Fine Books Part 6

When we pa.s.s from roman to gothic types there is a bewildering field from which to choose. Here again dull commercialism gained the upper hand about 1480, and towards the end of the century an ugly upright text-type of 80 mm. to twenty lines, with a fantastic headline type of twice its size, or a little more, found its way all over Germany. But types with a twenty-line measurement ranging round 120 mm., such as those of Peter Schoeffer or the Printer of Henricus Ariminensis, are often extraordinarily handsome. Both of Schoeffer's earlier small types and the small type of Ulrich Zell at Cologne are engagingly neat, and at the opposite end there is the magnificently round gothic used by Ulrich Han at Rome.

Most of the finest gothic types were used for Latin books of law and theology, the peculiar appropriateness of roman type being considered to be confined to works appealing to cla.s.sical scholars. In Germany, for some time, not much distinction was observed, but there was a tendency in cla.s.sical books to use an f and long [s] starting from the level of the line, whereas in most vernacular books the tails of these letters came below the line, giving a strangely different appearance to the type. In the 'nineties a distinctively cursive type called Schwabacher, usually measuring 93 mm. to twenty lines, makes its appearance all over Germany. In Italy, both at Naples and by Ulrich Han at Rome, a very small text type, which is certainly cursive in its affinities, was used at the very outset, but found no favour. The typical vernacular French types are also very often on a slope. The small cursive type cut for Aldus in 1501 by Francesco da Bologna was thus not quite so great a revolution as is sometimes represented. Its clearness in proportion to its size, its extreme compactness, and the handiness of the small octavos with which it was at first specially connected, gained for it a great success, and it gradually, though only gradually, usurped the name of italic, the upright Italian bookhand being distinguished from it as roman. Few treatises on printing or the development of books give any idea of the immense popularity of italics during the sixteenth century.

About 1570 they seemed to have established themselves as the fashionable vernacular type both in Italy and France, and even in England whole books were printed in them. In Switzerland also and Germany they gained some hold; but gradually the tide turned, the upright bookhand regained its predominance, and italics now survive chiefly for emphasis and quotations--in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were often used for proper names--giving to the page on which they occur an unpleasantly spotty appearance. Their occasional use in prefaces and dedicatory letters is much more appropriate.

The completion of books at first by a colophon, afterwards by a t.i.tlepage, may be ill.u.s.trated in the same way as that by which we have traced the evolution of the text from incompleteness to completeness and the development of different cla.s.ses of types. At least one printer, Johann Mentelin of Stra.s.sburg, seems to have considered the addition of colophons as the proper business of the rubricator. While printed colophons in his books are exceptionally rare, several copies have come down to us in which full colophons have been added by hand, e.g. in a vellum copy of the _Speculum Morale_ in the Bibliotheque Nationale, after praise of the book, we read:

Impressumque in inclyta vrbe Argentinensium ac nitide terse emendateque resertum per honorandum dominum Dominum Iohannem Mentelin artis impressorie magistrum famosissimum. Anno a partu virginis salutifero millesimo quadringentesimo septuagesimo s.e.xto. die mensis nouembris s.e.xta.

Despite a few instances of this kind, however, it is certain that the majority of printers who omitted to print colophons to their books did so, not in the expectation that they would be supplied by hand, but in imitation of the ma.n.u.script books to which they were accustomed, in which it is distinctly exceptional to find any mention of the name of the scribe. But the men who took a pride in their new art, and who thought that their work was good enough to bring more custom to their press if their name were a.s.sociated with it, took the opposite course, and so colophons from 1457 onwards are common in the best books, and may perhaps be found in about 40 per cent of the incunables that have come down to us. By the men who were skilful in using red ink they were often thus printed, and whether in red or in black, they frequently had appended to them the printer's mark or device, which gave a very decorative finish to the book.

