The Invention of Typography: A Brief Sketch of the Invention of Printing and How it Came AboutHamilton, Frederick W. (Frederick William)
History
The Invention of Typography: A Brief Sketch of the Invention of Printing and How it Came About
Hamilton, Frederick W. (Frederick William)
Printing -- History -- Origin and antecedents
Of these forty-seven works, forty-five are in Latin, which, as we know,
was the language of schools, courts, and churches at this period in all
nations. One, an edition of a book of which there are several editions
in Latin, was in Dutch. One was in French. That these forty-seven books
all came from Haarlem is pretty clearly shown by certain internal
evidence. One of them is clearly placed in Holland by the fact that it
was printed in Dutch. Nobody at the very outset of printing would print
books in Dutch except a Dutchman. All the rest of the forty-seven are
closely related to these, as is shown by the similarity but not identity
of their types.
The earliest printers were imitators of the copyists. They made their
pages look as much like a manuscript page as they could, not perhaps
with intent to deceive, but because nothing else occurred to them. You
will find that all the earliest types are modeled upon the handwriting
current among the copyists of the place where the printing was done.
Certainly these books did not come from Mainz. Nobody has ever claimed
that they did. Almost equally certainly they did come from Holland and
from Haarlem. The handwriting is the handwriting of the Haarlem copyists
of the period. An attempt was made at one time to assign these books to
Utrecht, but it is not only true that each country had its prevailing
copyist’s hand, but that each important center had its own system
variously developed in the local schools in which copying was taught.
The Utrecht hand is not the Haarlem hand. The books resemble the Haarlem
hand and not the Utrecht.
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