Printing and the Renaissance: A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York — John Shaqi
Printing and the Renaissance: A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New YorkSlater, John Rothwell
History
Printing and the Renaissance: A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York
Slater, John Rothwell
Printing -- History -- Origin and antecedents; Renaissance
The capital for the new business was furnished by a wealthy goldsmith
named Johann Fust. Between 1450 and 1455 Gutenberg printed an edition of
the Latin Bible, sometimes known as the Mazarin Bible, which is
ordinarily regarded as the first printed book. It was a magnificently
printed volume, exhibiting at the very foundation of the art a skill in
presswork scarcely surpassed by any of Gutenberg's immediate successors.
He was a great printer, but not a financially successful one. Fust sued
his partner in 1455 for repayment of the loans advanced, and upon
Gutenberg's failure to meet these obligations Fust foreclosed the
mortgage and took over the printing plant. Although Gutenberg started
another publishing house at Mainz, and continued it until his death in
1468, the main development of printing after 1455 was in the original
plant as carried on by Fust and his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer. They
printed in 1457 an edition of the Psalms in which for the first time
two-color printing was employed, the large initial letters being printed
in red and black. This innovation, designed to imitate the rubricated
initials of the manuscripts, involved great technical difficulties in
the presswork, and was not generally adopted. Most of the early printed
books, even down to the end of the fifteenth century, left blanks for
the large capitals at the beginnings of the chapters, to be filled in by
hand by professional illuminators.
From the establishments of Gutenberg and of Fust and Schoeffer in Mainz
knowledge of the new art spread rapidly into many German cities. In 1462
Mainz was captured and sacked by Adolph of Nassau in one of the local
wars of the period, and printers from the Mainz shops made their way to
other cities throughout the empire. Before 1470 there were printing
establishments in almost every German city, and hundreds of works,
mostly theological, had been issued from their presses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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