CHAPTER I

BLOCK-BOOKS: THE INVENTION OF PRINTING: THE PSALTER OF MAYENCE

Printing, with the discovery or invention of which the name of Gutenberg is intimately associated, goes back to the year 1454, or, if we accept the recent discovery of an almanac which can only refer to 1448, some six years earlier.

This is not the place to relate its general history, which is to be found in all the special works on the question. We shall set down here only the facts which concern our subject more particularly, and show the evolution of ornamental letters in books of the first period after the discovery of the new art.

It is known that Gutenberg, after the expensive experiments that had crippled his resources, had borrowed money from his fellow-citizen Fust, for the purpose of developing his new discovery.

His methods were, however, incomplete, and, according to one of many conjectures, it was not until two or three years later that Peter Scheffer, presumably a workman in Gutenberg’s office, perfected it by the invention of punches and matrices, so discovering a means of founding the type for which he devised a more suitable alloy instead of engraving each letter. This brought Scheffer into favour with Fust, who gave him his daughter in marriage. A quarrel with the original inventor ensued, and Gutenberg, nearly ruined, was forced to retire, leaving the two others in possession of the field.

The object of the first printers was no doubt to imitate the manuscript book as closely as possible. Gutenberg in his Bible had only attempted to copy the letterpress proper. The two partners gave in 1457 as their diploma piece an edition of the Psalter with two hundred and eighty-eight capitals in two colours, besides the great initial B, the whole forming a perfect imitation by the press of a highly decorated manuscript.

At the present time an expert could see at a glance that this book is printed, instead of being written. But in 1457, and until the invention of printing had become generally known, no one could have guessed that it was anything but what it appeared, a beautifully finished manuscript.

Of the letters, which are mostly in red and blue, the handsomest is the initial B at the beginning of the first psalm, which is surrounded by arabesques, continued along the margin. Besides these ornaments, figures of a dog and bird are stencilled, as it were, in white on the red ground of the letter.

Writers are by no means agreed as to the way in which these initials were executed, but until recently the explanation most generally accepted was that of _emboîtement_, each part of the letter being inked separately and afterwards joined. According to Mr. Gordon Duff, it is impossible to determine exactly how they were produced, but in one edition, that of 1515, the exterior ornament has been printed, while the letter itself and the interior ornament have not. This shows that the letter and ornament were not on one block, and that the exterior and interior ornaments were on different blocks. Mr. Blades thought that the design was not printed but impressed in blank, and afterwards filled in with colour by the illuminator. The last opinion, that of Mr. Weale, is that the letters were not set up and printed with the rest of the book, but subsequently to the typography, not by a pull of the press but by a blow of the mallet on the superimposed block.

It is not, perhaps, without interest to note that the white ornaments which have been already mentioned are reproduced on one of the initials of the Bamberg missal. Whether or not this lends additional likelihood to the Bamberg printer having been a workman of Gutenberg, the reader must judge for himself.

We have said that the object of the first printers was to produce an imitation manuscript. It has even been suggested that Scheffer tried to palm off some of the copies of the Bible as, and at the price of, the manuscripts.

Gabriel Naudé, in his addition to the history of King Louis XI., is responsible for this accusation, which has been reproduced without investigation by several historians. The passage is too long to quote here, but he states positively that Scheffer sold the first copies _pour manuscrites_ at seventy-five _écus_ a copy, selling others afterwards at from twenty to thirty. Those who had paid the higher price brought an action against him for _survente_, and he had to fly from Paris to Mayence, where not being in safety he took refuge at Strasburg, living for a time with Messire Philippe de Commines.

The story is charmingly circumstantial but hardly convincing. At any rate, it is certain that no sharp practice could have been attempted after 1457, as the colophon of the Psalter states the volume ‘Venustate capitalium decoratus rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus adinventione artificiosa imprimendi et characterizandi; absque calami ulla exaratione sic effigiatus.’

It has also been said that Scheffer was not the first to use the Psalter initials, which formed part of the stock which Gutenberg was compelled to relinquish in payment of the money he had borrowed of Fust.

