As we have seen, the typical book during the first quarter of a century of the history of printing is one in which the printer supplied the place of the scribe and of the scribe alone. An appreciable, though not a very large, percentage of early books have come down to us in the exact state in which they issued from the press, with a blank space at their beginning for an illumination, blanks for the initial letters, blanks for the chapter headings, no head-lines, no title-page, no pagination, and no signatures to guide the binder in arranging the sheets in the different gatherings. Our task in the present chapter is to trace briefly the history of the emancipation of the printer from his dependence on handwork for the completion of his books. We shall not expect to find this emancipation effected step by step in any orderly progression. Innovations, the utility of which seems to us obvious and striking, occur as if by hazard in an isolated book, are then abandoned even by the printer who started them, and subsequently reappear in a number of books printed about the same time at different places, so that it is impossible to fix the chronology of the revived fashion.

We have already noted how the anxiety of the earliest Mainz printers to rival at the very outset the best manuscripts with which they were acquainted, led them to anticipate improvements which were not generally adopted till many years afterwards. Among these we must not reckon the use for the rubrics or chapter headings of red ink, which appears in the trial leaves of the 42-line Bible, and was to a greater or less extent employed by Schoeffer in most of his books. Although red ink has appeared sporadically, and still does so, on the title-page of a book here or there, more especially on those which make some pretence to sumptuousness, its use in the fifteenth century was a survival, not an anticipation. For legal and liturgical works it was long considered essential; for other books the expense of the double printing which it involves soon brought it into disfavour and has kept it there ever since.

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.

The last book of Pfister's we have to notice, the Complaint of the Widower against Death, is probably earlier than either of his dated ones. It contains 24 leaves, with five full-page cuts, showing (1) Death on his throne, and the widower and his little son in mourning; (2) Death and the widower, with a pope, a noble, and a monk vainly offering Death gold; (3) two figures of Death (one mounted) pursuing their victims; (4) Death on his throne, with two lower compartments representing monks at a cloister gate, and women walking with a child in a fair garden,—this to symbolise the widower's choice between remarriage and retiring to a monastery; (5) the widower appearing before Christ, who gives the verdict against him, since all mortals must yield their bodies to Death and their souls to God. The cuts in this book are larger and bolder than the other specimens of Pfister's work which we have noticed, but they are rude enough.

After the introduction of woodcut illustrations, the next innovation with which we have to concern ourselves is the adoption of the title-page. What may be called accidental title-pages are found on both the Latin and the German edition of a Bull of Pope Pius II. printed by Fust and Schoeffer in 1463. After this Arnold ther Hoernen of Cologne appears to have been the first printer lavish enough to devote a whole page to prefixing a title to a book. A facsimile is here given, from which we see that this 'sermon preachable on the feast of the presentation of the most blessed Virgin' was printed in 1470 at the outset of ther Hoernen's career. The printer, however, seems to have understood no better than Schoeffer the commercial advantage of what he was doing, and the next title-page which has to be chronicled is another of the same kind, reading the 'Tractatulus compendiosus per modum dyalogi timidis " ac deuotis viris editus instruens non plus curam " de pullis et carnibus habere suillis quam quo modo " verus deus et homo qui in celis est digne tractetur. " Ostendens insuper etiam salubres manuductiones quibus " minus dispositus abilitetur,' etc. What we may call the business title of this book is much more sensibly set forth in the brief colophon: 'Explicit exhortacio de celebratione misse per modum dyalogi inter pontificem et sacerdotem, Anno Lxx?,' &c. Still, here also, the absence of an incipit, and of any following text must be taken as constituting a title-page. Three years later two Augsburg printers, Bernardus 'pictor' and Erhardus Ratdolt, who had started a partnership in Venice with Petrus LÖslein of Langenzenn in Bavaria, produced the first artistic title-page as yet discovered. This appears in all the three editions of a Calendar which they issued in Latin and Italian in 1476, and in German in 1478. The praises of the Calendar are sung in twelve lines of verse, beginning in the Latin edition:—

Then follows the date, then the names of the three printers in red ink. This letterpress is surrounded by a border in five pieces, the uppermost of which shows a small blank shield (see p. 19), while on the two sides skilfully conventionalised foliage is springing out of two urns. The two gaps between these and the printers' names are filled up by two small blocks of tracery. It is noteworthy that this charming design was employed by printers from Augsburg, the city in which wood-engraving was first seriously employed for the decoration of printed books. But the design itself is distinctly Italian in its spirit, not German.

