The Printed Book. Bouchot Henri
German colporteurs carrying on their trade under cover of other commerce, a practice from which the most grave inconveniences might result. It occurred to them that to prevent fraud they would themselves create a printing establishment; but if they deliberated on it, it must have been in secret, for the registers of the Sorbonne are silent on their enterprise. If Fichet conceived the idea, it may be believed that, from his German origin, Heinlein put it into execution. M. Philippe thinks that he was formerly at Basle. In all probability it was from that city he tried to obtain his workmen. In 1468 six years had elapsed since the craftsmen were dispersed and fled from Mayence. At all events, it was from Basle that Ulrich Gering, Michael Freyburger, and Martin Krantz, printers recommended to the two Sorbonnists, departed, and in due course arrived in Paris. Of these three men, who were the first to establish a printing office on the French side of the Rhine, Ulrich Gering was a student as well as a printer, so was Freyburger, originally of Colmar. Krantz was a letter-founder, and the only real workman of the three companions.
We have often regretted with regard to these men, as also to Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer, that no really authentic portrait has transmitted their features to us. Every one will recall the fur cap and loose pantaloons of the mediocre statue at Mayence, but there is really no portrait of Gutenberg. As to Gering, M. Philippe, in his Histoire de l'Origine de l'Imprimerie à Paris, publishes a grotesque figure muffled in the ruff of the sixteenth century, after a picture preserved at Lucerne, but for which much cannot be said. Lacaille, in his Histoire de l'Imprimerie, gives a full-length portrait of Gering, said to be taken from a painting in the College Montagu.
The workshop of the three Germans was set up within the walls of the Sorbonne —in ædibus Sorbonnicis– in 1469. There they set to work at once, their printing establishment consisting simply of a room, none too light, a table, a press, and formes. Krantz doubtless struck the types chosen by the Sorbonnists, for there were then in use two sorts of letters: German Gothic and Roman. They kept to the Roman, as being more round and clear; and as soon as they obtained matrices and cast their type, they entered on their task with ardour.
The tendencies of Fichet and Heinlein were not towards transcendent theology, but rather towards the literature of the ancients and contemporary rhetorical works. Besides, it may be said, considering that men are far from perfect, Fichet counted on making the authorised presses serve his own purpose. We find him publishing a treatise on rhetoric in quarto in 1471; meantime he supervised the work confided to his artists. They commenced with a large volume of "Letters" of Gasparin of Bergamo, which was set up in quarto with the Roman type, the form of which had been accepted. At the end of the work, the impression of which cost much time – possibly a year – the three printers placed a quatrain in Latin distichs, which is at once a statement of identity and a promise for the future.
If we try to apportion to each of the three printers his share in the making of the book, it may be supposed that the intellectual part of the composition and the correction fell to Freyburger and Gering, while the heavier work of founding, placing in formes, and press work fell to Krantz. This essay, satisfactory as it appeared, was far from perfection. The first Parisian printers had multiplied abbreviations and irregular contractions, and enormous difficulties and inevitable faults ensued. Further, either they had more than one punch, or the leaden matrix was deformed, for the characters frequently differ. At the same time, we must commend them for having used the æ and œ, which were uniformly written e in the manuscripts, thus giving rise to errors without number. Their punctuation was the comma, semicolon, and full stop.
Fichet and Heinlein had become the modest librarians of the Sorbonne, and this new employment gave them greater facilities for surveillance. The printing office did not remain inactive. It issued successively the "Orthography" of Gasparin of Bergamo, the "Letters" of Phalaris, two books of Æneas Sylvius, the "Conspiracy of Catiline" of Sallust, the "Epitome of Titus Livius" of Florus, and finally the "Rhetorics" of William Fichet, which, if we may credit a letter addressed to Bessarion, was finished in 1471. Following came the "Letters" of Bessarion, the Elegantia Latinæ Linguæ of Valla, the first folio volume from the Sorbonne presses; and others, thirteen volumes in 1470-71 and seventeen in 1472.