Fischer at the beginning of the last century published the description of a Donatus of 1451 with some of these initials, of which he gave a facsimile, and which he attributes to Gutenberg, but this book is no longer to be found, and it is supposed that he was the victim of a hoax.[7] The only copy now known with these initials has come down to us in the shape of a fragment which is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The catalogue gives the date as 1468, but Hessels and many other good judges place it at 1456. It is printed in the type of the forty-two line Bible, with thirty-five lines to the page. In the colophon Scheffer makes use of the expression ‘_cum suis capitalibus_,’ which Hessels translates ‘with his capital letters,’ a rendering, says Mr. Gordon Duff, which is surely impossible.

[7] According to M. de Laborde, ‘Bodman archiviste de Mayence, tourmenté par Oberlin, Fischer et tous les bibliographes du temps pour leur trouver quelques nouveaux renseignements sur Gutenberg, n’imagina rien de mieux que d’en fabriquer.’ Fischer in his _Essai sur les monuments Typographiques de Jean Gutenberg_ declares that he found two leaves of a Donatus, which was printed by Gutenberg with the same initials as were afterwards used by Scheffer. These leaves were in the cover of an account-book dated 1451, which was discovered in the Archives of Mayence by Bodman. These leaves have since disappeared.

Two other questions remain to be considered: Why Scheffer should have used the initials frequently until 1462, and then (with the exception of successive editions of the Psalter) have given up their use entirely? Who was their author?

For the first there was a combination of several reasons. The opposition of the Formschneiders may have had something to do with it. On the other hand, Scheffer may have got tired of always using the same initials which had been cut for him by an exceptionally clever engraver, of whom he had afterwards lost sight. In the third place, the sack of Mayence in 1462, which led to the dispersion of his workmen, may have been partly the reason, but that he did not lose his material is proved by the initials appearing in the antiquarian reprints of the Psalter.

In our opinion the second reason is most probable, and it is supported by the testimony of Papillon as to the identity of the artist, which seems to have escaped recent bibliographers.

According to Heineken, a certain Meydenbach is mentioned in Sebastian Münster’s _Cosmographia_, and also by an anonymous author in _Serarius_, as being one of Gutenberg’s assistants. Heineken on these grounds considers that he accompanied Gutenberg from Strasburg to Mayence, also that he was probably an engraver or illuminator, and Von Murr thinks he was the artist who engraved the large initials.

Fischer is convinced that they were engraved by Gutenberg himself, ‘a person experienced in such work, as we are taught by his residence in Strasburg,’ which Jackson declares teaches no such thing.

Papillon’s history is too long to be related here _verbatim_, but in substance it is as follows: A German who was making the _tour de France_ applied to him for work. He stated that his name was Cocksperger, and that he was descended from Peter Cocksperger who had engraved the initials of the Psalter of Mayence. Papillon only saw him three times in 1737, when he showed him some of his work, which, although somewhat coarse, was well cut, of a pretty taste, and not common. His ancestors had lived in Mayence, Cologne, and Nuremberg. One of them, Peter, had worked with Fust and Scheffer at their first impressions, and it was a tradition in the family that he was a scribe and miniaturist, and also engraved neatly on wood. He had been engaged by Scheffer, who lodged him in his house, to design and engrave on wood large initials embellished with ornaments like those he was in the habit of drawing and painting. Also that one of his brothers, Jacques, together with a friend named Thomas Forkanach who also engraved on wood, had helped him to engrave the initials for Scheffer’s Psalter. He showed Papillon a book of ‘figures of the mass,’ a xylographic tract printed _au frotton_. Not being able to get acceptable work, he left Paris. ‘This man,’ says Papillon, was ‘_franc et de très bon caractère_,’ he had means to live quietly at home, had not _l’envie de voyager_ made him leave Germany.[8]

[8] Papillon, _Histoire de la gravure sur bois_.

We have not seen any references to Cocksperger in modern works, but Dibdin in one of his books quotes Papillon’s account of him. It would be curious to know whether there was really a family of this name in Mayence at the date Papillon gives, and whether there is any trace there of such a tradition.

Besides the initials used in the different editions of the Psalter, and in some other publications such as the _Rationale Durandi_, which has the same subscription as the Psalter, but with the date changed to 1459, Scheffer had a splendid bichrome T for the _Canon of the Mass_, considered by many as quite equal to the B of the Psalter.

