A Companion to the History of the Book (39 page)

In the early years, when Latin was the principal language in which books were printed (overall estimated at more than 70 percent of books printed before 1501), there was an almost constant migration of printers: the great centers of printing in Italy became home to printers from the Rhine area, from Paris, and from the Low Countries, before Italians became established in the industry. Printers who had learned the art and the business in Venice, Padua, and Rome, or in Cologne, returned to their native towns in the Low Countries, or went to Paris and London as founders of a trade that was to flourish in these more westerly centers of commerce. Among the eight early printers in England known as individuals, only William Caxton was born an Englishman, and his first steps in the publishing business were taken in Cologne and Bruges. The consequence of this mobility is that initially there was much uniformity in printing-house practice, but in the course of the sixteenth century the uniform character of the printing trade changed. Several influences brought this about. National identities became stronger, and printing in the vernacular increased; during the Reformation and the political turmoil of the sixteenth century, the printing press became more subject to controls and censorship imposed by authorities, as the power of the press in opposing authority by spreading heresy and dissidence was recognized. In many places the trade itself became organized in self-regulating companies or guilds, excluding outsiders.

As a result of this progressive separation, printing-house practices began to diverge between countries, but the basic technical equipment remained stable until the end of the “hand-press period” early in the nineteenth century. There were a few minor modifications to the press, and the last years of the sixteenth century saw the introduction of a rolling press for the printing of copper engravings. The history of type design is one of steady evolution, but type-founding remained the same as invented in the fifteenth century until the wide-scale application of stereotyping, first used in Bible printing in Holland in the late seventeenth century, but not fully developed until the nineteenth. Not long after that period rapid developments in printing technology wrought a definitive change in book production, which could from then on be carried out on an industrial scale.

The Spread of Printing after the Invention

The geographical spread of printing in the fifteenth century can be mapped with fair accuracy (Nieto 2003). In the two decades after its invention, printing spread in many directions over Europe and with gathering speed, emanating from Mainz (1455) and Strasbourg (1465): in the Rhine valley to Cologne (1465) and Basel (by 1468) and many smaller places in between, in the other German lands to Bamberg (not after 1461), Augsburg (1468), Nuremberg (1469), and northwards to Lübeck (1475) and Rostock (1476), in Italy to Subiaco (1465), Rome (c.1467), Venice (1469), Naples (c.1470), Milan (c.1470), Florence (1471), Bologna (1471), and Padua (1471), to Paris (1470) and Lyon (1473), to Segovia (c.l472) and Barcelona (c.1473), and to cities in the Netherlands (1473, but probably already in the 1460s), and in Eastern Europe to Cracow (c.1473), Pilsen (1476), and Budapest (1473). England, where Caxton began printing in 1476, was rather late to be engulfed by this tide, but printing arrived there before it reached the Scandinavian countries in 1482 (in Odense). The rapid branching out of the technique, mainly between 1465 and 1475, was followed by further ramifications to very many small towns, some enterprising monasteries, and to universities, wherever there was demand for printed material. However, maps of the spread of printing reveal a reverse movement of concentration by the 1490s. In many small towns and other centers printing turned out to be of an incidental nature and was discontinued once an immediate need was fulfilled.

Through recording the surviving editions of texts, whether large or small, all printed before 1501, in a bibliographical database, we now have solid grounds for estimating that there are between 27,000 and 28,000 separate editions of that period still extant, although even with automated records it is difficult to provide a figure for the total surviving copies of these books. (The estimate is based on the short-title catalogue of incunabula, ISTC, recorded on the database held at the British Library, now an almost comprehensive record of surviving editions.) It is more difficult to estimate how many editions are lost, since rates of survival vary enormously according to the nature of the text and the book: a small schoolbook, for example, once it had served its purpose, had much less chance of surviving the centuries than a substantial, dignified edition of the Bible. Print-runs would also vary according to the expected demand, and much remains unknown, but there is just enough documentation to know that in the earliest years an edition size of 275–300 copies was not uncommon, while in the 1490s a print-run of 600 copies may have been considered normal. Extant contracts and accounts show that an exceptionally ambitious enterprise, Hartmann Schedel’s
Liber chronicarum
printed in 1493 in Nuremberg by Anton Koberger, had a print-run of about 1,400 copies of its Latin version, but that the German version had a print-run of half that size.

