The interest of individual colophons in early printed books has often been noted. The task which, under the kind auspices of the Caxton Club, is here to be assayed is the more ambitious, if less entertaining, one of making a special study of this feature in fifteenth-century books, with the object of ascertaining what light it throws on the history of printing and on the habits of the early printers and publishers. If, instead of studying each colophon singly for the sake of the information it may give us as to the book which it completes, or for its own human interest,—if it chance to have any,—we compare the same printer’s colophons in successive books, and the colophons of different printers in successive editions; if we group those which have similar characteristics, and glance also at the books which have no colophons at all, or quite featureless ones, then if there is anything to be learnt from colophons, we ought to be by way of learning it; and if there is only very little to be learnt, that also is a fact to be noted.

The existence, incidentally referred to in our last paragraph, of books which have no colophons, or colophons from which all positive information is conspicuously absent, is a point which may well be enlarged on. In Mr. Proctor’s “Index of Early Printed Books” the one unsatisfactory feature is the absence of any distinguishing mark between the books which themselves contain a statement of their printer’s name, and those of which the printer was discovered by the comparison of types, or ornaments, or other inferential evidence. Mr. Proctor used humorously to excuse himself for this omission on the ground that he had already used so many different symbols that if he had added one more to their number the camel’s back would have broken. But the omission, while occasionally vexatious to the student, is regrettable chiefly as obscuring the greatness of Mr. Proctor’s own work. If all books gave full particulars as to their printers and dates, there would have been little need of Bradshaw’s “natural-history” method, or of Mr. Proctor’s almost miraculous skill in applying it. It is the absence of colophons in so many books that calls into play the power of identifying printers by their types, and of dating books by the appearance of new “sorts,” or the disuse of old ones. A single instance will suffice to illustrate the secrets thus revealed. To Ludwig Hain, Bartolommeo di Libri of Florence is the printer of four books. In Mr. Proctor’s Index he is credited with no fewer than one hundred and twenty-six in the collections of the British Museum and the Bodleian alone, among these being the famous first edition of Homer and some of the finest Florentine illustrated books. He is thus raised from obscurity to the front rank of Italian printers, an example of a man who, though he did excellent work, hardly ever troubled himself to take credit for it. In the face of such an instance the partial nature of the information we can gather from colophons is at once plain. And yet from this very absence of Libri’s name we glean some really characteristic evidence. For, to begin with, the great Florentine Homer is not without a colophon. On the contrary, it possesses this very explicit one:

Here Demetrio Damilas, the Cretan of Milanese descent, is anxious enough to advertise himself: perhaps all the more anxious because his name seems to have been suppressed in the case of some previous Greek books in which he may have had a share. He compliments also, as in duty bound, the brothers Nerli, without whose munificence the book could not have been produced. But the craftsman at whose press the Homer was printed was too insignificant a person for a scholar of the very self-regarding type of the first professors of Greek to trouble to mention him, and thus Libri is ignored by Damilas as completely as the later printers were ignored by the publishers. In some of his larger works of a less learned kind,—books by Boccaccio, the Florentine Histories of Bruni and Poggio, and the Logic of Savonarola,—Libri, when left to himself, was at the pains to print his name. But in the mass of “Rappresentazioni,” Savonarola pamphlets, and other seemingly ephemeral books which he made attractive by procuring for them delightful woodcuts, he did not take sufficient pride to claim the credit which Mr. Proctor after four centuries recovered for him. The scribes who preceded the printers were by no means forward in naming themselves. Though not to the same extent as Libri, the early printers largely imitated their reticence. More especially with vernacular books they were careless of connecting themselves, because vernacular books were as yet despised. Hence, though we shall have to quote some in the chief languages of Western Europe, the comparative rarity of vernacular colophons. Hence, on the other hand, the comparative frequency of the Latin ones, which can be culled from all kinds of learned books, more especially from the laborious legal commentaries which now possess so few attractions beyond their beautiful, though crabbedly contracted, typography. It is a pity, because the Latin found in colophons is often far from classical, and occasionally so difficult that our renderings will be offered in fear and trembling. But it was in Latin that literary distinction was mainly to be won in the fifteenth century, and it was therefore with Latin books that the printers desired their names to be associated. Colophons, in fact, are the sign and evidence of the printer’s pride in his work, and this is the main clue we have in seeking for them.