Like its two predecessors, the title-page of 1476 was a mere anticipation, and was not imitated. The systematic development of the title-page begins in the early part of the next decade, when the custom of printing the short title of the book on a first page, otherwise left blank, came slowly into use.[4] The two earliest appearances of these label title-pages in England are (1) in 'A passing gode lityll boke necessarye & behouefull agenst the Pestilens,' by 'Canutus, Bishop of Aarhus,' printed by Machlinia, probably towards the close of his career [1486-90?]; and (2) in one of the earliest works printed by Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton's foreman, after his master's death. Here, in the centre of the first page, we find a three-line paragraph reading:

The prouffytable boke for maÑes soule And right comfortable to the body and specially in aduersitee & tribulation, which boke is called The Chastysynge of goddes Chyldern.

Other countries were earlier than England both in the adoption of the label title-page and in filling the blank space beneath the title with some attempt at ornament. In France the ornament usually took the form of a printer's mark, more rarely of an illustration; in Italy and Germany usually of an illustration, more rarely of a printer's mark. Until the first quarter of the sixteenth century was drawing to a close the colophon still held its place at the end of the book as the chief source of information as to the printer's name and place and date of publication. The author's name, also, was often reserved for the colophon, or hidden away in a preface or dedicatory letter. Title-pages completed according to the fashion which, until the antiquarian revival by William Morris of the old label form, has ever since held sway, do not become common till about 1520.

Perhaps the chief reason why the convenient custom of the title-page spread so slowly was that soon after 1470 the Augsburg printers began to imitate in woodcuts the elaborate borders with which the illuminators had been accustomed to decorate the first page of the text of a manuscript or early printed book. When they first appear these woodcut borders grow out of the initial letter with which the text begin, and extend only over part of the upper and inner margins. In other instances, however, they completely surround the first page of text, and this is nearly always the case with the very beautiful borders which are found, towards the close of the century, in many books printed in Italy. In these they are mostly preceded by a 'label' title-page. The use of borders to surround every page of text was practically confined[5] to books of devotion, notably the Books of Hours, whose wonderful career began in 1487 and lasted for upwards of half a century. Head-pieces are found in a few books, chiefly Greek, printed at Venice towards the close of the fifteenth century. In the absence of any previous investigations on the subject, it is dangerous to attempt to say where tail-pieces first occur, but their birthplace was probably France.

Pagination and head-lines are said to have been first used by Arnold ther Hoernen at Cologne in 1470 and 1471; printed signatures by John Koelhoff at the same city in 1472. The date of Koelhoff's book, an edition of Nider's Expositio Decalogi, has been needlessly held to be a misprint, though it is a curious coincidence that we find signatures stamped by hand in one edition of Franciscus de Platea's De restitutionibus, Venice, 1473, and printed close to the text in the normal way in another edition issued at Cologne the following year. None of these small matters have any direct bearing on the decoration of books, but they are of interest to us as pointing to the printer's gradual emancipation from his long dependence on the help of the scribe. It is perhaps worth while, for the same reason, to take as a landmark GÜnther Zainer's 1473 edition of the De regimine principum of Aegidius Columna. This book is possessed of printed head-lines, chapter headings, paragraph marks, and large and small initial letters. From first page to last it is untouched by the hand of the rubricator, and shows that Zainer at any rate had won his independence within five years of setting up his press. Curiously enough, to this particular specimen of his work he did not give his name, though it is duly dated.