there is, apparently, no reason to think that these precise documents, while speaking exclusively of this art, should always mean another art which they do not mention. Procopius, indeed, seemed to have known an art of writing, in which he instructed others (second document) and which he and his associates wished to keep secret, while the “letters,” tools, &c. of which they speak were no doubt “movable.”
But Procopius himself appears to have possessed neither letters nor tools nor instruments or forms at the beginning of these proceedings; it was Menaldus Vitalis, a bachelor of law and student at Avignon, who entrusted to him the “two steel alphabets, two iron forms, one steel screw, and forty-eight tin and other forms,” mentioned in the first document of 1444. Procopius, however, appears to have seen no permanent value in these letters, forms, &c. as he, of his own accord, promised to return them at the first request of Menaldus, who had handed them to Procopius without asking for a receipt. The third document, however, makes it plain that Procopius engraved for Davinus the Jew, not for himself, twenty-seven Hebrew letters (therefore a complete alphabet, including the five final letters) in iron, in accordance with the art of writing which he had taught Davinus two years ago, together with tools of wood, tin and iron, in return for which the Jew would teach Procopius the art of painting stuffs. The fourth document shows that Procopius had made tools of iron, steel and other metals for writing artistically, but again not for himself but for two other men one of whom was Menaldus who, two years ago, had entrusted him with two alphabets and some tools; Procopius, however, had this time reserved to himself a share in these tools, and Menaldus sold his share in the tools for twelve florins to the other associates, so that the value of all these tools cannot have amounted to more than about 36 florins of Avignon currency.
Therefore, the precise descriptions in the documents of the letters, tools and instruments required for Procopius's art of writing artistically, and the absence of all allusions to paper, ink and other things necessary for printing with movable types, show that there is no reference to this art, even in its infancy. That art means the multiplication of books or documents by means of an adequate quantity of single types for composing a whole page of text, and capable of being taken asunder and used again for a second, a third and a multitude of other pages, and so produce a number of copies of a book in the same or a shorter time than a scribe with his pen could produce one copy. But two Latin alphabets (of steel) and one Hebrew alphabet (of iron) would not suffice for composing and printing more than two or three words on any one page at a time, so that a person with such a small quantity of letters at his command would, in several respects, be worse off than a scribe. Hence the documents which only refer to the art of writing, mean nothing more serious than an art of taking impressions of certain letters (perhaps initials or capitals) in a more regular and steady fashion than even trained scribes could produce them by hand. For pressing in such (ornamental) initials or capitals here and there in MSS., after the scribes had done their ordinary work of writing, the insulated alphabets of Menaldus and Davinus would be a great help and save a deal of time and labour, but useless for the art of printing with movable types. If the two steel alphabets, and the one Hebrew alphabet of iron, and the 48 letters engraved in iron had been patrices, and the 48 forms of tin had been matrices, the documents, no doubt, would contain some expressions to show this, in spite of the endeavour not to divulge this art of writing. What the nature of this writing was, and why all these forms and instruments, even a screw, were required, we cannot say. It has been pointed out that the art of printing was also described as an art of writing, which is true; but when it is so described we learn at the same time that typography is meant. But we must bear in mind that Davinus the Jew was engaged on the painting of colours on stuffs and that Procopius desired to become acquainted with this industry. No doubt tools were much more required for this work than for writing. However, this writing association seems to have come to an end in 1446, and the parties departed from Avignon, without leaving there or anywhere else any trace of themselves and their interesting operations. See also Zedler, Gutenberg-Forsch., p. 10 sqq.
As for non-European countries and towns, printing was established in Mexico in 1544, at Goa about 1550, at Tranquebar in 1569, Terceira in the Azores 1583, Lima 1585, Manila and Macao (China) 1590, in Haiti in the beginning of the 17th century, at Puebla in 1612, Cambridge (Mass.) 1638, Batavia 1668, Tifiis 1701, German-town 1735, Ceylon 1737, Halifax (Nova Scotia) 1766, Madras 1772, Calcutta 1778, Buenos Aires 1789, Bombay 1792, in Egypt (at Alexandria, Cairo, and Gizeh) in 1798, at Sydney 1802, Cape Town 1806, Montevideo 1807, Sarepta 1808, Valparaiso 1810, Astrakhan 1815, in Sumatra and at Hobart Town and Santiago (in Chile) in 1818, in Persia (at Teheran) in 1820, and at Chios about 1821.[1]
Till the moment (say 1477) that printing was practised in almost
all the chief towns of the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Switzerland,
France, Spain, England, not a single printer carried
away with him a set of types or a set of punches
or moulds from the master who had taught him, but, in
setting up his printing office, each man cast a set of types
Customs of
Early Printers.
