Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
At Bruges the first printers were Colard Mansion and William Caxton,
names well known to English book-lovers, though not all the labours of
Mr. William Blades and Mr. Gordon Duff have made it quite clear which of
the two was the leader. Only two English books were printed, the
_Recuyell of the Histories of Troy_ and _The Game and Play of the
Chess_, when Caxton returned to England and set up his presses in the
Almonry at Westminster. Whether he had any pecuniary interest in the
French _Recueil_ and the _Quatre Dernieres Choses_, and whether
printings at Bruges began with the _Recuyell_, or, as Mr. Proctor
contended, with the French Boccaccio _De la ruine des nobles hommes et
femmes_ of 1476, are points of controversy. From 1477 till his flight
from Bruges to avoid arrest for debt in 1484, Mansion worked steadily by
himself, and the total output of his press amounts to twenty-five French
works and two in Latin.
At Brussels the Brothers of the Common Life, who worked also as printers
in other places, published numerous popular Latin works between 1476
and 1487, about which time their press seems to have stopped. But the
removal of Gerard Leeu's business from Gouda to Antwerp in 1484 soon
gave that town a typographical importance which (except for a few years
at the end of the century) it long maintained.
The true incunabula of the Netherlands are, of course, the "Costeriana."
Whatever view we may take of their date and birthplace, they were
undoubtedly home products, with a strongly marked individuality.
Ketelaer and Leempt, however, at Utrecht, Veldener at Louvain and
elsewhere, Caxton and Mansion at Bruges, were real pioneers. In a sense
this is true also of John of Westphalia and Gerard Leeu, notably of the
former, who had learnt his art in Italy and by the type which he had
brought thence raised the standard of printing in his new home. It is,
indeed, almost exclusively at Deventer that we get the dull commercial
work which has nothing primitive or individual about it, and thus,
perhaps because their grand total is so much smaller than in the case of
Germany, Italy, or even France, the special interest of incunabula
attaches to rather a high proportion of the early books of the
Netherlands.
If this be true of the Netherlands, it is even truer of the two
countries with which we have still to deal in this rapid survey, Spain
and England. Of Spanish incunabula about seven hundred are now
registered; of English, three hundred is a fairly liberal estimate of
the grand total still extant. Within the limits of the fifteenth century
neither country reached the purely mechanical stage of book production
to which so many German and Italian books belong after about 1485. In
England, indeed, this stage was hardly reached until the general
downfall of good printing towards the end of the sixteenth century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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