Printing-house equipment, type metal and printing types, paper and parchment, could be transported down rivers, over mountains, and across seas, but printed books required a much more complex distribution system. This is the main reason why printing became concentrated in the most important centers on the trade routes that had traditionally linked the European countries. Commercial centers were also the places where one might find financial backing for the manufacture of a product that usually took a long time to sell and produce a return on investment. Thus, in the 1480s and 1490s, Venice took the lead in both book production and the book trade over all other cities, providing scholars and professionals across Europe with Latin works of the highest academic standard. Venice had quickly overtaken the early printers in Rome, which was never an international trade center, but Florence and Milan flourished at the expense of the many small towns in Italy where presses operated at one time or other. Similarly, north of the Alps, there were great concentrations of book production in Strasbourg, Nuremberg, Basel, and Cologne, in Paris, later followed by Lyon, and in Antwerp. Leipzig as a gateway to Eastern Europe became one of the most important centers of the book trade. Book production in Spain did not entirely conform to this pattern and remained relatively isolated. After absorbing early on a number of printers of German and Polish origin who seem to have worked mainly with materials from Italy, the Spanish presses came to provide for the requirements of the Iberian peninsula, in Latin, Hebrew, and the vernacular languages.

The British Isles constitute a case apart, for here, with London as a major center of trade, importation of Latin books from the continent dominated the book market. Printers in England hardly competed with the “Latin trade” as the flow of importation is known, and they were often importers themselves (Christianson 1999; Ford 1999; Needham 1999; Roberts 2002). A record of owners of printed books in the British Isles until the middle of the sixteenth century, combined with the places where the books they owned were printed, demonstrates that most books in Latin were imported from the great continental centers: above all from Venice and Paris, but also from Lyon, Cologne, Basel, and in smaller quantities from other centers of printing (Ford 1999: 189). Recent research into the book production that did take place in England before 1501 complements this finding: 63 percent of the surviving production of English printers are in English, and only 28 percent are in Latin, much of these consisting of works, liturgical and other, conforming to the use of the diocese of Salisbury. The remaining 9 percent are works in law-French, the language of texts of the common law of England (BMC xi: 43–7). Many of the English texts can be rated as a publishing success, not only because they were reprinted, but also because records of ownership show that they soon began to reach a new lay readership, especially among male readers and owners, while the tradition continued of book ownership among high-born and religious women, which had begun early in the fifteenth century with manuscripts (see chapter 14; BMC xi: 61–70.)

Fifteenth-century Books

With the steady geographical spread of printing from the early 1460s, application to a variety of uses grew at equal pace. The late fifteenth century was more an age of invention than of great literary creation. The earliest printers concentrated on the age-old cornerstones of Western civilization, most of them published in huge volumes: Latin Bibles, patristic texts, moral theology, civil and canon law, and liturgical works were soon followed by the authors of classical antiquity and by the great medical works of Arabic origin. Such lists and such large books characterize the production of Gutenberg’s successors in Mainz, Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, and the early printers in Strasbourg, Rome, Venice, and Padua, and were followed by many later in the century.

