appearance was very slight. The printer’s type (see Typography) would as a rule be based on a handwriting considered by the scribes appropriate to works of the same class; the chapter headings, headlines, initial-letters, paragraph marks, and in some cases illustrations, would be added by hand in a style which might closely resemble the like decorations in the manuscript from which the text was being printed; there would be no title-page, and very probably no statement of any kind that the book was printed, or as to where, when or by whom it was produced. Information as to these points, if given at all, was reserved for a paragraph at the end of the book, called by bibliographers a colophon (q.v.), to which the printer often attached a device consisting of his arms, or those of the town in which he worked, or a fanciful design. These devices are sometimes beautiful and often take the place of a statement of the printer’s name. Many facsimiles or copies of them have been published.[1] The first dated title-page known[2] is a nine-line paragraph on an otherwise blank page giving the title of the book, Sermo ad populum predicabilis in festo presentacionis Beatissime Marie Semper Virginis, with some words in its praise, the date 1470 in roman numerals, and a reference to further information on the next page. The book in which this title-page occurs was printed by Arnold ther Hoernen at Cologne. Six years later Erhard Ratdolt and his partners at Venice printed their names and the date, together with some verses describing the book, on the title-page of a Latin calendar, and surrounded the whole with a border in four pieces. For another twenty years, however, when title-pages were used at all, they usually consisted merely of the short title of the book, with sometimes a woodcut or the printer’s (subsequently the publisher’s) device beneath it, decoration being more often bestowed on the first page of text, which was sometimes surrounded by an ornamental border. Title-pages completed by the addition of the name and address of printer or publisher, and also by the date, did not become common till about 1520.
While the development of the title-page was thus slow the completion of the book, independently of handwork, in other respects was fairly rapid. Printed illustrations appear first in the form of rude woodcuts in some small books produced at Bamberg by Albrecht Pfister about 1461. Pagination and headlines were first used by ther Hoernen at Cologne in 1470 and 1471; printed signatures to guide binders in arranging the quires correctly (see Bibliography and Bibliology) by Johann Koelhoff, also at Cologne in 1472. Illustrations abound in the books printed at Augsburg in the early ’seventies, and in the ’eighties are common in Germany, France and the Low Countries, while in Italy their full development dated from about 1490. Experiments were made in both Italy and France with illustrations engraved on copper, but in the 15th century these met with no success.
Bound with wooden boards covered with stamped leather, or with half of the boards left uncovered, many of the earliest printed books are immensely large and heavy, especially the great choir-books, the Bibles and the Biblical and legal commentaries, in which a great mass of notes surrounds the text. The paper on which these large books were printed was also extraordinarily thick and strong. For more popular books small folio was at first a favourite size, but towards the end of the century small thin quartos were much in vogue. Psalters, books of hours, and other prayer-books were practically the only very small books in use. Owing to changes, not only in the value of money but in the coinage, the cost of books in the 15th century is extremely difficult to ascertain. A vellum copy of the first printed Bible (Mainz, c. 1455) in two large folio volumes, when rubricated and illuminated, is said to have been worth 100 florins. In 1467 the bishop of Aleria writing to Pope Paul II. speaks of the introduction of printing having reduced prices to one-fifth of what they had previously been. Fifteen “Legends” bequeathed by Caxton to St Margaret’s, Westminster, were sold at prices varying from 6s. 8d. to 5s. This would be cheap for a large work like the Golden Legend, but the bequest was more probably of copies of the Sarum Legenda, or Lectionary, a much smaller book.
16th Century.—The popularization of the small octavo by Aldus at Venice in 1501 and the introduction in these handy books of a new type, the italic, had far-reaching consequences. Italics grew steadily in favour during the greater part of the century, and about 1570 had almost become the standard vernacular type of Italy. In France also they were very popular, the attempt to introduce a rival French cursive type (lettres de civilité) attaining no success. In England they gained only slight popularity, but roman type, which had not been used at all in the 15th century, made steady progress in its contest with black letter, which by the end of the century was little used save for Bibles and proclamations. The modern practice in the use of i and j, u and v dates from about 1580, though not firmly established till the reign of Charles I.
In the second quarter of the 16th century the French printers at Paris and Lyons halved the size of the Aldine octavos in their small sextodecimos, which found a ready market, though not a lasting one, the printers of Antwerp and Leiden ousting them with still smaller books in 24mo or small twelves. These little books were printed on paper much thinner than had previously been used. The size and weight of books was also reduced by the substitution of pasteboards for wooden sides. Gold tooling came into use on bindings, and in the second half of the century very elaborate decoration was in vogue in France until checked by a sumptuary law. On the other hand a steady decline in the quality of paper combined with the abandonment of the old simple outline woodcuts for much more ambitious designs made it increasingly difficult for printers to do justice to the artists’ work, and woodcuts, at first in the Low Countries and afterwards in England and elsewhere, were gradually superseded by copper-plates printed separately from the text. At the beginning of this century in England a ballad or Christmas carol sold for a halfpenny and thin quarto chapbooks for 4d. (a price which lasted through the century), the Great Bible of 1541 was priced at 10s. in sheets and 12s. bound, Edward VI.’s prayer-book (1549) at 2s. 2d. unbound, and 3s. 8d. in paste or boards; Sidney’s Arcadia and other works in 1598 sold for 9s.
17th Century.—Although the miniature editions issued by the Elzevirs at Leiden, especially those published about 1635, have attracted collectors, printing in the 17th century was at its worst, reaching its lowest depths in England in the second quarter. After this there was a steady improvement, partly due to slight modifications of the old printing presses, adopted first in Holland and copied by the English printers. In the first half of the century many English books, although poorly printed, were ornamented with attractive frontispieces, or portraits, engraved on copper. During the same period, English prayer-books and small Bibles and New Testaments were frequently covered with gay embroideries in coloured silks and gold or silver thread. In the second half of the century the leather bindings of Samuel Mearne, to some extent imitated from those of the great French binder Le Gascon, were the daintiest England had yet produced. For trade bindings rough calf and sheepskin were most used, and the practice of lettering books on the back, instead of on the sides or fore-edges or not at all, came gradually into favour. Owing to the increase of money, and in some cases to the action of monopolists, in others to the increased payments made to authors, book-prices rather rose than fell. Thus church Bibles, which had been sold at 10s. in 1541, rose successively to
- ↑ Works especially devoted to these facsimiles are:—Berjeau’s Early Dutch, German and English Printers’ Marks (London, 1866); W. Roberts’s Printers’ Marks (London, 1893); Silvestre’s Marques typographiques (French; Paris, 1853–1867); Die Büchermarken oder Buchdrucker und Verlegerzeichen (Strassburg, 1892–1898), the successive parts containing the devices used in Alsace, Italy, Basel, Frankfort, Mainz and Cologne; and Marques typographiques des imprimeurs et libraires qui ont exercé dans les Pays-Bas (Gand, 1894). Numerous devices are also reproduced in histories of printing and in volumes of facsimiles of early types.
- ↑ An edition of a bull of Pope Pius II. in the John Rylands library, Manchester, in types used by Fust and Schoeffer at Mainz, bears printed on the top of the first page the words “Dis ist die bul zu dutsch die unser allerheiligster vatter der bapst Pius herusgesant hait widder die snoden ungleubigen turcken.” This is attributed to the year 1463, and is claimed as the first book with a printed title-page.