At the end of 1472 the workshop was somewhat broken up, Fichet having left for Rome and Heinlein preaching in Germany. The three printers had shown by their works that they were in earnest; besides, they had from the first gratuitously distributed copies among the nobles, who, being accustomed to pay highly for manuscripts, did not fail to note the difference. The associates then resolved to quit the Sorbonne and create an establishment for themselves; their patrons being no longer there to sustain them in case of failure, and in giving up their presses and types it may be judged that they were not without anxiety on that point.
Their oldest dated book, the Manipulus Curatorum of Montrochet, was also the first that they printed in their new quarters, at the sign of the "Golden Sun" in the Rue St. Jacques. They remained united up to the year 1477, when Gering alone printed at the "Golden Sun," but he obtained associates, George Mainyal in 1480 and Berthold Rembold in 1494, who lived with him in the Rue de la Sorbonne, where he established himself on leaving the Rue St. Jacques. Ulrich Gering died on the 23rd of August, 1510, after a half-century of work.
The movement inaugurated by the Sorbonne was promptly followed. German workmen opened their shops nearly everywhere in France; then the French themselves scattered. At Lyons in 1472 a Frenchman was established, the same at Angers, Caen, Metz, Troyes, Besançon, and Salins. But in the central provinces we find Henry Mayer at Toulouse, John Neumeister at Albi; in the east Metlinger at Dijon; and Michael Wensler, of Basle, at Macon, among others, about 1493.
We have now arrived at an epoch of greater efforts. The Lyons printers used ornamental letters, from which were developed engravings in the Book. Since the block books illustration had been neglected, as the means were wanting to distribute the plates here and there in the forme; Schoeffer still employed initial letters in wood very like vignettes. John Fust was now dead, but Peter Schoeffer continued to print without intermission.
If we search for the precise epoch in which illustration appeared in the history of the Book, we shall perhaps have to go back to the time of Albert Pfister, printer of Bamberg, who issued in 1461 an edition of the "Fables of Ulrich Bohner" with a hundred and one figures on wood. This may be said to be the unconscious combination of xylography with typography, a kind of transformation of old elements to new things without other importance; art had no place in this adaptation.
Up to this time Germany had not, in its school of painters or miniaturists, men capable of giving a personal impulse to ornament. In the German editions of the block books the influence of Van Eyck had made itself felt very sensibly, and the Flemish had preserved their supremacy on this point; on the other hand, the German printers who went to seek their fortune in Italy fell into the middle of a circle admirably prepared to receive them and to communicate their ideas to them. It is believed that the first book printed in Italy with woodcuts in the text and with an ascertained date is the work of a German established at Rome, Ulrich Hahn, in 1467. An account in the Annuaire du Bibliophile, which, being without citation of authority, we quote for what it is worth, relates that Ulrich Hahn was established as a printer at Vienna about 1462, but was driven thence by the publication of a pamphlet against the burgomaster of the city, and was attracted to Rome by Torquemada, who confided to him the impression of his work the Meditationes. Hahn was an engraver, as were also most of his confrères at that time – that is, he cut in relief designs to be intercalated in the text – and Passavant relates that the designs of the Meditationes were from compositions of Fra Angelico, who died in 1455. Be that as it may, the book, the printing of which was finished on St. Sylvester's Day, 1467, is the first known with engravings, and only three copies of it exist: one at Vienna, one at Nuremberg, and one in Lord Spencer's library; it is composed in Gothic type in folio.
Illustration found a true artist at Verona, Matteo Pasti, who furnished designs for a volume on military art by Valturius, printed in Roman characters in folio, at the expense of John of Verona, and dedicated to Sigismond Pandolfi. Pasti's eighty-two figures are simple outlines, and we here reproduce one of the principal – an archer shooting at a butt. Published in 1472, the volume of Valturius followed soon after the Meditationes, but the engravings enable us to see how the Italian process, consisting mostly of lines without