CHAPTER V

LÜBECK AND BAMBERG

Lübeck is represented here by two printers, Lucas Brandis and Bartholomew Ghotan. In one of his recent catalogues J. Rosenthal has given the reproduction of an alphabet from a Herbal, but the letters are of very little interest, being about the same size as those of the Ulm Boccaccio and with the same kind of ornamentation. As the first letters used in the town of Ulm, and one of the first sets used by any printer, and so showing the evolution of typographical ornamentation, the Ulm initials have a certain interest, but they would not have been worth reproducing from a book dated almost twenty years later.

Lucas Brandis published two immense folios, the _Rudimenta Novitiorum_, the Latin original of the _Mer des Hystoires_, the other the History of the Jews by Josephus. The first, which appeared in 1477, is a kind of History of the World, and, like the Nuremberg Chronicle, is full of cuts representing towns, kings, philosophers, and other subjects. These, however, are much less interesting than the initials, which are the first examples of what are called _passe-partouts_, the central picture being removable at will and adaptable to any frame. Some of them are special to one or other volume, but most of them are to be found in both.

The most curious is perhaps the I at the beginning of the volume on page 3, of the purest manuscript character, and entirely different from anything we have met with elsewhere.

The Q of the _Quinta Ætas_, with a battle-scene, is a favourite one for reproduction. Dibdin, who gives it in the _Bibliotheca Spenceriana_, considers it to be ‘the most remarkable’ of a ‘very splendid and noteworthy book,’ and it has lately been reproduced in a monograph on Lübeck printing, but a quarter only of its right size, giving no idea whatever of how it looks in the original.

On page 289 is a C with the Virgin, unfortunately too badly daubed over in the Bibliothèque Nationale copy to permit of reproduction. The interior, the Virgin and Child, is given as a cut by itself without the letter, on the verso of the same page, and in other places.

Of our three other specimens Mr. Pollard has already given one, the ‘Knight Templar,’ in an essay on the subject now reprinted in a volume called _Old Picture-Books_.

The Rudimenta itself was one of the great picture-books at the end of the fifteenth century, and as in the Nuremberg Chronicle, the same cuts often did duty for more than one subject. On the verso of p. 404 is a picture representing a few buildings with a windlass behind a wall, with a gate in it from which a man is emerging; and in the foreground an imposing draped figure giving directions to three little fellows, who are severally trundling a wheelbarrow, carrying a flask, and flourishing an adze. This is at the beginning of the chapter ‘Turris confusionis Babel.’ On p. 107 the same cut is the foundation of the kingdom of Assyria. On p. 117 it serves for the Constructio Treveri, and successively for Spires, Lüneburg, and Wismaria. Athenodorus and Philo Judaeus have the same cut, and the same counterfeit presentment does for Demosthenes, Pericles, Parmenides, Aristides, and Xenophon. Another series represents indifferently Crato, Cicero, Cato, Virgil, Simonides, Plotinus, Theophrastus, Menander, Paulus, and Archephilus.

The little D would appear to be a first attempt at book ornamentation, and was used at the beginning of the _Leben des heil. Hieronymus_ by Bartholomew Ghotan in 1486. Our other Lübeck initials are taken from the 1493 edition of the Meditations of St. Bridget by the same printer, in which there are altogether ten or a dozen different ornamental letters, one of them being repeated twice, another three or four times.

This book is chiefly esteemed on account of the engravings, representing the miracles of the saint, some of which are full-page size.

Like all works of the kind, it was very popular in its day and went through many editions, but the Lübeck impression is the most rare, most of the copies having been destroyed by accident before the book was published.

_Bamberg._--Independently of accessory ornamentation, the missals printed at Bamberg by J. Sensenschmidt, either by himself or with a partner, have always been considered by bibliographers as models of beautiful letterpress. Lippmann gives amongst his reproductions of early typographical monuments a page of the _Missale Olumucense_ with one of the large red initials used only in these Bamberg missals.

The first in which they occur is the _Missale Freysingense_, printed in 1487 by Sensenschmidt and Heinrich Pelgensteiner; here the initials would seem to be slightly smaller than in the succeeding volumes.

It was in the following year that Sensenschmidt published the _Missale Olumucense_,[19] in 1489 the _Liber Missalis Bambergensis_. Mr. Weale[20] mentions two other editions from this press in the two following years. The letters reproduced here were taken from the copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale, in which there are ten of these special red initials, beginning with the A of the opening line of the mass (_Ad te Dominum_), and comprising one of each of the following: B, C, D, E, P, R, S, and two different varieties of the T. There is besides a large historiated T, in black, representing the sacrifice of Abraham, at the commencement of the Canon of the Mass (_Te igitur_). This is the only volume that we have been able to examine personally, but we have seen a G in a collection of initials with a different text on the verso, which probably comes from one of the other editions.

[19] See also in Burger, _Monumenta Germaniae et Italiae Typographica, Deutsche und Italiänische Inkunabeln_.

[20] _Bibliotheca Liturgica._

Of other Bamberg missals with other ornamental letters, the most interesting is that of Johann Pfeyl, the initials being entirely different in style to any that we have seen elsewhere. The colophon has it: ‘Missale speciale divinorum officiorum secundum chorum alme et imperialis ecclesie Bambergensis,’ and states that it was printed in 1506 ‘by the industry and exact diligence of that “disert” and expert master Johann Pfeyl.’ In the splendid full-page engraving on vellum, which in many missals is the chief attraction to collectors, there is a view in the distance of the town of Bamberg.

The initials are so curious that we have reproduced them all. One or two are repeated; the G, representing Jehovah crowning a martyr, serves for three different saints. The somewhat smaller linear T, of the Canon of the Mass, is a reduced copy of the corresponding initial in the Sensenschmidt missals.