In 1471 Wendelin, or his correctors, lest their inspiration should be too hard worked, invented a simple couplet which would apply to any book equally well.

This is found in the “Apophthegmata” of Plutarch, the “Memorabilia” of Valerius Maximus, the “Singularia” of Pontanus, the “Aureae Quaestiones” of Bartolus de Saxoferrato, etc.; and must have been a welcome second string in case of need. Nevertheless, when a second edition of Sallust was called for, Wendelin’s private poet was equal to the occasion, producing the quatrain:

The verses are so incredibly bad, not merely in their entire disregard of quantity, but in grammar as well, that it would be pleasant to reproduce the peculiar iniquity which makes their charm. What the writer meant to say was something to the effect that:

Faithfully to reëcho the discords of the original is above the present translator’s skill.

As money troubles thickened about him, Wendelin’s colophons became less buoyant and interesting; but in 1473, when the transfer of his business to John of Cologne and Manthen of Gerresheim was impending, we find these verses in one of the huge law-books in which the early printers were so bold in investing their money—the “Lectura Bartoli de Saxoferrato super secunda parte Digesti Veteris”:

When Wendelin resumed business on his own account in 1476, he published very few books; but one of these, the “Divina Commedia” of Dante, printed in that year, has an Italian colophon in the ambitious form of a sonnet:

This putting of dates into verse is sad work. In Jenson’s early colophons, instead of dates (which are added in prose), we have the name of the reigning doge to wrestle with. Thus, in his edition of the “Rhetorica” and “De Inuentione” of Cicero we find the following verse and prose colophon:

So again in an edition, of the same year, of the Letters to Atticus we have a similar colophon, the poetical portion of which might easily have led a reader to believe that he was invited to buy a work by Atticus himself instead of letters mainly addressed to him:

In the next year we have to deal with the little group of vernacular books printed by Jenson, to one of which the omission of an X from the date in the colophon has given such notoriety. The three which are correctly dated are: (i) “Una opera la quale se chiama Luctus Christianorum ex Passione Christi, zoe pianto de Christiani per la Passione de Christo in forma de Meditatione.”

(ii) “Parole devote de lanima inamorata in Misser Iesu.”

(iii) “Una operetta la quale si chiama Palma Virtutum zioe triumpho de uirtude: la quale da Riegola forma et modo a qualunque stato,” etc.

It will be noticed that the second colophon is shorter than the first, and it should be mentioned that in yet another book of the same kind, the “Gloria Mulierum,” Jenson did not trouble to put his name at all, doubtless thinking, according to the view propounded in our first chapter, that these little vernacular books of devotion would bring him no particular credit. If we look now at the book with the misprinted date, “Una opera la quale si chiama Decor Puellarum, zoe Honore de le Donzelle: la quale da regola forma e modo al stato de le honeste donzelle,” we find this colophon:

Just as the subjects of all the books are of the same class, and just as they are all printed in the same types and the same size, so we find a general agreement in the colophons (as compared with those used by Jenson in the books issued in 1470), tempered with modifications which seem to fall into an orderly sequence. In subject the “Pianto de Christiani” and “Parole devote de l’anima inamorata” seem to pair best together, and the “Decor Puellarum” (regola de le honeste donzelle) with the “Palma Virtutum” (regola a qualunque persona). The first two are exactly dated within three days of each other, the second pair have only the date of the year. Probably there were two sets of compositors, one of whom printed the first pair, the other the second, and we see them starting by calling Jenson a “most famous engraver of books,” dropping these flowers in the “Decor Puellarum,” and quickly getting down to the curt formula of the “Palma Virtutum.” The typographical evidence, without further corroboration, would entitle us to feel sure that the omission of a second X in the date MCCCCLXI was purely accidental,[4] but it is satisfactory to find that the form of the colophon itself makes it impossible to separate it from its fellows and unreasonable to place it earlier than the fuller and more boastful form used in the “Pianto de Christiani.”

