Early Illustrated Books:A History of the Decoration and Illustration of Books in the 15th and 16th Centuries
A History of the Decoration and Illustration of Books in the 15th and 16th Centuries
9781465543004
1 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
No point in the history of printing has been more rightly insisted on than that the early printers were compelled to make the very utmost of their new art in order to justify its right to exist. When a generation had passed by, when the scribes trained in the first half of the fifteenth century had died or given up the struggle, when printing-presses had invaded the very monasteries themselves, and clever boys no longer regarded penmanship as a possible profession, then, but not till then, printers could afford to be careless, and speedily began to avail themselves of their new license. In the early days of the art no such license was possible, and the striking similarity in the appearance of the printed books and manuscripts produced contemporaneously in any given city or district, is the best possible proof of the success with which the early printers competed with the most expert of the professional scribes. All this is trite enough, but we are somewhat less frequently reminded that, after some magnificent experiments by Fust and Schoeffer at Mainz, the earliest printers deliberately elected to do battle at first with the scribes alone, and that in the fifteenth century the scribes were very far, indeed, from being the only persons engaged in the production of books. The subdivision of labour is not by any means a modern invention; on the contrary, it is impossible to read a list of the medieval guilds in any important town without being struck with the minuteness of the sections into which some apparently quite simple callings were split up. Of this subdivision of labour, the complex art of book-production was naturally an instance. For a proof of this, we need go no further than the records of the Guild of St. John the Evangelist at Bruges, in which, according to Mr. Blades's quotation of the extracts made by Van Praet, members of at least fourteen branches of industry connected with the manufacture of books joined together for common objects. In the fifteenth century a book of devotions, commissioned by some wealthy book-lover, such as the Duke of Bedford, might be written by one man, have its rubrics supplied by another, its small initial letters and borders by a third, and then be sent to some famous miniaturist in France or Flanders for final completion. The scribe only supplied the groundwork, all the rest was added by other hands, and it was only with the scribe that the early printers competed.
