Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
If this is true of the early books printed in any country, it is also
true in only slightly less degree of those which first appeared in any
great city which afterwards became a centre of printing. Strassburg,
Cologne, and Nuremberg, Rome, Venice, and Florence, Paris and Lyon,
Antwerp and London (if we may be permitted for once to ignore the
separate existence of Westminster), each has its own individuality, and
in each case it is interesting to see with what wares, and in what form,
the first printers endeavoured to open its purse-strings. But when we
come to towns and townlets some distinction seems needed. I may be
misled by secret sympathy with that often scholarly, too often
impecunious figure, the local antiquary. To him the first book printed
in his native townlet, though by a printer merely stopping on his way
between one great city and another, must needs be of interest, and it is
hard that its price should be forced beyond his reach by the competition
between dealers keen to do business with a rich collector to whom the
book will have none of the fragrance it would possess for him.
Typographical itinerancy, this printing by the roadside, as we may
almost call it, must needs be illustrated in great collections, like any
other habit of the early printers. But the ordinary private collector
can surely dispense with buying books because they have been printed in
places which have no associations for him, of which perhaps he has never
heard.
As for the individual man, if we would keep any oases green in what may
easily become a sandy desert, we must surely treasure every trace of his
personality. One large element in the charm of incunabula is the human
interest of difficulties overcome, and wherever a craftsman began work
by cutting a distinctive type to suit the calligraphic fashion of the
neighbourhood, at whatever date he started, his books will still have
some interest. When he becomes articulate and tells us of his
difficulties, or boasts of how they have been overcome, we may value his
work still higher. As the first book printed at Florence, the Commentary
of Servius on Virgil needs no added attraction, and yet how much its
charm is enhanced by its printers' addresses to the reader. Here is the
second of them roughly Englished:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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