Nowadays, when we have been accustomed all our lives to the luxury of t.i.tlepages, it may well seem to us merely perverse to hide the t.i.tle of a book, the name of the author, and information as to where, when, and by whom it was printed in a closely set paragraph at the end of the book. But if we think for a moment of how the ma.n.u.script books to which the early printers were accustomed had been produced we shall see that it was the most natural thing in the world. A scribe would take his quire of paper or vellum, and if he were a high-cla.s.s scribe, mindful of the need of keeping his text clean, he would leave his first leaf blank and begin at the top of his second. But here he would begin to write straight away, sometimes with the first words of his text, sometimes with a preliminary paragraph, which may be called the _Incipit_, from the important word in it. In this paragraph he would give either the name of his book or, almost as commonly, the name of the first section of it, introducing the t.i.tle only incidentally.

Incipit Racionale diuinorum officiorum.

Incipiunt Const.i.tutiones Clementis pape V una c.u.m apparatu Ioannis Andree.

Marci Tullii Ciceronis Arpinatis consulisque Romani ac oratorum maximi Ad M. Tullium Ciceronem filium suum Officiorum liber incipit.

Incipit epistola sancti Hieronimi ad Paulinum presbiterum de omnibus diuine historie libris.

That it did not occur to him to devote his blank page to a displayed t.i.tle of the book he was copying was due to the fact that every medieval ma.n.u.script was the direct descendant, through many or few stages, of the author's own original draft, and that this was the most pretentious way and least natural in which any author could begin to write a book. So the scribes imitated the author in his normal beginning, and the early printers imitated the scribes, and because an author was more inclined to relieve his feelings at the end of a book than to express them volubly at the beginning, it was only when books multiplied so greatly that purchasers wanted to see at a glance what was the name of the book at which they were looking that t.i.tlepages superseded colophons. The proof of this explanation being the true one is that t.i.tlepages become common just about the time (1480 to 1490) that book-production was beginning to be divided up between publishers and printers, and that the publisher very quickly claimed them for his own.

The earliest t.i.tlepages, those of the Mainz _Bul zu deutsch des bapst Pius II_ (1463), Rolewinck's Sermon for the Feast of the Presentation (Cologne: Arnold ther h.o.e.rnen, 1470), the _Flores Sancti Augustini_ (Cologne, 1473), and the _Kalendarium_ of Joannes de Monteregio and its Italian translation (Venice: Ratdolt and partners, 1476), were all more or less of the nature of "sports." When t.i.tlepages came to stay, a year or two later than the last of these precursors, they everywhere took the form of labels, a single sentence containing the short t.i.tle of the book, printed sometimes in large, sometimes in small type, but with no other information. The label t.i.tle, being usually printed high up on the page, left two-thirds, or thereabouts, blank beneath it, and this s.p.a.ce was soon filled, sometimes by a pictorial woodcut, sometimes by a mark or device, which at first might be either that of the printer or publisher, but gradually came to be much more often the publisher's. The short t.i.tle and device taken together filled the page sufficiently for decorative purposes, but they left room for a further paragraph of type to be added if desired, and the advantage of filling this with the name and address of the firm from whom the book might be obtained was so obvious that the "imprint," as it is rather loosely called, soon made its appearance and gradually became recognized as an essential part of the t.i.tlepage. When printers and publishers lost pride in their work and ceased to care to decorate their t.i.tlepages with pictures or devices, the t.i.tle was displayed in a series of single lines and made to straggle down the page till it came nearly low enough to meet the imprint.

If we go back to the habits of the scribes it is easy to understand another point in the early history of books, their make-up into quires and the marking of these quires by signatures and catchwords. The word _quaire_ or _quire_ is a shortened form of the Latin _quaternio_, the name devised for four sheets of paper folded down the middle so as to form eight leaves. A gathering of five sheets making ten leaves was called a _quinternion_, and this, though it has yielded no modern word, was for generations such a popular form that _quinterniones_ was sometimes used as a general expression for ma.n.u.scripts. Gatherings of three sheets, making six leaves, were called _terniones_; gatherings of two sheets, making four leaves, _duerniones_. A few, but only a few, books exist--nearly all of those which I have seen are either block-books or thin folios of poetry of the reign of Charles II--which are made up in single sheets not placed one within the other, but following consecutively. But the system of gathering from two to five or more sheets together into quires was practically universal both before and after the invention of printing, and this for the excellent reason that it reduced the quant.i.ty of sewing necessary in binding a book, and reduced also the risk of the sewing cutting through the paper or vellum, as it would be very likely to do if there were only a single thickness to resist it.

