A Bibliographical Rarity

WHAT profit or entertainment there is in the perusal of a list of book titles, however learnedly selected and elegantly printed, may not be altogether plain to the uninitiated ; but to the lover of books, not so much for their own sake as for their history, or scarcity, or some other purely bibliographical interest, — in other words, to that highly organized being who experiences the sensation that is known as “the feel of a library,” — this catalogue of the first books issued from the first presses will probably afford a refined pleasure.¹ It is true that Mr. Hawkins has introduced these titles with a short preface in which he discusses once more the long-debated contest of Holland and Germany for the honor of the invention of printing; but as this is nothing more than a very learned rejoinder a partisan on the side of Germany to Mr. Hessels’ recent argument in defense of the claims of Holland, and in particular as it does not add anything to the stock of evidence, but only rearranges in a very lucid and convincing manner the old facts, we need not be detained by its musty antiquity. Probably the real moral character of that thievish runaway servant of Laurens Coster, whose flight from Holland with the secret of his master’s invention was first remembered a century and a half after it took place, will never be known; and until there is some better reason than has yet been brought forward to identify him with Gutenberg, or in fact to believe that he existed, or even that his master experimented with matrixes at all, the world will continue to ascribe the most powerful element in modern civilization to the obscure Mentz printer, whose legal difficulties in the course of his invention were miraculously preserved in the rotting records of Strasburg.

Besides this discussion of the old question, the origin of the art, Mr. Hawkins gives nothing in this beautiful volume except the titles—two hundred and thirty-six in number — of the first books published in any European city or town before the year 1500, with some brief comments of a bibliographical nature and several admirable reproductions from pages of the original volumes interleaved in the text.

To the antiquarian the volume has a peculiar flavor ; and since it affords a bird’s-eye view, as it were, of the state of knowledge and of literature in Europe at the beginning of a new age, the scholar, also, who is interested in the successive phases of civilization will find much that is suggestive in these mere names. Naturally the first books printed in any community were either those of the highest repute among the learned, or of the greatest popularity. The Bible, of course, — the great Biblia Sacra Latina of 1455, — in two large folio volumes, heads the list, and as one turns over the pages devoted to the German press he finds that theology practically monopolized attention. Italy, on the other hand, the heir of antiquity, began her printed literature characteristically with Cicero de Oratore (1465), which the little towm of Subiaco, where the German printers had settled, sent forth; and in Rome and Venice, too, Cicero was the first author to receive the honor of print. Throughout the Italian list the classics occupy the same place as theology in the German. Bologna published Ovid, Parma Plutarch, Fivizzano and Modena Virgil, Savona Boëthius ; and in the native tongue, to which the art was at once applied, Padua first gave its citizens Boccaccio, Jesi Dante, Polliano Petrarch. Similarly in the publications of every country one finds the national characteristic. One of the first French books was Le Liure des Bonnes Meurs, printed at Chablis, and in England Caxton’s first book was The Dictes and Sayinges of Philosophres. Before the end of the century that saw the earliest leaflets of the Gutenberg press the invention had spread over Europe ; the Germans carried it to their neighbors, and the Jews took it from them and disseminated it to the borders of Spain and Turkey. One cannot obtain an idea of the course of this movement more directly and simply than by the aid of this volume, by far the most complete of its kind; but it should be added that the utility of it in these ways as a chart of the times depends almost wholly on the knowledge that the reader brings with him. Generally speaking, it is merely a curious and well-annotated handbook for bibliographers, who will take further pleasure in the beauty of the volume.