetare” being the first word of the introit for the fourth Sunday in Lent, it thus appeared on Monday, March 18th, exactly a fortnight after the “Postilla” of Guillermus. So again we find Hans Schauer of Augsburg dating an edition of a “Beichtbuchlein,” or manual of confession, “am Samstag vor Invocavit in dem XCij. iar,”—on Saturday before Invocavit, 1492,—which gives the date (Invocavit marking the first Sunday in Lent and Easter in 1492 falling on April 22d), Saturday, March 10th. It is generally only the introits of the first four Sundays in Lent (Invocavit, Reminiscere, Oculi, and Laetare) and that of the first Sunday after Easter (Quasimodo) that are used in colophons in this way.

We may bring this chapter to an end by noting one or two fruitful causes of error in dating books which arise from misunderstanding the reference or meaning of the dates in their colophons. In Chapter VI it has already been noted that where an author or editor has given the date on which he finished writing, such a date has often been confused with the date of imprint. More dangerous but much rarer than such a pitfall as this is the case of the reprinted colophon (see Chapter VII), which can be detected only by experts in typography. The majority of mistakes, however, arise from very simple misreadings. In many fifteenth-century fonts of type the symbols x and v are very imperfectly distinguished, so that the five has often been mistaken for a ten. Modern eyes, again, being used to the symbols iv, ix, xl, are very apt to read the fifteenth-century iiii as iii, the viiii as viii, and the xxxx as xxx. On the other hand, as they neared the end of the century the printers not only expressed ninety-nine by ic, but also used the forms vc, iiiic, iiic, iic, to express the years ’95 to ’98; and, as has been done here for the sake of brevity, occasionally omitted the precedent Mcccc., as in the “in dem XCij. iar” of the colophon of the “Beichtbuchlein,” quoted a page or two back. They also, it may be noted, frequently expressed eighty by the reasonable symbol for fourscore, or quatre vingt—namely, iiiixx. These latter methods of writing dates, however, though they may puzzle for a moment, can hardly mislead; but in the case of books issued in the years 1470, 1480, 1490, and 1500 (more especially the last) there is one error so easily made that it has left its mark on every old catalogue of incunabula. Thus when Hermann Lichtenstein dated an edition of the “Opuscula” of S. Thomas Aquinas “anno salutis M.cccc.xc. vii Idus septembris” he encouraged any ignorant or careless cataloguer to misread the date as 1497 on the “Ides of September,” instead of 1490 on the seventh day before the “Ides of September.” The mistake may be made just as easily when words are used instead of numerals, for “anno nostre salutis millesimo quadringentesimo octogesimo quinto kalendas Iunij” is very easily read as 1485. It is, of course, equally easy to make the opposite mistake and transfer to the record of the month a number which relates to the year. As a rule, the printers, by interposing “die” or “vero” or both, or by a change of type, put their meaning beyond dispute; but sometimes they got confused themselves, and by leaving out either the last numeral of the year, or that of the day of the month, produced a puzzle which can be solved only by independent knowledge of the years during which a printer worked.

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