Fifteenth-century book production
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taimatsuChoose one contemporary printed document and discuss how it might have been produced in the fifteenth century.
The University of Reading
Department of Typography & Graphic Communication
TY1HG, Introduction to the History of Graphic Communication
Lucy Kennedy, 30 January 2006
Choose one contemporary printed document and discuss how it might have been produced in the fifteenth century.
The book I have chosen is a 1995 edition of the Common Bible, a Revised Standard Version translation labelled ‘ecumenical version’ and including the Apocrypha, printed in Great Britain, published by Collins. It is a hardback edition bound with board covers with a plasticised finish and gold embossing; the interior is produced with sewn signatures glued together. The paper is very thin though not quite the ‘onion-skin’ of some older Bibles. The type used is Plantin Clear-Type; the text is in two columns with large drop figures for chapter numbers; page numbers are centred at the top of each page; variant readings are italicised in footnotes. There are no illustrations. 1
The fifteenth century was the turning-point for book production in Western culture. At the start of the century all books were produced by hand, written by monks and by lay stationers; by the end of it printing was taking off and books were being mass-produced.
Manuscript Bibles were produced primarily by monks until the 13th century, at which time book production moved gradually into the secular domain; they were written by hand on parchment, treated calfskin2 – most would have been written on vellum, the finest type of parchment. It was suggested at the time that printed works would not last as they were produced on paper rather than vellum; in fact, some early printing was done on vellum for precisely this reason, and for the associations of expense, status, handwork and durability which vellum carried.
Paper had come into Europe from the East in the 12th century3, but for a long time it was considered a substandard product. By the early 14th century it was gaining ground, as various innovations improved paper quality, and a hundred years later the battle was essentially won – by that time, paper was simply much easier to acquire and use than vellum. This plentiful supply of paper was a necessary condition for the spread of printing, as printing on vellum was a costly and difficult process – only the most expensive skins were suitable for letterpress work.
Handwritten Bibles would have been written in the ecclesiastic script of the period and the area, and decorated with coloured lettering and illuminated capitals. Some books, especially for rich patrons, would have been more profusely illustrated. The appearance of the books would have been far more colourful and ornate than modern printed Bibles, as befits an item which would be a treasured possession of a monastery or wealthy family.
Printing was invented in about 1447 by Gutenberg at Mainz. Early printed books tried to emulate the appearance of their manuscript counterparts, using fonts designed to resemble manuscript and often some efforts at colour printing or illumination added by hand. The modern Bible is monochrome, a style which evolved during the later part of the fifteenth century. It is easy for a scribe writing by hand to change ink colour for emphasis or decoration, but far less easy to produce large numbers of pages printed in more than one colour using primitive letterpress methods. Gradually, the attempts made by printers to emulate handwritten books and print in several colours ceased, and books became monochrome. Some hand-illustration and colouring was still done, but this became something that the purchasers of books would arrange, rather than the printer-publisher having it done before sale.
The publishing business in the fifteenth century was a very different environment from the trade as we know it today. Printers took on many of the functions of publishers and were responsible for most stages of book production. They would select (and sometimes write) the texts to be printed, taking charge of editing them and deciding on the book format and layout. They would commission type designs, or buy matrices from other printers; they would make the type sorts and physically print the book. They were also responsible for sales and distribution. They did not take on the papermaking and bookbinding processes, but otherwise, in the incunabula period the printing business was all-encompassing4. In modern times this is not remotely the case – printing is a separate industry from publishing and the whole process is far more segregated.
As for the book as a physical object, there are many obvious differences, and comparatively strong similarities. The modern Bible is printed on machine-made paper which is noticeably thinner than most modern book-paper. Modern paper is made by machine using vats of wood-pulp and produced in a single continuous roll. In the fifteenth century paper was made by hand (as it was right up until the nineteenth century5) and would have been produced one sheet at a time. It would then need some further preparation (flattening, trimming to size) before use in a printing press.
Type production in the fifteenth century was a process requiring the skills of more than one specialist workman. The letters were designed and then cut into metal punches often by men trained as gold engravers, which were struck into a copper matrix, which was then attached to a mould which was filled with typemetal to produce the sorts for printing. The mould was adjustable, so that the body part of the type could be varied in width for different letters.
Books printed between 1450 and 1480 look almost identical to their manuscript counterparts.6 Different scripts were made into type-founts for different purposes, just as the same scripts had been used for various types of works. Liturgical and religious works used the textura or calligraphic blackletter style, legal the bastarda (a more cursive blackletter form), humanist thought and the classics used lettera anticha (based on Roman inscriptions in stone) and cancelleresca (based on humanist rounded script).
Steinberg suggests that this faithful imitation of manuscript books by early printers was driven by market forces; readers are conservative, he says, and books which look too different are no longer considered books, but rather curious art objects7. So printers followed the scribe’s emphasis on the overall appearance of the page over legibility and clarity. This changed only slowly, and varied according to the dominant scripts in use in particular countries.
The earliest English Bibles used the type now known as ‘blackletter’, ‘gothic’ or ‘fraktur’ (from the ‘broken’ strokes of the letters), which reached its final form in Germany in the early 1500s. Fraktur is the later form of the gothic font; Schwabacher is the earlier 1400s style, slightly more rounded; but Steinberg suggests they cannot really be meaningfully distinguished8.
