The Invention of Printing.: A Collection of Facts and Opinions, Descriptive of Early Prints and Playing Cards, the Block-Books of the Fifteenth Century, the Legend of Lourens Janszoon Coster, of Haarlem, and the Work of John Gutenberg and His AssociatesDe Vinne, Theodore Low
History
The Invention of Printing.: A Collection of Facts and Opinions, Descriptive of Early Prints and Playing Cards, the Block-Books of the Fifteenth Century, the Legend of Lourens Janszoon Coster, of Haarlem, and the Work of John Gutenberg and His Associates
De Vinne, Theodore Low
Incunabula -- Bibliography; Printing -- History -- Origin and antecedents
We do not certainly know when and where these blocks were engraved,
but we do know when they were destroyed. Two books, published by Peter
Van Os of Zwoll, in Holland, in 1488 and 1489, contain seventy-seven
engravings on wood which were certainly cut from the blocks that had
been used to print the original edition of the _Bible of the Poor_.
To get the little cuts he needed to illustrate texts of movable type,
Van Os must have partly destroyed the original blocks. In this act of
destruction, we have a fact and a date which give a clue to the origin
of the book. Copies of the first edition in folio form must have been
printed before 1488. At this date, and perhaps for some time before,
the blocks in folio form had no mercantile value; there was no longer
any demand for the book in the neighborhood in which it had been made.
That the country in which this first edition was printed and sold was
Holland, seems probable when we find that the blocks were used for the
last time, and in a mutilated form, in a town of Holland. This opinion
is strengthened by the facts that the _Bible of the Poor_ in folio
form was then, and afterward, a salable book in Germany and in other
countries, but it was not subsequently reprinted in the Netherlands
in any form. The Dutch and Flemish architectural features in the
designs, and the legends which attribute the work to Dutch engravers
and printers, are of themselves unsatisfactory evidences of the origin
of the book; but they cannot be entirely overlooked. They lead to the
conclusion that the book was printed in [p208] Holland, but they do
not fix the date of printing, which may have been as early as the year
1425, or as late as 1450.[110]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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