Early Illustrated Books. Alfred W. Pollard

      The use of a colophon, or crowning paragraph, at the end of a book, to give the information now contained on our title-pages, dates from the Mainz Psalter of 1457, and was continued by Schoeffer in most of his books. A colophon occurs also in the Catholicon of 1460, though it does not mention the printer's name (almost certainly Gutenberg). There is an admirably full one in rhyming couplets (set out as prose) to Pfister's Buch der vier Historien von Joseph, Daniel, Esther, und Judith, and the brothers Bechtermüntze, who printed the Vocabularius ex quo at Eltvil in 1467, are equally explicit. In many cases, however, no colophon of any sort appears, and the year and place of publication have to be deduced from the information given in other books printed in the same types, or from the chance entry by a purchaser or rubricator of the date at which the book came into or left his hands. We may claim colophons as part of the subject of this book, because they early received decorative treatment. Schoeffer prints them, as a rule, in his favourite red ink, and it was as an appendix to the colophon that the printer's device first made its appearance. Schoeffer's well-known shields occur in this connection in his Bible of 1462. No other instance of a device is known until about 1470, when they became common, some printers, like Arnold ther Hoernen of Cologne, and Colard Mansion of Bruges, imitating Schoeffer in the modest size of their badges, while others, among whom some Dutch printers are prominent, made their emblem large enough, if need be, to decorate a whole page.

      Of Schoeffer's coloured capitals enough has already been said. Woodcut initials for printing in outline, the outline being intended to be coloured by hand, were used by Günther Zainer at Augsburg at least as early as 1471, and involved him in a controversy to which we shall allude in our next chapter. Their use spread slowly, for it was about this date that the employment of hand-painted initials was given a fresh lease of life, by the introduction of the printed 'director,' or small letter, indicating to the illuminator the initial he was required to supply. The director had been used by the scribes, and in early printed books is frequently found in manuscript. It was, of course, intended to be painted over, but the rubrication of printed books was so carelessly executed that it often appears in the open centre of the coloured letter. In so far as it delayed the introduction of woodcut letters, this ingenious device was a step backward rather than an improvement.

      In the order of introduction, the next addition to a printer's stock-in-trade which we have to chronicle is the use of woodcut illustrations. These were first employed by Albrecht Pfister, who in 1461 was printing at Bamberg. Like Schoeffer's coloured initials, Pfister's illustrated books form an incident apart from the general history of the development of the printed book, and it will be convenient, therefore, to give them a brief notice here, rather than to place them at the head of our next chapter. They are six in number, or, if we count different editions separately, nine, of which only two have dates, viz.: one of the two editions of Boner's Edelstein, dated 1461, and the Buch der vier Historien von Joseph, Daniel, Esther, und Judith, dated 1462, with Pfister's name in the rhyming colophon already alluded to. The undated books are another edition of the Edelstein; the Belial seu consolatio peccatorum; a Biblia Pauperum; two closely similar editions of this in German; two editions of the Rechtstreit des Menschen mit dem Tode, also called Gespräch zwischen einem Wittwer und dem Tode. Attention was first drawn to these books by the Pastor Jacob August Steiner of Augsburg in 1792, and when the volume which he described was brought to the Bibliothèque Nationale, with other spoils from Germany, a learned Frenchman, Camus, read a paper on them before the Institute in 1799. The three tracts which the volume contained were restored to the library at Wolfenbüttel in 1815, but the Bibliothèque has since acquired another set of three and a separate edition of the German Biblia Pauperum. The only other copies known are those in the Spencer Collection, one of the Belial at Nuremberg, and a unique example of the undated Edelstein at Berlin.[3]

      These four books contain altogether no less than 201 cuts, executed in clumsy outline. One hundred and one of these cuts belong to the Edelstein, a collection of German fables written before 1330. The book which contains them is a small folio of 28 leaves, and with a width of page larger by a fourth than the size of the cuts. To fill this gap, Pfister introduced on the left of the illustration a figure of a man. In the dated copy, in which the cuts are more worn, this figure is the same throughout the book; in the undated there are differences in the man's headgear, and in the book or tablet he is holding, constituting three different variations. In the Buch der vier Historien the cuts number 55, six of which, however, are repeated, making 61 impressions. In the impossibility of obtaining access to the originals, while the Spencer Collection was in the course of removal, the careful copy of one of these, made for Camus in 1799, was chosen for reproduction as likely to be less familiar than the illustrations from Pfister's other books given by Dibdin in his Bibliotheca Spenceriana. The subject is the solemn sacrifice of a lamb at Bethulia after Judith's murder of Holofernes. The Biblia Pauperum is in three editions, two in German, the third in Latin; each consists of 17 printed leaves, with a large cut formed of five separate blocks illustrating different subjects, but joined together as a whole, on each page.