The Invention of Printing/Chapter 13
XIII
The Donatus, or Boy's Latin Grammar.
A Very Old Book … A Favorite with the Early Xylographers … Frequently Printed … Scarcity of Fragments … Printed by Typographic Process … Printed before and after Invention of Typography … Testimony of the Cologne Chronicle … Of Accursius … Of Scaliger … Of Sweinheim and Pannartz … Fac-simile of a German Donatus … Of a Dutch Donatus … The Arrangement of Words in the Donatus … Obscurity of the Letters … Fac-simile of a Dutch Horarium … Xylographic Editions are Imitations of Typographic Editions ... Irregularities of Engraved Letters … The Donatus a Relic of the Past … Shows the Retrogressive Tendencies of the Teachers of the Period … The Pettiness of all Block-Books … An Evidence of the Limitations of Xylography.
The only block-book without pictures of which we have any knowledge is the Donatus,[1] or Boy's Latin Grammar. It received its name from its author, Ælius Donatus, a Roman grammarian of the fourth century, and one of the instructors of St. Jerome. The block-book is but an abridgment of the old grammar: as it was usually printed in the form of a thin quarto, it could, with propriety, be classified among primers rather than with books. When printed in the largest letters, it occupied but thirty-four pages; when letters of small size were used, it was compressed within nine pages. As the most popular of small works, and one constantly needed in every preparatory school, it met the conditions then required by the early publisher: it could be engraved at little cost, and the printed copies could be sold in very large quantities. How many xylographic editions of the book were printed has never been ascertained, but we are led to believe that the number was large when we learn that more than fifty editions were printed from types before the year 1500.
Fragments of the xylographic Donatus are scarce, and they are, for the most part, in a shabby condition. Many of them are the remnants of badly printed leaves which were rejected as spoiled by the printer. If it had not been for the frugal habits of the binders, who used them as stiffeners in the covers of books, we should have few specimens of this book. These waste leaves were put to this use because they were printed on parchment and had more strength than paper. And here we have to notice a remarkable difference between the block-books of images and the xylographic Donatus.
All the block-books are printed on paper, and the greater part are printed on one side of the sheet in brown ink. All copies of the xylographic Donatus are printed on parchment, on both sides of the leaf, and in black ink. Parchment was, no doubt, selected to adapt the book to the hard usage it would, receive from careless school-boys, but the method of printing in black ink and on both sides is the typographic method, which was not in use, so far as we can learn, before the middle of the fifteenth century. We have to conclude that all copies of the Donatus printed in this manner were printed after the invention of types. The most trustworthy authorities say that there is no known fragment of an engraved Donatus that can be attributed to the first half of the fifteenth century.
In the manufacture of this grammar, the block-book printers competed successfully with type-printers for many years. But typography improved while xylography declined; at the end of the fifteenth century, the copies made from type were decidedly superior. The engraved copies of the book were gradually cast aside as rubbish, for they contained no pictures, and had no features to justify their preservation. We cannot wonder that copies of the engraved Donatus are scarce, but we must not infer from their present scarcity that they were not common before the year 1450. It is probable that more copies were printed of this than of any pictorial block-book; although we find no copies, we have trustworthy evidences that the Donatus was printed before types were made.
That the Donatus was engraved and printed before the invention of typography is distinctly stated in the book now known as the Cologne Chronicle, which was published in that city by John Koelhoff, in the year 1499. The name of the author is unknown, but he writes with the confidence of a clear-minded thinker and a candid chronicler. He says that the following statement was communicated to him, by word of mouth, "by Master Ulric Zell, of Hanau, now a printer in Cologne, through whom the art was brought to Cologne."
Although the art [of printing], as has been said, was discovered at Mentz, in the manner as it is now generally used, yet the first prefiguration was found in Holland, in the Donatuses which were printed there before that time. From these Donatuses the beginning of the said art was taken, and it was invented in a manner much more masterly and subtle than this, and became more and more ingenious.[2]
Mariangelus Accursius, a learned Italian of the fifteenth century, made a similar acknowledgment of the indebtedness of the men whom he regarded as the inventors of typography to the unknown printers of the Donatus in Holland. He says:
John Fust, a citizen of Mentz, and the maternal grandfather of John Schœffer, was the first who devised the art of printing with types from brass, which he subsequently invented in lead. Peter Schœffer, his son, added many improvements to the art. The Donatus and Confessionalia were printed first of all, in the year 1450. But the suggestion [of typography] was certainly made by the Donatuses that had been printed before in Holland, from wooden blocks.
