An Essay on Colophons, with Specimens and TranslationsPollard, Alfred W. (Alfred William)
History
An Essay on Colophons, with Specimens and Translations
Pollard, Alfred W. (Alfred William)
Books -- History -- 1450-1600; Colophons; Incunabula -- Bibliography
A few notes on some of the words in this colophon may be offered.
“Codex,” which has been paraphrased “copy,” meant originally a collection
of tablets waxed over for writing on, and so any book in which the
leaves are placed one on another instead of being formed into a roll.
“Capital letters” must be understood of large initials, not merely, as
the phrase is often used to mean, majuscules, or “upper-case” letters.
“Adinventio” appears to mean simply invention, and not, as with our
knowledge of stories of “prefigurements” of printing in Holland afterward
completed in Germany we might be inclined to think, the perfecting of an
invention. The epithet “artificiosa” probably only means skilful, without
emphasizing the contrast between the artificial methods of printing as
compared with the natural use of the hand. About “caracterizandi” it is
not easy to feel quite sure. Does it complete “imprimendi” by adding
to the idea of pressing the further idea of the letter (χαρακτήρ)
impressed, or is “imprimendi” already fully equivalent to printing, while
“caracterizandi” refers to engraving the letters on the punches? Lastly,
it may be noted that in _calamus_, “reed,” and _exaratione_, “plowing
up,” which properly refers to the action of the “stilus” of bone or metal
on the waxed surface of a tablet, we have reference to two different
methods of writing, one or other of which must necessarily be slurred.
Not all colophons present so many small linguistic difficulties as
this, but few are wholly without them, and many of the renderings which
will be offered in ensuing chapters must be accepted merely as the best
paraphrases which could be attained.
This first colophon was repeated by Fust and Schoeffer with very
slight alterations in the Psalter of 1459 (in which were added the
words “et honorem sancti iacobi,” “and to the honour of S. James,”
the patron of the Benedictine monastery at Mainz, for whose use the
edition was printed), in the “Durandus” of the same year, the Clementine
Constitutions published in 1460, and the Bible of 1462.
Meanwhile, in 1460, there had been published at Mainz an edition of the
“Catholicon,” a Latin dictionary compiled by Joannes Balbus of Genoa, a
Dominican of the thirteenth century. The colophon to this book, instinct
with religious feeling and patriotism, and interesting for its pride in
the new art and use of some technical terms, yet lacks the one important
piece of information which we demand from it—the name of the printer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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