When the scribe had arranged his quire or gathering he wrote first page by page on all the leaves on the left hand until he came to the middle of the quire, when he proceeded to write page by page on all the leaves on the right hand. Thus in a quire of four sheets the left half of the first sheet would be leaf 1, pages 1 and 2, and the right half would be leaf 8, pages 15 and 16, so that the same sheet formed the beginning and end of the quire. In the earliest printed books the quires were printed page by page exactly as the quires of a ma.n.u.script had been written. But early in the 'seventies (Peter Schoeffer can be proved to have adopted the practice between 1471 and September, 1474) the advantage was perceived of printing both the pages on the upper or lower side of a sheet at the same time, i.e. in a quaternion, page 16 together with page 1. As soon as a printer had learnt to print two folio pages together, it became easy to print four quarto pages, or eight octavo pages, or sixteen s.e.xtodecimo pages. In each case the amount of type to be printed at a pull would be approximately the same. It thus ceased to be disadvantageous to print small books, whereas so long as each page had to be pulled separately it was obviously wasteful to make that page a very small one.

Even when the printers had learnt how to print two folio pages at the same time the presswork remained very laborious. The earliest presses were worked with only a single screw, and when the pressman had pulled the lever one way to bring the platen down on the type, he had to push the lever back again in order to raise the platen and release the paper.

Thus in order to print a large book quickly four or six sets of pressmen had to work on it at once, each at a different press. To avoid mistakes, therefore, the practice was to allot one section of the book to each press. Thus if a book were calculated to run to 288 leaves, six presses might begin simultaneously at leaves 1, 49, 97, 145, 193, and 241. What more often happened was that either to follow the natural sections of the book, or because some of the printers were engaged on other tasks and not ready to begin at once, the sections were of much less regular lengths, and we can sometimes prove that the first press was far advanced in its section before the fifth and sixth had begun. Now in all these cases, unless they were reprinting an earlier book, page for page, it is obvious that some nice calculations would be needed to make each section end with the end of a quire so as to be able to join on with the beginning of the quire containing the next section without any gap or crowding. Hence the striking irregularities in the make-up of many early books. Instead of a book being printed in a succession of quinternions or a succession of quaternions we have many a make-up which can only be expressed by a cruelly mathematical formula, such as this, which represents the quiring of the Forty-two Line Bible.

a-i^10; k^10+1 lm^10 n^6+1; o-z^10 [inverted 2]^10 [@]^10+1; A-F^10 G^4: aa-nn^10; oo pp^10 qq^10+1; rr-zz AA-CC^10; DD^12 EE^10+1; FF GG^10 HH^4+1 II^10.

In this the index-letter shows the number of leaves in the quire, a-i^10 being a short way of stating that each of the nine quires a b c d e f g h i has ten leaves in it. In the tenth quire (k) there is an extra leaf, and again in the thirteenth (n) the printer found that he had too much copy for six leaves and not enough for eight, and was therefore obliged to put in an odd one, because another press had already printed off the beginning of the next quire (o). Not infrequently it would happen that the odd amount of copy for a section was very difficult to fit exactly into a leaf even when the printer had compressed it by using as many contractions as possible, or eked it out by using no contractions at all. This accounts for the occurrence of a blank s.p.a.ce, large or small, at the end of some sections without any break in the text, as the printer was sometimes careful to explain by the printed notice "Hic nihil deficit," or as in our page from Ulrich Zell, "Vacat."

As has been already noted, in a moment of enthusiasm Mr. Proctor once said to the present writer that it was impossible to find a fifteenth century book that was really ugly. This was certainly putting the case for his beloved incunables a peg too high, for there were plenty of bad printers before 1500, and even such a master as Jenson was by no means uniformly careful as to the quality of his presswork. But one of the legacies which the early printers received from the scribes was the art of putting their text handsomely on the page, and the difference which this makes in the appearance of a book is very marked, little as many modern printers and publishers attend to it. But in the books of the best printers of our own day, as well as in those of the best of the fifteenth century, from 65 per cent to 72 per cent of the height of the page is devoted to the text, from 28 per cent to 35 per cent being reserved for the upper and lower margins, of which at least two-thirds is for the lower and not more than one-third for the upper. As compared with the height of a page of type the breadth is usually in the proportion of about 45 to 70 (a trifle more in a quarto), and here again the outer margin is at least twice as great as the inner. Thus in a book with a page measuring 10 by 7 inches, the type-page should measure about 7 by 4 inches, with a lower margin of about 2 inches, an upper of 1 inch, an outer of 1 inches, and an inner of inch.

