In our opening chapter it was suggested that if all early books were provided with colophons the work of bibliographers would be much simplified. Some qualifying epithet ought, however, to have been inserted; for there are some colophons which, instead of simplifying the task of assigning to every book its place, printer, and date, greatly aggravate the bibliographer’s troubles. Of deliberately untruthful colophons I can, indeed, only think of a single fifteenth-century example—that in the “Incunabulum of Brescia hitherto ascribed to Florence,” which the late Mr. R. C. Christie tracked down so neatly in the fourth volume of the Bibliographical Society’s Transactions. This occurs in a copy of some of the works of Politian, and reads:

As a matter of fact, the book, as Mr. Christie showed (and Mr. Proctor accepted his conclusions), was printed with the types of Bernardinus Misinta of Brescia, and the colophon which looks so simple and straightforward deceived bibliographers for some four centuries. Even the increased study of types would by itself hardly have sufficed to detect the fraud, but the fact that it was alluded to, though without mention of the name of the book, in the petition of Aldus to the Venetian Senate (17th October, 1502) put Mr. Christie on the track, and he ran it down with his accustomed neatness and precision. The fraud, of course, was the direct outcome of the first imperfect attempts to give the producers of books a reasonable copyright in them by means of privileges. As Brescia was subject to the Venetian Senate, Misinta, had he put his name in the colophon, could have been punished, and he therefore used a false imprint in order to divert suspicion. When restrictions, right and wrong, multiplied during the sixteenth century, false imprints became increasingly common, and they form a subject by themselves with which we must not here meddle farther. While Misinta’s “Politian” stands by itself, as far as I know, in deliberately trying to mislead purchasers as to its place of imprint, there are quite a considerable number of early books which reprint the colophons of previous editions, and thus tempt the unwary to mistake them for the originals which they copied. Since the decision in the case of Parry v. Moring and another, English publishers and those they employ are likely to be much more careful; but in the years immediately preceding it the carelessness with which one “editor” used the text of his predecessor to print from was often extraordinary, one reprint even including a number of duly initialled and copyright notes from another which had appeared only a year or two earlier. If this could be done in our own day, despite the existence of reviewers and the law courts, we may easily imagine that the smaller printers and publishers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who could not afford to keep their own scholarly “corrector,” simply handed over existing texts to their workmen and printed them as they stood. In most cases, of course, they had the sense to stop when they came to the colophon; but they did not always do so, and, more especially, when the colophon was in verse an unlearned compositor might easily imagine that it formed an essential part of the book. Thus twelve Latin couplets from the Milan edition of the “Confessionale,” of Bartholomaeus de Chaimis, though they end with the clear statement that Christopher Valdarfer of Ratisbon came to the help of the Milanese and printed this book (October, 1474), were reprinted as they stood in several anonymous Strasburg editions, while Creusner at Nuremberg and Schoeffer at Mainz compromised by leaving out the last six lines, which contain Valdarfer’s name.

Occasionally this careless reprinting leads to a book possessing a double colophon, as in the 1478 Naples edition of the “De Officiis” and other works of Cicero, which uses for his “Letters to Atticus” Jenson’s text of 1470. The colophon begins exactly (save for differences in contractions, punctuation, etc.) as in the Jenson edition already quoted (Chapter III):

and then proceeds:

Such an instance as this shows clearly enough that colophons could be copied verbatim without any intention to make the purchaser believe that he was purchasing the original edition, though it must be owned that many printers took no pains to inform him that he was not purchasing it. It is thus a matter of opinion as to whether they deserve the severest condemnation, or whether this should not rather be reserved for the pirates—for such they really were—who seized another printer’s book, colophon and all, merely substituting their own name for his, and thus claiming in some cases all the credit for the preparation of an original edition.

A striking instance of piracy of this kind, with a curious after-story to it, is that of Conrad of Westphalia’s appropriation of Veldener’s edition of Maneken’s “Epistolarum Formulae,” and of the colophon attached to it. Though a wordy and dull composition, this colophon is certainly distinctive enough:

