must have been in one and the same office; their workmanship shows that their founder step by step simplified and improved his work, and in what order they are to be placed; the most perfect of them (V.) was in existence not later than 1471 (see above), and the three, together with the xylographic leaves in the mixed Latin Speculum (from which they cannot be separated) take us back to a period which could not possibly be extended beyond 1470, but which may reasonably be said to have begun as early as, say 1440.
Therefore these three types, and the books printed with them in combination with the xylographic leaves, and various circumstances pointing to Haarlem as their birthplace, would alone suffice to support and vindicate the Haarlem claims to the honour of the invention of printing. It could, however, serve no useful purpose to separate the types I., IV., VI. and VII. from those of the Speculum, as they have all a great family likeness and three distinctive peculiarities common among them: (1) a perpendicular stroke to the cross-bar of the t; (2) a small curl attached to the top of the r found in no other Netherlandish type; it goes backward in types 1 and 3; and in type 2 another curl is added to the first, bending to the right again; (3) a minute perpendicular link connecting the marks of contraction with the letters above which they appear (a peculiarity common also in the Dutch MSS. of the time). A copy of the latest issue of the Saliceto, preserved at Darmstadt, printed in type VII., has the rubricator's date 1472 in two places; another book in the same type (in the Meerman Museum) was bought between 1471-1474, and as this type is used for a tract printed together with the Pontanus treatise printed in type VI., and the Pontanus type is supplemented with capitals of type IV. (the Valla type), it follows that these three types (IV., VI. and VII.) must have been in use in one and the same office, and that the latest of them (VII.) cannot be placed later than 1472. Again, it must be said that there is no direct evidence that these three types were used by the printer of the Speculum, but as fragments of Donatuses in the Saliceto type have been found in account-books of the Great Church at Haarlem, all presumably bound by the same Cornelis the bookbinder (the reputed servant of the Haarlem inventor), who also used fragments of Donatuses in the Speculum types, Haarlem may be regarded as their common birthplace.[1] Hence these seven types may be grouped thus: (a) the Abecedarium type; (b) the three Speculum types; (c) the Valla, Pontanus and Saliceto or Pius types; the (a) group cannot be dated later than 1470; (b) (three types) not later than 1471; (c) (three types) not later than 1472 and perhaps not before 1458.
Here then we have a printer who, before 1472, had manufactured and extensively used at least seven (if not eight or nine) different and primitive looking types; three of the seven must have existed long before 1471, as with them he had printed before that year no less than five folio editions of one book (the Speculum), besides several editions of Donatus and the Doctrinale of Alex. Gallus and other smaller books. This work may be supposed to have extended over a number of years, and before he printed any of these type-printed books he had already engraved, printed and issued at least one large folio blockbook (the Speculum).
And yet the catalogues of the present day, which profess to arrange the incunabula chronologically, under their respective countries, towns, printers, types and dates—according to some “historical” or “natural history method” suggested in 1870 by an eminent bibliographer, and intended to show the “development of printing”—assign this primitive Dutch printer, and his primitive types and books, to what is presumed to be their “chronological” place, after the productions of Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France; that is, they are placed in a period when printing presses had been established in nearly every large town of Europe, and the art of printing was already so fully developed and vulgarized, that the books of that period show, on comparison with the Costeriana, that the latter must have preceded them by at least two or three decades.
Apart from this anachronism, the same catalogues assign this printer and his books no longer to Haarlem in North Holland, to which they had always been attributed in conformity with the tradition that printing had been invented in that town and the Speculum and other books printed there; but they locate them at Utrecht, the capital of the province of the same name, although the types of the Costeriana show that they are imitations of the hand writings indigenous to the province of Holland, not to those of Utrecht.