Later in the century polychrome initials, as these letters in two colours are somewhat incorrectly termed, are said to have been used in early Dutch impressions. Humphreys in his _History of Printing_ gives the reproduction of a Q in two colours from the _Dyalogus Creaturarum_, printed at Gouda in 1480 by Gerard Leeu, which he supposes to be printed, and which he considers, as we think erroneously, to be quite equal to Scheffer’s B.

Initials printed in one colour are not uncommon. They are to be found, for instance, in the _Etymologicum Magnum_ of Callierges, and sometimes in missals, such as the Missale Olumucense of Bamberg and the Rouen Missal, ‘ad usum insignis ecclesie Atrebatensis.’

It has been said that the Psalter letters ceased to be used in 1462. Whatever may have been the reason for this, and it is possible after all that it was simply from motives of economy, Scheffer’s example, as regards the suppression of ornament, was followed by the other printers, and with the exception of Pfister, whose impressions from movable characters have every appearance of xylographic productions, for some years no books were issued with typographical embellishments.

It is probable that, for the two years during which he flourished, Pfister’s illustrated publications were tolerated because they were generally supposed to be block-books, and that he was compelled to stop operations by the Guilds, as soon as they found out that he was in reality one of the hated printers. For it was not only as craftsmen that the Formschneiders were hostile to the members of the new trade. The engravers had become the printers of the xylographic books, then a new and profitable industry, and they were afraid of the sale of their own productions being interfered with by the illustrated works of the type-printers.

From the point of view of ornamental initials there is little to say about the xylographic impressions.

Before the invention of printing, the copies of block-books were obtained, as has been already mentioned, by what is known as the _frotton_ process, the paper being placed over the engraved block and rubbed with a special pad. The ink in the originals is of a brownish yellow. After the invention of the press, certain popular treatises continued to be struck off from xylographic cuts, but by impression, like ordinary books. One of these, the _Mirabilia Romae_, a guide-book to Rome at the end of the fifteenth century, has a large historiated S at the beginning. It is remarkable from the fact that the letterpress, of which a specimen is given with the initial, is not cut in imitation of type, but, as can be seen in our reproduction, of ordinary hand-writing.

Another specimen of this kind of printing is the P, which we reproduce with a border, from a Donatus, the first and eighth leaves of which were preserved for centuries in an old binding.

This Donatus, of which the only leaves remaining belong to the Leipsic Museum, was printed by Dinckmut. There is another xylographic fragment with a colophon bearing the same name in the Bodleian Library. The initial itself represents a schoolmaster surrounded by his pupils, a subject frequently met with as a frontispiece to books of this class, and it is prolonged into a border which frames the page.

When the initial of a Donatus does not represent a pedagogue and his class, the subject is often the Virgin and Holy Family. J. Rosenthal has an extremely valuable edition with the Virgin, the Child, and St. Catherine. Amongst our specimens of Cologne is a Donatus without name of printer or date, but no doubt printed by Quentell towards 1500, in which, besides the Virgin and Child, there are grotesque profiles in the two left corners which look as if copied from the same source as one of the Bämler initials, and the initial with grotesques in the Bâle Psalters.[9]

[9] The Donatus, always being in demand, was generally one of the first books printed at a new press. It was the first work issued by Pannartz and Sweynheim when they started at Subiaco.

During the remainder of the fifteenth century there was very little in the way of initial ornamentation in books published at Mayence, where Scheffer, who was always the chief printer, seems to have exhausted his possibilities in this direction with his first experiment.

There is, however, a fine large historiated D in a German translation of Æsop--_Das Buch und Leben des Fabeldichters Æsop_--without printer’s name or date, but attributed to Scheffer, towards 1480. This initial has already been reproduced in Muther’s _Bücher-Illustration_, and more recently in a bibliography of incunabula and books printed before 1501, by Ludwig Rosenthal. The only other interesting ornamental letter we are acquainted with of Mayence origin before 1500 is the G at the commencement of Erhardt Reuwich’s _Breidenbach_.

During the first two decades of the sixteenth century there is the same dearth of anything like ornament in Mayence books, but towards 1520 John, the grandson of the first Peter Scheffer, has several alphabets, one of very large letters with arabesques of flowers, foliage, and birds, used first in his Livy of 1518, published under the patronage of Brandeburg, Archbishop of Magdeburg and Mayence. There is also a smaller one with the most varied subjects, besides a few letters with children on a black ground, and one or two linear initials also with children, copied from Venetian models.