This extract first appeared in an Appendix to the Library of the Vatican, which was written by Angelo Rocca, and published at Rome in 1591. Rocca says that this statement is in the handwriting of Mariangelus Accursius, who affixed his name to it. On this page it is not necessary to point out the many errors of Accursius about the origin of the invention at Mentz; it is enough to show that he believed that the Donatus was printed in Holland before types were made in Germany. It is not known, however, whether he acquired this information from the Cologne Chronicle or from another source.
Joseph Justus Scaliger, an eminent scholar of the sixteenth century, says that printing was invented in Holland, and that the first block-book with text was a breviary or manual of devotion. It seems that this book was like the Horarium, of which a fac-simile will be shown on an advanced page.
Printing was invented at Dordrecht, by engraving on blocks, and the letters were run together as in writing. My grandmother had a psalter printed after this fashion with a cover two fingers thick. Inside of this cover was a little recess in which was placed a little crucifix of silver. The first book that was printed was a breviary or manual, and one would have thought that it had been written by hand. It belonged to the grandmother of Julius Cæsar Scaliger. A little dog destroyed it, much to his vexation, for the letters were conjoined, and had been printed from a block of wood, upon which the letters were so engraved that they could be used for this book and for no other. Afterward was invented a method of using the letters separately.
This record is of interest for its specification of Dordrecht in Holland as the birthplace of block-books, but it does not give any date, nor the name of the first printer. As it has not been corroborated by the testimony of any other chronicler, it is now regarded by the historians of typography as imperfect evidence — incorrect, probably, in its assertion of the priority of the breviary, but trustworthy so far as it shows that this learned antiquarian had some really valuable evidences concerning a very early practice of block-printing in Holland.
Sweinheym and Pannartz, the German printers, who introduced typography in Rome, and published more books than they could sell, in the year 1472 petitioned Pope Sixtus iv for relief. In the catalogue accompanying their petition they describe this Donatus as the "Donatus for Boys, from which we have taken the beginning of printing." Their language is not clear, for it may be interpreted as the first book printed by Sweinheym and Pannartz, or as the first book made by the art of printing.
The National Library at Paris has two very old xylographic blocks[3] of this book, which some bibliographers suppose were made about the middle of the fifteenth century.
Fac-simile of part of a Block of the Donatus in the National Library at Paris.
[From Lacroix.]
One of these blocks has been attributed to John Gutenberg, for its letters resemble those of the Mazarin Bible. It has been conjectured that this block may have been one of Gutenberg's earlier experiments in printing. Apart from the similarity of the characters, there is no warrant for this conjecture. This similarity is entirely insufficient as evidence; it is not even proof of age. The block was probably engraved during the last quarter of the fifteenth century.
Koning, author of a treatise on early printing in Holland, has given in his book the fac-simile, which is here copied, of 
Fac-simile of the Fragment of an early Donatus.
[From Koning.] a fragment of a leaf from a xylographic Donatus. It was taken from the cover of a book printed by Gerard Leeu, of Antwerp, in 1490. Koning says that the fashion of the letters in this book is like that of letters in the manuscripts of Holland during the fifteenth century, and that they closely resemble the engraved letters of one edition of the Ars Moriendi. Holtrop gives a fac-simile of the entire page of a xylographic Donatus with similar letters, which he claims as a piece of early Dutch printing.
The arrangement of words in Koning's fac-simile of this fragment cannot be passed by without notice. The words are more readable than those of many block-books, but I have reset a small portion in modern type, that they might be more clearly contrasted with the modern method of composition. The words that do not appear in the mutilated fragment given by Koning are restored from the perfect copy of Holtrop.
| THE OLD METHOD. | THE MODERN METHOD. | |||
| Lego legis legit. & plr legim' legitis legu't. Dtito ipsco legeba' legebas legebat. & plr legebam' legebatis legeba't. | Present Tense. | Imperfect Tense. | ||
| Singular. | Plural. | Singular. | Plural. | |
| Lego, | Legiums, | Legebam, | Legebamus | |
| Legis, | Legitis, | Legebas, | Legebatis, | |
| Legit, | Legunt, | Legebat, | Legebant. | |
Fac-simile of an early Dutch Horarium.
[From Koning.]
To support his theory that this fragment of the Donatus is but a part of one of the many copies of the book which were printed in Holland before the invention of typography, Koning submits the fac-simile of a page from an old Horarium, or manual of devotion, which was copied by him from the original block. He says that this block once belonged to Adrien Rooman, a Haarlem printer of the seventeenth century, who had received it from one of the descendants of Coster. That Coster engraved or printed this block is highly improbable, but it is, without doubt, a very old piece of engraving. It can be fairly attributed to the fifteenth century, but no good evidence has been adduced to show that it was made before the invention of types. The block is practically worn out: the letters have been so flattened by impression that many of them are illegible.