Though the colophons of his vernacular books were thus already tending to curtness in 1471, Jenson still paid some attention to those of his Latin publications. Thus, in an edition of Suetonius’s “Lives of the Caesars” of that year we find the quatrain:

In the “De Bello Italico aduersus Gotthos” of Leonardo Aretino, printed in the same year, we find this sentiment expressed more concisely in a couplet which could be inserted in any book:

Lastly, in this same year, we have two variants of a prose colophon which contains a fine phrase of epigrammatic brevity. In an edition of the “Familiar Letters of Cicero” it runs:

The phrase, but slightly enlarged, recurs in the “Institutes of Quintilian” of the same year.

After this, until he joined John of Cologne, Jenson’s colophons become short and featureless. Meanwhile, however, a third printer, Christopher Valdarfer of Ratisbon, had set up a press at Venice, and toward the close of 1470 joined in the contest of poetical colophons. His first contribution to it appears to be these three couplets in praise of his edition of Cicero’s “De Oratore”:

In the following year he issued another volume of Cicero, containing thirty orations, and added to it, doubtless by the hand of “Lodovico Carbo,” his corrector, seven couplets of verse whose phrasing has somehow impelled me to render them into disgracefully jingling rhymes:

After 1471 Valdarfer moved from Venice to Milan, where books from his press began to appear in 1474. Adam of Ammergau made some original contributions to the poetical tradition, but in his 1472 edition of Cicero’s Orations conveyed, and very clumsily, a couplet from Valdarfer’s edition of the previous year:

The Venetian verse tradition seems now to have settled down into a convention that a new printer should announce his arrival in Latin elegiacs, but need not continue the practice. Franciscus de Hailbrun complied with it to this extent in some dull lines in an edition of the “Quadragesimale” of Robertus de Licio in 1472; and it is in another edition of the same work that Panzer first records three couplets which, with the addition of a prose sentence, also constant in form, occur in numerous books printed by Bartolommeo de Cremona:

There is nothing very remarkable in these lines, but they are better than most of those with which I have been wrestling, and shall be dignified, therefore, by being rendered into prose instead of doggerel; for which also there is another reason in the fact that the meaning, just when it becomes interesting, is not as clear as could be wished. The best version I can make is as follows:

“Chalcographi,” which I have rendered literally as “writers in brass,” is, of course, no more than “typographers,” which means literally “writers with type.” But what exactly were the “notas archetypas,” the well-known models? And how did Bartolommeo of Cremona use them so as to distinguish himself from other “chalcographi”? For a moment the obvious answer appears to be that Bartolommeo is claiming credit for himself, not as a printer, but as a type-founder. The explanation, however, cannot stand in any sense which would differentiate Bartolommeo from his fellows in the way in which a modern type-founder differs from the printers who buy their types of him. For we know that Bartolommeo was himself a printer; and, on the other hand, it was the rule at this period for every printer to cast his own types, so that in doing this he would not be accomplishing anything exceptional. If he had been a type-seller in the modern fashion, we may be assured that he would have addressed the chalcographers, his presumable customers, much more respectfully. I can only imagine, therefore, that the “notas archetypas” was simply a good font of type which Bartolommeo thought that other printers were likely to copy.

In the editions of Virgil which he printed at Padua in 1472 (unless there is a mistake in the date), and again in 1473, Leonardus Achates announces himself very concisely:

The verse tradition was also complied with by Jacobus de Fivizano in a Virgil of 1472, by Jacobus Rubeus in an Ovid of 1474, and by Erhard Ratdolt and his companions on the title-page of the Calendar of Johannes de Monteregio in 1476. Two years later, when printing was becoming so great an industry at Venice that such toys as colophons in verse must have begun to appear a little undignified, an editor in the service of John of Cologne, ordinarily a man of quite commercial colophons, burst out into this song in his praise, at the end (of all places in the world) of the Commentary of Bartolus de Saxoferrato on a section of the Justinian Code:

With these lines, certainly more poetical than those of most verse colophons, we may bring this chapter to a close.