for his own use, always imitating as closely as possible the handwriting
indigenous to his locality, or of some particular manuscript
which he or his patron desired to publish. When we compare
Schoeffer's 30-line Indulgence of 1454 with a manuscript copy of
the same Indulgence dated the 10th of April 1454, now in the
hands of a private collector at Wiesbaden, we see that the
types used in printing that document were specially cast for
the purpose after the model of the handwriting employed for
the written copies. We know also that the types of the 36-line
and 42-line Bibles and those of the Psalter of 1457 are the closest
possible imitations of the ornamental church handwriting customary
at the time of their production. Also, when we compare
the 31-line Indulgence of 1454 with the German blockbook
called the Enndtchrist, and both in their turn with the German
MSS. of that period (especially the manuscript portions in the
printed copies of the Indulgences), we see that the cutter of
the text type of the Indulgence; as well as the engraver of
the blockbook, formed his characters according to some German
handwriting (book hand) of the period. This imitation extended,
not only to the shape of the individual letters of the alphabet, but
likewise to all those combinations of letters (double p, double f,
double s, st, ti, tu, re, cu, ct, si, de, co, ci, te, ce, or, ve, po, fa, he, be,
&c.) and contractions (for pro, -um, -em, -en, the-, uer, -bus, -bis, sed,
am, tur, qui, quae, quod, secundum, &c.) which were then, and had
been for many centuries, in use by scribes. In most, if not all
cases, the MSS. which the printers imitated were, as has been remarked
above, indigenous to the place where they settled. Thus
the first printers of Subiaco, though they were Germans and had
most probably learnt the art of casting types and printing at Mainz,
yet cut their types after the model of some Italian MS. which was
free from any Gothic influence, but written in a pure Caroline
minuscule hand, differing but slightly from the Caroline minuscules
which the same printers adopted two years afterwards at Rome.
The first Paris printers started in 1470 with a type cast entirely on
the model of the Caroline minuscule handwriting then in vogue at
Paris. John de Westphalia, who introduced printing into Belgium,
used from the beginning a type which he calls Venetian. Therefore
a great similarity (without absolute identity) between the types of
two printers (e.g. Schoeffer and Ulr. Zell), should be attributed to
the similarity of the hand writings which the printers followed, not
to any attempt on their part to imitate each other's types. To this
universal system (clearly discernible in the first twenty-five years
of printing) of each printer setting up business with a new type cast
by himself, there would be, according to the conjectures of some
bibliographers, only two exceptions; one is Albrecht Pfister (see
above); the other is the Bechtermunczes of Eltville (see
above).[2]
Another important feature in the earliest books is that the printers
imitated, not only the handwriting, with all its contractions, combined
letters, &c., but all the other peculiarities of the
MSS. they copied. There is in the first place the
unevenness of the lines, which often serves as a guide to
the approximate date of an early printed book, especially when we
Unevenness
of Lines.
deal with the works of the same printer, since each commenced with
uneven lines, and gradually made them less uneven, and finally
even. The unevenness was unavoidable in manuscripts as well
as in blockbooks; but in the earliest printed books it is regarded
as evidence of the inability of the printers to space out their lines.
If this theory be correct, this inability was perhaps owing to the
types being perforated and connected with each other by a thread,
or to some other cause which has not yet been clearly ascertained.
In some incunabula we find some pages with uneven lines, and others
quite straight in the same book. It is not impossible, however,
that the unevenness was simply part and parcel of the system of
imitating MSS., and that only gradually about 1473 or 1474, but
in some cases later), printers began to see that even lines looked better
than uneven. This seems clear when we observe that the imitation
of MSS. was carried so far that sometimes things which deviated
from the work of the scribe, but had accidentally been printed in,
were afterwards erased and altered in conformity with the MS.
The Paris Library, for instance, possesses two copies of the Liber
Epistolarum of Gasparinus Pergamensis (printed at Paris in 1470),
in both of which the initial G of the first line and the initial M of the
fourth line were printed in, and, whilst they have been allowed to
- ↑ On the introduction of printing in various towns, consult Henry Cotton, A Typog. Gazet., 8vo, Oxford, 1831 and (second series, 8vo, Oxford, 1866); (P. Deschamps) Dict. de géogr. à l'usage du libraire, (8vo, Paris, 1870); R. C. Hawkins, Titles of the First Books from the Earliest Presses Established in Different Cities in Europe, (4to, New York, 1884); Rob. Proctor, Early Printed Books in the British Museum, (1898), &c.
- ↑ In recent years Dr Dziatzko, overlooking the relation between MSS. and typography in its infancy, has attempted to show that the types of the 36-line Bible were imitations of those of the 42-line Bible.