It will be greatly to the advantage of book-buyers to bear these proportions in mind, in order to measure how much a book offered to them has been cut down, and also to be able to instruct their binders as to how to reduce the absurd margins of some modern "Large Paper" copies to more artistic dimensions. Whether it is legitimate further to reduce the margins of an old book which has already been mangled by a binder in order to get the proportions better balanced is a nice question of taste. If a two-inch lower margin has been halved and a one-inch upper margin left intact, if the upper margin is reduced, the book will become a pleasant "working copy" instead of an obviously mangled large one, and the collector must settle in his own conscience whether this be a sufficient justification for snipping off a centimetre of old paper.

Exactly why the proportions here laid down, with their limits of variation, are right for books cannot easily be set forth. It is easiest to see in the case of the relation between the inner and outer margins.

As William Morris was never tired of insisting, the unit in a book is, not a single page, but the two pages which can be seen at the same time.

The two inner margins separate the two type-pages by a single band of white, which, if each inner margin were as large as the outer, would become insufferably conspicuous. As for the proportions between the lower and upper margins, the explanation may lie in the angle at which we habitually read books, or by the need for leaving room for the reader to hold the book in his hands. But whether it be a matter of inherent rightness or merely of long-established convention, the pleasure of handling a book with correct margins is very great, and a collector who secures an uncut copy of even a poorly printed book of the period when margins were understood, will find that it presents quite a pleasing and dignified appearance. And so in regard to other points, any book which ill.u.s.trates the relations of the early printers to the scribes, the difficulties which they experienced in their work and the expedients by which they were surmounted deserves, whatever its date or present price, to be reckoned as a real incunable, and the collector who gets together a few dozen books of this kind will have far better sport for his outlay than he who is tied down too rigorously by chronology.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] It will be so much the better if the collector can add to them a copy of one of the early books printed at Rome (the German ones are too rare) in which there still survives the text of the rubrics, printed not in their appropriate places, but on a separate leaf or quire for the guidance of the rubricator.

[28] By Jenson and many early printers in Italy, and by Husner and a few others in Germany, the majuscules of the founts used in the text were ma.s.sed together in headings with admirable effect. But for a time the heavy heading types carried all before them.

CHAPTER VII

EARLY GERMAN AND DUTCH ILl.u.s.tRATED BOOKS

[Ill.u.s.tration: VIII. AUGSBURG, G. ZAINER, C. 1475

TUBERINUS. GESCHICHT VON DEM SELIGEN KIND SYMON]

The natural method of ill.u.s.trating a book printed with type is by means of designs cut in relief, which can be locked up in the forme with the type, so that text and ill.u.s.trations are printed together by a single impression[29] without any special preparation of the paper. So long as the design to be printed stands out clearly on the block it matters nothing whether it be cut on wood or on soft metal. Even as between the design cut by hand and the process line-block which has as its basis a photograph taken direct from a pen drawing, the difference can hardly be said to be one of better and worse. We lose the individuality of the wood-cutter or wood-engraver, but we are brought into closer touch with the individuality of the artist, and whether we gain or lose depends on the ability of the artist to dispense with a skilled interpreter. The one requisite for success is that either the artist, or an interpreter for him, should recognize the limits within which his work can be effective. The reproductions of the artist's designs will be looked at, not in isolation, but as part of an _ensemble_ made up of two pages printed in a type which, perhaps with a little trouble, can be ascertained beforehand, and they will be printed not as proofs on a special press by a special workman on paper chosen solely to suit them, but with average skill and care in an ordinary press and on paper the choice of which will be dictated by several considerations. Whenever relief blocks have been used for any length of time as a method of book-ill.u.s.tration the rivalry of artists has tended to cause these restrictions to be forgotten. In our own day line-blocks have been almost driven out of the field by "half-tones," which cannot be printed without the aid of paper specially coated, or at least rolled or "calendared." Shortly before the process line-block was perfected the extreme fineness of the American school of wood-engraving had induced a nearly similar result. The successors of Bewick worked with equal disregard of the need for clearly defined lines, and when we travel back to the first half of the sixteenth century we find the Holbeins, Burgkmair, Weiditz, and other artists producing designs far too delicate for the conditions under which they were to be reproduced. Thus the charm of the woodcuts in books of the fifteenth century is by no means confined to that "quaintness" which is usually the first thing on which the casual observer comments. The "quaintness" is usually there, but along with it is a harmony between print, paper, and woodcut which has very rarely since been attained.