IV
PRINTERS’ COLOPHONS IN OTHER TOWNS

The examples already quoted from books printed at Mainz and Venice will have sufficiently illustrated some of the general features which run through early colophons—the professions of religious thankfulness and devotion, and the desire of the printer to glorify not only the new art but himself as its most expert practitioner. These features will recur in other colophons we shall have occasion to quote, but there is no need to pick out many examples from books printed in other towns specially to illustrate them. The piety of German printers frequently prompted such devout colophons as this which Johann Zainer at Ulm added to his edition of the “Quodlibet” of S. Thomas Aquinas, and the one example may serve for all:

As to boasting, there is more than enough of it to be found wherever we turn; but it will not be amiss to collect some instances of the special vaunts of the prototypographers,—the men who claimed to have been the first to practise their craft in any particular town,—as these are sometimes of importance in the history of printing. Thus, in the “Lectura super Institutionum libros quatuor” of Angelus de Gambilionibus de Aretio, printed by Joannes de Sidriano of Milan, we have a most precise statement of the day on which the first printed book was finished at Pavia:

Equally precise is Bartolommeo de Cividale in the short colophon he adds to his edition of Petrarch’s Trionfi, the first book printed at Lucca:

In the “Manuale” or “Liber de salute siue de Aspiratione Animae ad Deum” of S. Augustine, printed at Treviso in 1471, we find Gerard de Lisa boasting, with more poetry, but less precision:

Curiously enough, a year before Joannes de Sidriano issued the first book at Pavia, printing had been inaugurated at Mantua with another work by the same not very illustrious author—Gambiglioni’s “Tractatus Maleficiorum.” In this Petrus Adam de Michaelibus writes:

All these claims seem sufficiently well established, but that of Filippo of Lavagna in the “De medicina” of Avicenna (translated by Master Gerard of Cremona) is much less tenable. Here he says distinctly at the end of Book II:

We know that Antonio Zaroto had printed at Milan a “Festus de Verborum significationibus” on the 3d August, 1471, while the earliest date credited to Lavagna is that of his edition of the “Epistolae ad Familiares” of Cicero, 25th March, 1472. It is true that the pretty colophon to his “Miraculi de la Vergene Maria” tells another tale:

But this is another instance of the risks of using Roman numerals (compare the three “1468” colophons cited in Chapter III), since the V in this date is clearly a misprint for a second X, which in some copies correctly takes its place.

A possible explanation of Lavagna’s boast in 1473 lies in the fact that he was by birth a Milanese, while Zaroto came from Parma; so that if we may take the latter half of the colophon to mean “the first man in this town who introduced and discovered this art of printing,” it would be literally correct—that is, if we can be sure that Lavagna was actually a printer at all, a point on which Mr. Proctor was very doubtful. But to raise this question is perhaps only a modern refinement, since without the help of the doctrine qui facit per alium facit per se we must accuse many worthy fifteenth-century tradesmen of lying in their colophons.

Another dubious statement, which may perhaps be explained, was introduced, amid some very vainglorious boasting, in the colophon to the Oxford edition of the Epistles of Phalaris. This runs:

This is certainly not a truthful colophon, for we cannot believe that any foreign students would have sent to Oxford to buy the letters of the pseudo-Phalaris or any other books there printed, while the assertion that Britons learnt printing by their mother-wit accords ill with the fact that Theodoric Rood came from Cologne to practise the art on their behalf. Mr. Horatio Brown, however, perhaps presses the fifth line a little too hard when he asserts that “these verses prove that public opinion abroad assigned the priority of printing in Venice to Jenson.” John of Speier had died so early in his career, and the work of Jenson is to this day so universally recognized as the finest which was produced at Venice, that the Frenchman may fairly be said to have taught the Venetians printing, without claiming for him priority in order of time. It should, perhaps, also be noted that while Hain and Mr. Brown print the important word as docuit, Mr. Madan gives it as decuit, from which it might be possible to extract the assertion, not that he taught the Venetians the art, but that he graced them with it. It would need, however, a fifteenth-century Orbilius to do justice upon the perpetrator of such vile Latin, while e for o is an easy misprint, and docuit is confirmed by the obvious antithesis of didicit in the next line.

More important, because more detailed than any of the boasts we have yet quoted, are the claims and pleas put forward in the colophons to the edition of the commentary of Servius on Virgil, printed by Bernardo Cennini and his son Domenico, at Florence, in 1471-72. The first of these occurs at the end of the Bucolics, and is repeated, with the substitution of “Georgica” for “volumen hoc primum,” after the Georgics. The second comes at the end of the book.