Others deliberately took a different course. In Cologne, one of the first cities where early printers settled, a multitude of small quarto editions were printed from 1465 onward, many of them texts that were linked to the traditional curriculum of the university, prepared for publication by teachers (Corsten 1987). The first press in Paris, situated from 1470 at the Sorbonne, was even more closely associated with the university by the active participation as editors and authors of two prominent professors, Guillaume Fichet and Jean Heynlin. In contrast to the Cologne printers, they undertook the publication of new works in a spirit of renewal of teaching methods. They also used their books as instruments for intricate diplomacy, inserting in numerous copies of their printed works individual dedications to the pope, princes of the Church, and worldly rulers (Veyrin-Forrer 1987). The first press in Oxford (run by someone only identified as “the printer of Rufinus”) was a modest enterprise and produced only three small books mainly for local use, but presented in a modern, humanist style (BMC xi: 13, 15). Later in the century, the newly established university in Leipzig followed the model of printing small quartos required for the curriculum of many of the universities in Eastern Europe. In the sixteenth century, the small, often short-lived university presses reflected a penchant for renewal and the originality of individual professors (Goldschmidt 1955). As witnesses for the interaction of authors and printers, their work is of great value. In quantitative terms, however, they represent only a small proportion of book production in Latin in the early years of printing.

Among the earliest printed books are traditional texts for the elementary teaching of Latin, almost all surviving only as fragments, which makes it impossible to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the total once produced. Modernizing textbooks and reading texts, written by schoolmasters and humanist scholars, began to appear in print in the 1480s. Apart from liturgical works, often commissioned on ecclesiastical authority, a large proportion of books in Latin were destined for the priesthood, which remained a stable client base for printers. Works for clerical use, such as Duranti’s
Rationale divi-norum officiorum
(ISTC records 45 editions), the much smaller
Manipulus curatorum
by Guido de Rochen (117 editions), and the
Stella clericorum
(at least 60 editions) were all frequently reprinted. Books of Hours and Psalters for the private devotion of lay people were printed many times, and were for printers a secure source of income but, as with the elementary schoolbooks, we know that much of this material is lost, and it is difficult to arrive at sensible estimates of how much was once printed.

Books for practical instruction were also published in Latin. The often-reprinted
Regimen sanitatis,
or more specifically the
Regimen contra pestilentiam,
is an example that shows that such popular texts could still be disseminated in the language of learning. A significant part of publishing in Latin consisted of historical works, some by contemporary authors. One of them was Werner Rolewinck whose
Fasciculus temporum
went from 1474 through many editions and translations, and was a strong influence on vernacular historical works, including William Caxton’s version of the
Chronicles of England
and his edition of John Trevisa’s translation of Higden’s
Polychronicon
to which he added an extension (BMC xi: 127–30). Pseudo-historical works, such as versions of the history of Troy, could be equally successful. In 1493, a major enterprise in historiography was the publication of the
Nuremberg Chronicle,
a world history compiled by the learned Dr. Hartmann Schedel with the support of other scholars in Nuremberg, and spectacularly illustrated by a team headed by Michael Wohlgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff in which the young Albrecht Dürer played a modest part. A German version was prepared in parallel and issued later in the same year (Reske 2000). Most historical works were frequently reprinted and they survive in many more copies than any other category of early printed book, clear indications that their publication was successful and that they came to be regarded as works of lasting value.

Practical and historical works in Latin appear therefore to have reached lay readers as well as scholars and ecclesiastics, but they were also published in most vernacular languages of the geographical area in which presses operated. The proportion of book production in the vernacular shows enormous variation in distinct language areas. What they have in common is that most printing in the vernacular consisted of devotional texts for a lay readership. Hagiography, sermons, and texts providing moral guidance were widely distributed, went through translations, and obviously fulfilled the need of a rapidly growing market, especially in countries north of the Alps. Few literary works by contemporary authors in vernacular languages were published in the period, even fewer with enduring fame. Sebastian Brant in German and François Villon in French stand out as exceptions. Instead, printers turned to the canon of medieval vernacular literature and improved access to texts that had already been transmitted in manuscript: Dante, Boccaccio in translation, Wolfgang von Eschenbach and, on a somewhat lower level but in much greater quantity, the many romances of medieval literature, as well as Aesop in various medieval translations. The fragmentary survival of popular texts, later known as chapbooks, suggests that by the 1490s they were already known as a cheap source of entertainment.