The claim made in the last paragraph must be understood as applying only to books honestly ill.u.s.trated with blocks specially made for them. Books decorated with a job lot of cuts, as was often the case, especially after about 1495, may accidentally be delightful and often possess some of the charm of a sc.r.a.pbook. It is good sport, for instance, to take one of Verard's later books and trace the origin of the cuts with which that cheaply liberal publisher made his wares attractive. But the incongruity is mostly manifest, and collectors might well be more fastidious than they show themselves and refuse to waste the price of a good book with h.o.m.ogeneous ill.u.s.trations in buying half a dozen dull little volumes with an old Horae cut at the beginning and the end of each.

A second exception must be recognized in the books ill.u.s.trated by untrained wood-cutters. In Germany and the Low Countries few, if any, quite untrained wood-cutters were employed, and this is true also of Paris and Florence. But at Lyon and other provincial towns in France (the Abbeville cutters, who probably came from Paris, are strikingly good), in a few books printed at Rome and Venice, here and there in Spain, and in one or two of Caxton's and several of Wynkyn de Worde's books in England, the cutting is so bad that, though it is possible sometimes to see that excellent designs underlie it, the effect is either ludicrous or repellent. Only fanatics could admire such pictures as we find in the early Lyonnese _Quatre fils d'Aymon_ (_s.n._, but about 1480), in the _Opuscula_ of Philippus de Barberiis printed by Joannes de Lignamine (Rome, 1481), in a large number of the cuts of the Malermi Bible of 1490 (Venice, G. Ragazzo for L. A. Giunta, 1490), in _Los doze trabajos de Ercules_ (Zamora, 1483), in Caxton's _Aesop_ or in Wynkyn de Worde's _Morte d'Arthur_ (1527). Books such as these (the Malermi Bible is on a different footing from the rest owing to the wonderful excellence of the good cuts) may be bought as curiosities, or for the light they throw on the state of the book trade when such work could be put on the market, but no artistic merit can be claimed for them.

In Germany good work began early, because, to supply the demand for playing-cards and pictures of saints, schools of wood-cutters had grown up, more especially at Augsburg and at Ulm. Block-books also had come into existence in the district of the lower Rhine, and these, which in their earliest forms can hardly be later than 1460, must be divided between the Low Countries and Germany and prove the existence of competent workmen. The earliest type-printed books which possess ill.u.s.trations are the little handful printed by Albrecht Pfister at Bamberg in and about 1461, described in Chapter V, but it was at Augsburg in the early seventies that book-ill.u.s.tration first flourished.

As has been mentioned in Chapter V, trade difficulties at first stood in the way, but by the arbitration of Melchior Stanheim, abbot of the local monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra, these were settled on the sensible basis that printers might have as many ill.u.s.trations in their books as they chose to provide, but that they must be designed and cut by Augsburg craftsmen. The series seems to have begun with some tolerably good column-cuts to an edition of the Lives of the Saints in German, of which the first part was issued in October, 1471, and the second in April, 1472. In _Das guldin spiel_ of a Dominican writer, Ingold, finished on 1 August of the latter year, we find for the first time real power of characterization. Lovers of woodcuts owe some grat.i.tude to the medieval trick of attaching edifying discourses to matters of everyday interest and amus.e.m.e.nt, for whereas the edifying discourses themselves could hardly carry ill.u.s.trations, hunting, chess, or, as here, seven games which could be likened to the seven deadly sins, gave opportunities for showing pictures by which the natural man would be attracted. Another important book of this year, only known to me in Bamler's plagiarism of it, was the first edition of the _Belial_, the amazing book which tells the story of Christ being summoned for the trespa.s.s committed in harrowing h.e.l.l.