It must here be noticed that the letters of this Horarium do not interlock, as they do in many of the block-books. A ruled line drawn between the printed lines will show only a few and unimportant interferences of letters. This evenness in lining, which is properly regarded as one of the peculiarities of typography, seems out of place in an early block-book. But it is not confined to the Horarium. There are copies of the xylographic Donatus that closely resemble typographic editions of the same period. They agree, line with line, page with page, and almost letter for letter, with the typographic model. That these xylographic copies were made from the engraved transfers of some typographic model is proved not only by the uniformity and parallelism of the letters, but by the square outline to the right of every page. These peculiarities are never produced in the workmanship of men who draw letters on a block.
It is not strange that the block-book printers should have imitated the work and the mannerisms of the typographers. It was easier to transfer the letters than to draw them; easier to cut the letters for a book of twenty or thirty pages than to cut the punches, make the moulds, and cast and compose the types. The blocks having been engraved, the block-printer had the superior advantage. His blocks, like modern stereotype plates, were always ready for use. He could print a large or small edition at pleasure. And what was of much more importance, he could print more legibly from his smooth plates of wood than the amateur typographer could from his uneven surface of lead.
The significance of the fact that letters were engraved by block-printers after typographic models will be more plainly seen when we examine the editions of the Speculum Salutis, a book which has been claimed by Dutch historians as the first production of the newly invented art of typography.
The irregular manner in which all the early xylographers drew and engraved letters on the block is fairly shown in this fac-simile of the imprint of Conrad Dinckmut, of Ulm, who affixed it to a Donatus printed by him in 1480. It will be seen that parallel lines ruled between the printed lines would interfere with almost every ascending or descending letter.
Reduced Fac-simile of the Imprint of Conrad Dinckmut.
[From De la Borde.]
The Donatus clearly shows the retrogressive tendencies of the teachers of that age. It was originally written for scholars who spoke in Latin, and who, when the book was first placed in their hands, knew the meaning of almost every word. In the fifteenth century Latin was a dead language, but the book that had been written a thousand years before received no modification adapting it to the capacities of the German or Dutch boys, to whom Latin was as strange as Chinese.[4] The rules and the explanations, as well as the text, were in Latin. The boy who began to study the book was compelled to translate the words and rules before he knew the simplest elements of the language. The difficulty of the task will be understood if we imagine an American boy beginning the study of German, not with a German grammar in which the explanations are in English, but with the grammar that is now used in the schools of Germany. We find no trace of any other school-book in the form of a block-book. There was no other book of equal popularity. To the scholar of the middle ages there was no science that could be compared with Latin; there was no knowledge like that of the words of the dead language. Words were held of more value than facts. The teachers of the fifteenth century clung to this obsolete book, and compelled their pupils to go through the same barren course of study that had been used in the fifth century. In this fixed purpose we see something more than the force of habit: there was a general unwillingness to make the acquisition of knowledge in any way attractive.
The limitations of xylography are plainly set forth in this review of the more famous block-books. During the first half of the fifteenth century, labor was cheap, skill in engraving was not rare, paper was in abundant supply, the art of block-printing was known all over civilized Europe, and there was a growing demand for printed work, but this rude art of block-printing was limited to the production of pictures. It was never applied to the production of books of size or merit. The Wonders of Rome, with its text of one hundred and sixty-eight pages, is its most ambitious attempt; but large as this work may seem when it is put in contrast with other block-books, it is really insignificant when compared with the works of the first typographers.
- ↑ The full title of the book is Donatus de octibus partibus orationis, or Donatus on the Eight Parts of Speech. It is sometimes designated as Donatus pro puerilis, or the Donatus for Little Boys.
- ↑ This extract is from the chapter entitled, "When, where, and by whom was found out the unspeakably useful art of printing books?" It contains statements of value, which will be quoted at greater length on an advanced page.
- ↑ There can be no doubt whatever about the genuineness of these blocks. They were bought in Germany, about two hundred years ago, by Foucault, the minister of Louis xiv of France.
- ↑ Van der Linde says that the Donatus and Abecedarium, a religious primer hereafter to be noticed, are used in all the religious schools of Italy to this day.
I look with melancholy respect at an Abecedarium, a little octavo of four leaves, Il Sillabario, printed in our time in 1862, at Asti. Beneath the heading, Jesus Maria, the Alphabet follows, and after that the Pater noster, Ave, and Credo. Beside the Sillabario, I have a little grammar entitled Donato ad uso delle scuolle secondarie. Nuova editione accresciuta e riformata. Pinerola, &c, 1865. … The esteem in which these Catholic school-books, those foul springs from which, for instance, Erasmus drew the first elements of Latin, were held, was so great that the first efforts of the humanists to improve them were regarded as heresy, and heaven and earth were moved against such dangerous destroyers. … Donatuses were printed in every place where schools were established, and where the art of printing was introduced. The Haarlem Legend, p. 3.