In a recent article in the New York TIMES, Philip Brooks, noted rare book commentator, remarked that there is nothing particularly mysterious about incunabula. A polysyllabic Latin word with an impressive sound, it means simply cradle books, or books published during the infancy of printing. They occupy only a short span in the history of books, no more than about fifty years, from the middle to the end of the fifteenth century. To many collectors they are the true aristocrats, not only for their antiquity, but often for their artistic beauty. For nearly 500 years printers have been trying but none have been able to approach the typographical perfection of the Gutenberg Bible, which was finished around 1455. Even the paper of these ancients is of superior quality that they will outlive most books issued today.

Mr. Brooks further declared that while a common objection to collecting incunabula is that they are incomprehensible, being printed in dead languages that nobody reads nowadays, it is nevertheless a fact that before the end of the century, books were being published freely in the vernacular, and Caxton and his successors were making valuable contributions to English literature in their native tongue.

Since the middle of the seventeenth century, when the output of the fifteenth century first began to attract notice as collectible objects, they have been subject to such intensive scrutiny that they are now the most thoroughly bibliographed books in the world. From Panzer (1793-1803) and Hain (1826-1834), who described 16,300 titles, the scientific study evolved through the brilliant work of Bradshaw and Proctor until its culmination in the British Museum catalogue.

Moreover, collectors today who look somewhat wistfully on the mounting prices of fifteenth century editiones principes (which means first editions) of Gutenberg Bibles even in single leaves, or of that familiar favorite, the Nuremberg Chronicle, are probably unaware that many incunabula are still available for much less than $100. The elusiveness and high price of all incunabula are as much a fiction as the belief that it is impossible to identify individual volumes.

It is generally admitted that there are in existence some 40,000 separate editions of books published during the fifteenth century. No one has yet had the hardihood to attempt to count all the known copies of these editions. One of the best modern efforts to gauge their extent was that of K. W. Hiersemann in his “Verlagskatalog”, Leipzig, 1924. He estimated that there were at least 450,000 pieces of incunabula around, or an average of more than eleven copies of each known edition.

In undertaking to investigate the present-day holdings of incunabula in all countries, Fremont Rider, librarian of the Olin Library at Wesleyan University, reported that Germany, the birthplace of printing and native home of most incunabula, is still, according to the latest available records, the largest holder of such books. With 105 libraries owning a hundred volumes or more, it registers a total of 115,927 volumes. Italy ranks second with 70,721. France makes a poor third with 35,278, just nosing out Great Britain’s 34,045. Austria comes next, outranking the United States, which can muster 22,166 volumes. Poland, Switzerland, Czecho-Slovakia, Spain, Holland and Russia follow next in order. In the 25 countries listed with libraries of a hundred or more volumes, Mr. Rider has located 380,750 titles.

The outstanding single collection of incunabula is in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek at Munich, with its 16,000 volumes. The British Museum comes second with 11,500, the Bibliotheque Nationale third with 10,000. The Huntington Library’s 5,200 take sixth place, while the 3,600 in the Library of Congress entitle it to rank seventeenth among the libraries of the world. Despite the great influx of incunabula into this country in recent years, the resources of the European collections are incomparable. It is perfectly true that most American libraries regard the acquisition of a single incunabulum as a rare treasure, while many unheard-of European libraries of religious orders or princely families own far more volumes than our largest and richest universities.

Mr. Rider’s analysis makes no attempt to assay the contents of the various collections, as his concern is only with a quantitative analysis. Some of the scarcest and most important incunables have found their way into this country. As a result of an inquiry among the 236 most likely sources in the United States, a table is shown giving the relative sizes of incunabula collections in twelve institutions and over a hundred colleges and universities. Following the Huntington and the Library of Congress are Harvard University with 1,860 volumes, the Pierpont Morgan Library with 1,800 and the Newberry Library with 1,634. The Folger Shakespeare Library contains a surprisingly large Shakespearean ancestry of 250 fifteenth century sources. The summary leaves out of account the growing private collections, confined mostly to this country, whose numbers should materially affect the figures and perhaps the order of rank. Otherwise it gives a satisfactory account of the distribution of incunabula in public institutions.