In 1473 the heavy gothic type which Zainer used in these ill.u.s.trated books was put at the disposal of the Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra and used to print a _Speculum Humanae Saluationis_, to which was added a summary in verse by Frater Johannes, an inmate of his monastery. This book was ill.u.s.trated by 176 different cuts of Biblical subjects, of varying degrees of merit. In the same year, and again in 1474, Zainer printed an ill.u.s.trated _Plenarium_, i.e. the Epistles and Gospels for the round of the Church's year. In or shortly after 1475 he printed and ill.u.s.trated a narrative of great contemporary interest, the story, written by one Tuberinus, of a child named Simon, who was supposed to have been slain by the Jews out of hatred of the Christian faith and desire to taste Christian flesh. The tale appears to contain internal evidence of its untruth, and the unhappy Jews who were cruelly executed had much better claims to be regarded as martyrs than "das susses Kind"

Simon. But some of the pictures are quite animated, especially one (see Plate VIII) of the hired kidnapper beguiling the child through the streets and then deftly hurrying him into the house of doom with a touch of his knee.

In 1475 or 1476, and again with the date 1477, Zainer produced editions of the German Bible in large folio, ill.u.s.trated with great pictorial capitals at the beginning of each book. But his greatest achievement was in an undated book of this period, the _Speculum Humanae Vitae_ of Rodericus Bishop of Zamora, in the German translation of Heinrich Steinhowel. If this Mirror of Man's Life had been written by a man with his eyes open instead of by a vapid rhetorician it should have been one of the most valuable doc.u.ments for the social life of the fifteenth century, since it professes to contrast the advantages and evils of every rank and occupation of life, from the Pope and the Emperor down to craftsmen and labourers. There is but little joy to be gained from its text, but the Augsburg artist has atoned for many literary shortcomings by his vivid and charming pictures of scenes from the social life of his day, though it is not to be supposed that German judges took bribes quite so openly as he is pleased to represent. In addition to fifty-four woodcuts of this kind, there is a large genealogical tree of the House of Hapsburg, which is a triumph of decorative arrangement.

Two other early Augsburg printers devoted themselves to ill.u.s.trated work, Johann Bamler and Anton Sorg. The former at first contented himself with prefixing a full-page frontispiece to his books, as in the _Summa_ of Johannes Friburgensis and _Die vier und zwanzig goldenen Harfen_, both of 1472, and again in the picture of S. Gregory and Peter the Deacon in the Dialogues of the former printed for the monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra, and that of the dying Empress in the _Historie von den sieben weisen Meistern_ of the following year. In the _Belial_ of 1473 and _Plenarium_ of 1474 Bamler was content for most of the cuts to borrow or copy from the editions of Zainer, but in the _Alexander der Grosse_ of the former year and _Melusine_ and _Sieben Todsunden_ of the latter he himself led the way with some excellent sets of woodcuts, which were copied by others. Again, in _Das Buch der Natur_ of 1475 we find a dozen specially designed full-page cuts, one to each book, ill.u.s.trating man, the spheres, beasts, birds, mermaids, serpents, insects, etc.; in the _Chronica von allen Kaisern and Konigen_ of 1476 there are four large cuts, showing Christ in glory, the dream of the Emperor Sigismund, the vision of S. Gregory at Ma.s.s, and S. Veronica holding before her the cloth with the imprint of Christ's face. It was perhaps in this same year that Bamler issued, without dating it, Jacob Sprenger's _Die Rosenkranz Bruderschaft_, with two very striking cuts, one of the offering of garlands to Our Lady, the other of Christ's scourgers looking back mockingly as they leave Him. A dated edition appeared in 1477. Another book of 1476 with a good set of cuts was the romance of Apollonius, King of Tyre. In 1477 Bamler issued a _Buch der Kunst_, which, like the _Buch der Natur_, went through several editions; it must be noted, however, that there is no such contrast between Art and Nature as the short t.i.tle of this book might suggest, the full t.i.tle being _Buch der Kunst geistlich zu werden_. The ill.u.s.trations for the most part represent a soul in different situations, but there are also many of Biblical subjects. The last book of Bamler's which need be mentioned is the _Turken-Kreuzzuge_ of Rupertus de Sancto Remigio, which has an effective frontispiece of the Pope preaching to the Crusaders and some vigorous smaller cuts.