As Veldener’s device is here added, the meaning of the last cryptic sentence appears to be either that authors with books to print who had not found his shop in April might find it by its sign in May, or that readers would be able to recognize the printer’s handiwork in the future books they would have a chance of purchasing, as well as in those already sold out. What Conrad of Westphalia made of it is doubtful, since, without affixing his own mark, he cribbed this sentence with all the rest of the colophon, only substituting his own name and address (“in platea Sancti Quintini”—“in St. Quentin’s Street”) for Veldener’s, altering the date of the inception of the book from April to December, and saying nothing as to when it was completed. A more disgraceful trick for one printer to play another living in the same town can hardly be imagined, and Holtrop may be right in considering it a deliberate attempt to annoy Veldener and the cause of his leaving Louvain the next year. Strange to say, however, the history of the colophon does not stop here. M. Claudin has shown, in the first volume of his “Histoire de l’imprimerie en France,” that a copy of Maneken’s “Formulae” exists printed in the types of Guillaume Balsarin of Lyons, but with the name of the Paris printer Caesaris substituted for that of Veldener in the colophon. It is clear, therefore, that in an edition now lost to us Caesaris must have played Veldener the same trick as Conrad of Westphalia had already played him, and that this Paris edition must have been reprinted by Balsarin at Lyons without troubling to alter the colophon. Truly there are pitfalls for the unwary in dealing with early books!

Perhaps one reason why colophons were sometimes reprinted as they stood was that a printer without a scholarly “corrector” to aid him had a wholesome dread of plunging into the middle of a Latin sentence. Those who rushed in hastily sometimes left very obvious footprints in the wrong places. Thus Ulrich Han, in printing from one of Schoeffer’s editions of the “Liber sextus decretalium,” changed his well-known “Alma in urbe Maguntina inclyte nacionis germanice quam dei clemencia tam alti ingenii lumine donoque gratuito ceteris terrarum nacionibus preferre illustrareque dignatus est” (see Chapter II), into “Alma in urbe Roma Totius mundi regina et dignissima Imperatrix [sic] que sicut pre ceteris urbibus dignitate preest ita ingeniosis uiris est referta.”

To call Rome “the Queen and most worthy Empress of all the world, which, as it takes precedence of all other cities in dignity, so is it filled with men of wit,” was quite a pleasing variation on Schoeffer’s tune. Unluckily Han did not note that his Queen and Empress ought to be in the ablative, and thus printed “Imperatrix” instead of “Imperatrice.” So again, when we look at the colophon to the third and fourth parts of the “Speculum” of Durandus printed at Venice in 1488, we find reason for suspicion:

The slip of “Brixiensis” for “Brixiensem” is not reproducible in English, but the reader who notes how the two partners are treated as singular instead of plural will easily see that this colophon could not have been written for them. It appears, indeed, to have been borrowed from Bernardinus de Tridino.

Sometimes the inaccuracies introduced are not of a merely verbal kind. Thus at the end of an edition of the “Fasciculus Temporum” printed by Heinrich Wirzburg at the Cluniac monastery at Rougemont in 1481 we have the following colophon:

Save that he substituted the address, “by the humble Bernhard Richel, citizen of Basel, in the year of the Lord 1482, on February 20,” this colophon was taken over in its entirety the following year by Richel. To us, until we compare it with the Rougemont version, there may seem no reason for suspicion. But if any one in those days remembered that the year of the great floods was 1480, and not 1481, his doubts may easily have been awakened. A Genevese printer was much more wise, for, while he doubtless kept the Rougemont colophon in his mind, he adapted its local coloring very skilfully, informing us that the book was:

Even when a colophon was in verse it was not safe from emendation, for when Giovanni da Reno of Vicenza in 1478 reprinted the Valdarfer Boccaccio we find him substituting for the line and a half, “Christofal Valdarfer Indi minprese Che naque in Ratispona,” the variant, “Giovanne da Reno quindi minprese Cum mirabile stampa.”

For other instances of more than one printer following the same leader we may note how Koberger in 1496, and Pierre Levet in 1497, both adopt the colophon[11] of the 1485 Cologne edition of the “Destructorium Vitiorum,” with its curious phrase “ad laudem summe Monadis”; how Han in his editions of the Clementine Constitutions in 1473 and 1476, and Wenssler in those of 1476 and 1478, copy the colophon of Schoeffer’s editions, substituting the praises of Rome and Basel for those of Mainz; and how in editions of the Gregorian Decretals Paganinus de Paganinis in 1489, and Johann Hamann de Landoia in 1491, adopted the favorite tag of Jenson and John of Cologne:

Not to be able to boast with originality is sad indeed, but to the students of early types and of the manners of the men who used them these traces of borrowing may at any point of an investigation prove useful. A printer who borrowed the wording of a colophon probably borrowed something else as well. In most cases this was the text, with which students of early printing seldom concern themselves as much as they should, but sometimes also typographical peculiarities which may be worth some attention.