Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
Mainz, where he at once opened a workshop and reaped rich fruit from
this theft, producing several printed books. The accuracy of this
story was attested by a respectable bookbinder, of great age but clear
memory, named Cornelis who had been a fellow-servant with the culprit
in the house of Coster, and indeed had occupied the same bed for
several months, and who could never talk of such baseness without
shedding tears and cursing the thief.
Written nearly a hundred and thirty years after the supposed events
which it narrates, this story is damned by its circumstantiality. It is
thus that legends grow, and it is not difficult to imagine Haarlem
bookmen picking up ideas out of colophons in old books and asking the
"respectable bookbinder of great age" whether it was not thus and thus
that things happened. Many of the details of the story are demonstrably
false; its one strong point is the bookbinder, Cornelis, for a binder of
this name is said to have been employed as early as 1474 and as late as
1514 to bind the account-books of Haarlem Cathedral, and in the two
years named, and also in 1476, to have strengthened his bindings by
pasting inside them fragments of _Donatuses_ printed on vellum in the
type of the _Speculum Humanae Saluationis_. The fragment in the
account-book for 1474 is rubricated, and must thus either have been sold
or prepared for selling, i.e. it is not "printer's waste," but may have
been bought by Cornelis for lining his covers in the ordinary way of
trade. But we have here a possible link between Zell's story of early
Dutch _Donatuses_ and the story of Junius about Coster and his servant
Cornelis, since we find fragments of a _Donatus_ in the possession of
this particular man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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