Anton Sorg began printing in 1475 and issued his first ill.u.s.trated book the next year. He was a prolific printer, and issued many close imitations of books originated by Gunther Zainer and others. The most famous work specially connected with his name is Ulrich von Reichenthal's _Das Conciliumbuch geschehen zu Costencz_ (1483), ill.u.s.trated with forty-four larger cuts, all in the first ninety leaves, and 1158 coats of arms of the various dignitaries present at the Council. The larger cuts show the knighting of the Burgermeister of Constance, processions, a tournament, and the martyrdom of Huss (despite his safe conduct) and the scattering of his ashes over a field. The later Augsburg ill.u.s.trated books, issued by the elder Schoensperger, Johann Schobsser, Peter Berger, and Hans Schauer, though they maintain a respectable level of craftsmanship, have less interest and individuality than these earlier ones. One Augsburg printer, Erhard Ratdolt, who had made himself a reputation by ten years' work at Venice (1476-86), shortly after his return issued a notable ill.u.s.trated book, the _Chronica Hungarorum_ of Thwrocz. His main business was the production of missals and other service books, in some of which he made experiments in colour-printing.

At the neighbouring city of Ulm, where also the wood-cutters had long been at work, ill.u.s.trated books began to be issued in 1473 by Johann Zainer, no doubt a kinsman of Gunther Zainer of Augsburg. His chief books are (1) Latin and German editions of Boccaccio's _De claris mulieribus_ (1473), with a fine borderpiece of Adam and Eve and numerous spirited little pictures which, though primitive both in conception and execution, are full of life, and (2) an _Aesop_ which was reprinted at Augsburg and copied elsewhere in Germany, and also in France, the Netherlands, and England. From 1478 onwards he seems to have been in continual financial trouble. He was apparently able, however, to find funds to issue two rather notable books about 1490, the _Prognosticatio_ of Lichtenberger, and a Totentanz. The blocks of both of these pa.s.sed to Meidenbach at Mainz.

Most of the forty books of a later printer, Conrad Dinckmut (1482-96), have ill.u.s.trations. His _Seelenwurzgarten_ (1483) appears at first sight to be a most liberally decorated book, crowded with full-page cuts, but of its 133 ill.u.s.trations only seventeen are different, one, representing the tortures of the d.a.m.ned, being used as many as thirty-seven times, a deplorable waste of good paper, which the printer had the good sense to reduce in a later edition. Dinckmut's most famous book is a German edition of the _Eunuchus_ of Terence "ain maisterliche vnd wolgesetzte Comedia zelesen vnd zeh.o.r.en l.u.s.tig und kurtzwylig, die der Hochgelert vnd gross Maister und Poet Therencius gar subtill mit grosser Kunnst und hochem Flyss gesetzt hat." This has twenty-eight nearly full-page cuts in which the characters are well drawn, the setting for the most part showing the streets of a medieval town. A _Chronik_, by Thomas Lirer, issued about the same time, was begun to be ill.u.s.trated on a generous scale with eighteen full-page cuts in the first twenty-eight leaves, but was hastily finished off with only three more cuts in the remaining thirty-six. They are less carefully executed than those of the _Eunuchus_, but show more variety, and are on the whole very pleasing.

Another Ulm printer, who began work in 1482, Leonhard Holl, printed in that year a magnificent edition of Ptolemy's _Cosmographia_, with woodcut maps (one signed "Insculptum est per Iohann[=e] Schnitzer de Armszheim") and fine capitals. The first of these, a pictorial N, shows the editor, Nicolaus Germa.n.u.s, presenting his book to the Pope.