This bibliographical calamity dates from the year 1870, when Dr Anton Van der Linde published his book The Haarlem Coster Legend. After it had become known to him that for years past the “Lourens Janszoon Coster” mentioned by Junius as the inventor of printing had been confused by some authors with another inhabitant of Haarlem, whose name was “Lourens Janszoon,” but who had never borne the surname “Coster,” he, after an inadequate investigation in the Haarlem archives and elsewhere, professed to prove from documents (1) that the Haarlem tradition was nothing but a “legend,” the kernel of which was “Jacob Bellaert,” who published in 1483 the first Haarlem book with a date; (2) Lourens ]anszoon Coster was a “myth”; (3) Cornelis the bookbinder, Junius's chief witness for the Haarlem tradition, had been Bellaert's servant, and, telling his story in his second childhood, magnified the first Haarlem printer of 1483 into the first printer of the world; (4) the “Spiegel” and the Donatuses could not have been printed before 1470-1474, &c. As Van der Linde's book was apparently based on documents, it was generally thought to have put an end to the Haarlem claims. It seems to have struck nobody at the time that this Haarlem tradition or legend, if it had originated in or after 1483, could not have been so strangely distorted and altered that, within a few decades, “Jacob Bellaert” its hero, according to Van der Linde, was forgotten, while his “servant,” in his second childhood, substituted for him another person of an entirely different name and of a much earlier period; whose descendants all appear in Haarlem's history, and one of whom records him in a genealogy; who is himself mentioned again and again in the Haarlem registers of the time, but who is finally, in 1870, declared to be a “myth.” Nor did it strike anybody at the time that if Cornelis the bookbinder had been Bellaert's servant or binder, and his story of the inventor related to him, and to no other printer, this bookbinder must have used fragments of Bellaert's productions for strengthening his bindings, instead of which he employed fragments of the Costeriana, which are admittedly not printed by Bellaert.
These are two of the many points which might have arrested Van der Linde in his sweeping denunciation of the Haarlem tradition if he had given more attention to the subject. As no reply invalidating the main part of his criticism emanated from Haarlem, Henry Bradshaw, the librarian at Cambridge, who had been studying the Dutch incunabula for some years, accepted Van der Linde's conclusions, and published, in 1871, his List of the founts of type used by printers in Holland in the 15th century, in which he explained that he was compelled to place the printer of the Speculum at Utrecht because “it is there that the cuts of the old folio editions first appear cut up into pieces in a book (Epistelen ende Evangelien) printed by Veldener at that place in 1481. Without further information he would have found it necessary to place the printer of the Speculum last among the Utrecht presses and to affix as his date (before 1481). But as the types of the Yliada (VII.) and of the Ludovicus de Roma (VI.) bear a close resemblance to those of the Speculum, they could not be separated from the latter, and a note in the Hague copy of the Tractatus de salute corporis in the same type VII. makes it clear that it was bought between 1471 and 1474, this was the only date which he could accept, and it compelled him to place the printer of the Speculum at the head of the Dutch printers, just as the Speculum compelled him to place him at Utrecht.”
It is clear that Bradshaw's system of classifying the incunabula, so inflexible as regards dates and places of printing, that he would admit any stray statement on these points if it be found in the books themselves, rather than go outside the books for further information, is yet elastic enough to ascribe the Yliada and the Pontanus to the printer of the Speculum, merely on account of a close resemblance between the types of these books. As he knew that the early printers shaped their types according to the hand writings indigenous to the places where they settled, it must have escaped him that in locating the printer of the Speculurn at Utrecht, he placed him among printers whose types bore no resemblance to those of the Costeriana. This system, therefore, so rigorous on the one hand and so flexible on the other, can only be applied with safety to books whose country, printer and date are known, not to such as the Costeriana, which have neither date nor printer's name, nor place of printing, and might, therefore, be ascribed to France, Italy, Germany or any other European country, if it were not that some of them were printed in the Dutch vernacular.
As to the Speculum cuts being in Veldener's hands in 1481 (and 1483), various circumstances show (see Holtrop, Mon. p. 110 sqq.) that he could not have possessed them, nor acquired them from other
- ↑ The Cambridge University Library possesses two sheets of two different editions of Donatus, one (unrubricated) printed in Speculum type 1, the other (rubricated) in the Saliceto type, both found pasted by the binder on the wooden boards of a copy of J. Mile's Reportorium, printed at Louvain in 1475, which is also in the same library.