Of later Ulm books by far the most important are two by Gulielmus Caoursin, published by Johann Reger in 1496, and both concerned with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem at Rhodes. One volume gives their _Stabilimenta_ or Const.i.tution, the other _Obsidionis urbis Rhodiae descriptio_, an ill.u.s.trated history of their defence of their island against the Turks and their subsequent dealings with the infidel, who at one time were so complaisant as to present them with no less valuable a relic than the arm of their patron, which was duly honoured with processions and sermons. Altogether the two books contain fifty-six full-page pictures, rather roughly cut, but full of vigour and bringing the course of the siege and the character of the wild Turkish hors.e.m.e.n very vividly before the reader. William Morris was even tempted to conjecture that the designs may have been made by Erhard Reuwich, the ill.u.s.trator of the Mainz _Breidenbach_, of which we shall soon have to speak.

At Nuremberg book-ill.u.s.tration begins with the _Ars et modus contemplatiuae vitae_, six leaves of which partake of the nature of a block-book. In or about 1474 Johann Muller of Konigsberg (whose variant names, Johannes Regiomonta.n.u.s, Johannes de Monteregio, have trapped more bibliographers into inconsistencies than those of any other fifteenth century author) issued calendars and other works with astronomical diagrams, and prefixed to his edition of the _Philalethes_ of Maffeus Vegius a woodcut (for which Dr. Schreiber suspects an Italian origin) showing Philalethes in rags and Truth with no other clothing than a pair of very small wings. In June, 1475, Sensenschmidt and Frisner ill.u.s.trated their folio edition of Justinian's _Codex_, with ten charming little column-cuts; the following month Sensenschmidt produced a _Heiligenleben_, with more than 250 ill.u.s.trations, which, according to Dr. Schreiber, are very noteworthy as they stand, and would have been more so had not the wood-cutter been hurried into omitting the backgrounds in the later cuts, those to the "Pars aestiualis."

Sensenschmidt also printed an undated German Bible with pictorial capitals.

In 1477 Creussner issued the travels of Marco Polo with a woodcut of the traveller, and about the same time Latin and German editions of the tract of Tuberinus on the supposed fate suffered by "Das Kind Simon" at the hand of the Jews.

In 1481 Anton Koberger published his first ill.u.s.trated book, _Postilla super Bibliam_ of Nicolaus de Lyra, with forty-three woodcuts, which were imitated not only at Cologne, but at Venice, though their interest is not very great. In his German Bible of 1483 he himself was content to acquire blocks previously used at Cologne. The next year he prefixed to his edition of the _Reformation der Stadt Nuremberg_ a notable woodcut of S. Sebald and S. Laurence in the style of Michael Wolgemut.

The 252 cuts in his _Heiligenleben_ of 1488 are mainly improved rehandlings of previous versions; of his _Schatzbehalter_ and Schedel's Chronicle we speak later on.

At Basel Martin Flach was the first printer of ill.u.s.trated books, ornamenting his 1473 edition of the Ackermann von Bohmen with a woodcut of Death, the labourer, and the dead woman, his _Cato_ with the usual picture of a master and scholar, his _Rosenkranz_ with a cut of a traveller beseeching the Virgin's protection from robbers, and another of a scene in heaven, and his _Streit der Seele mit dem Korper_ (these and the two preceding are undated) with eight ill.u.s.trations of various moments in the dispute. More important than these are three profusely ill.u.s.trated books from the press of Bernhard Richel. The first of these, his 1476 _Spiegel Menschlicher Behaltnis_, has 278 woodcuts, the work of two different hands, the earlier of the two showing less technical skill, but much more vigour and originality.[30] The other two books are undated editions of the romance of _Melusina_, with sixty-seven cuts, in which suggestions from the first Augsburg edition have been improved on by an abler workman, and a _Mandeville_ with 147 cuts, most of which pa.s.sed into the hands of M. Hupfuff at Stra.s.sburg, who used them in 1501. After this Richel turned his attention to liturgies, and is credited by Dr. Schreiber with being the first printer to insert in his Missals the woodcut of the Crucifixion, which thenceforth is so frequently found facing the first page of the Canon.