Roman or antiqua types had first been cut in Strasbourg in 1467, but it was the work of Aldus Manutius in Venice some decades later which propelled the antiqua type to prominence over the gothic style9. His beautiful clear types made the style of letter in which humanist scholars had copied classical texts into the defining letterform of the Renaissance. My chosen book uses Plantin Cleartype, a classic serif roman with cursive italics (rather than a sloped roman) used for footnotes. As the name suggests, this font is based on the work of Christophe Plantin, who did not begin printing till 1555. This type of font would not have been used for Bibles in the fifteenth century.
In the fifteenth century the printing process was quite involved. It would have begun with the preparation of the paper, which might often have needed to be flattened by wetting and standing under a weight overnight. The text would be typeset by hand, by compositors placing individual type sorts into a galley or composing stick. The lines of type would be placed into a frame and arranged with blocks and presses to conform to the required page layout.
Not much is known about very early printing presses, though it is suggested that Gutenberg’s press derived from the wine press which dates back to the Roman period.10 Illustrations survive from the fifteenth century but there are no extant presses dated before the sixteenth. These presses worked on the familiar lever mechanism, and perhaps earlier presses were not dissimilar. The finished forme of type would have been slid into a press of this kind, inked, and the text printed onto paper by the action of the hand-operated lever. The sheet would be printed on both sides and hung to dry. In the modern period all this process is done automatically. The typesetting is done by machine, and the printing itself is performed on large mechanical cylinder presses.
The Gutenberg 42-line Bible is a useful comparison to the modern Common Bible in terms of page layout. It was in progress in 1454 and completed by 1456, and was conceived as a piece of two-colour printing, with parts of some pages printed in red. This was not continued throughout the run, and later copies had spaces left for the red lettering to be added by hand. It is known as the 42-line Bible because most of its two columns have 42 lines of text.11 Some capital letters are illuminated by hand with gold leaf and painting.
Whereas chapter numbering in the Bible probably dates back to the second or third century (in Greek copies)12, verse numbering was an innovation of Robert Estienne in 1551. 13 Bibles of the fifteenth century would have had very little of the markings and numbering which the modern version exhibits.
The page layout, however, might have been quite similar. The modern Bible is laid out in two columns of fairly small, dense text, with subject headings and page numbers at the top, and footnotes at the bottom. Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible lacks the footnotes, numbering and other additional text, but it too is laid out in two columns of well-justified, densely-packed text.14 The page layout is not dissimilar to the Common Bible save that the columns are further apart and the margins far more generous.
The bindings of old books are noticeably stronger and more durable than modern bindings15. It is clear that as incunabula were infinitely rarer and more expensive than books today, commensurately greater care would be taken over their protection. Even with the advance of printing, this care of books continued – they were still expensive items made from costly materials, and needed careful preservation, despite the decrease in scarcity.
The overall concept of bookbinding has not changed much between the fifteenth century and the modern period, at least when it comes to hardcovers. The materials and processes, however, are somewhat different. In the 1400s, the board covering the front and back of the book would have been made of wood rather than the modern cardboard. These were then covered with leather (and occasionally with expensive fabrics, if the book was intended for a wealthy client). The leather was then impressed with designs, and sometimes tooled with gold leaf. The bindings were heavy and solid, and could incorporate metal clasps and nails for protection.16
As printing advanced, in the early sixteenth century, binders did change their processes to keep up with demand. Cardboard began to be used for covers, in the form of several sheets of waste paper pasted together17.
The binding process would have involved sewing together batches of sheets in signatures, which would then themselves be sewn together and attached to the boards, which were then covered in the outer material and decorated. This process has not changed, except that gluing has mostly replaced the stitching-together of signatures. The Common Bible is sewn into signatures and then heavily glued to a spine strip. This is of course all done by machines, whereas in former times most of it would have been done by hand.
The idea of the binding process as something done before sale is a relatively modern innovation – in the incunabula period, most books were sold unbound18, and purchasers would take their works to a bindery for a basic or personalised service, hence the idea of having one’s own binding in which all one’s books were covered.
One of the most significant differences between the modern Bible and its fifteenth-century counterpart is the language in which it is printed. Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible, like most Bibles of the period, is printed in Latin. The Bible was not printed in English till the early 16th century, and even then it was printed abroad.19 Only the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome was authorised by the Catholic Church, and for a long period those who worked for a Bible in English were persecuted and even killed.
Early Bibles were sectarian. The Roman Catholic Church included the Apocrypha, but even today these books are not included in editions promoted by Protestant and evangelical churches. The modern edition in question is an ‘ecumenical’ one, having been produced by a collaboration between different denominations, a practice unthinkable in the fifteenth century. It is also printed in Great Britain. By the end of the fifteenth century printing had hardly taken off in Britain; by 1500 there were only three master printers in the country, and all were of foreign birth20.
All in all, then, the modern Common Bible is deceptively similar to its fifteenth-century counterpart – the end result, a neat hardbound religious work in a classic type and formal page layout – is much the same, but almost every process and material by which it is produced has changed dramatically.
Bibliography:
Twyman, Michael, The British Library guide to printing history and techniques (London: The British Library, 1998)
Steinberg, S.H., Five hundred years of printing, new ed., revised by John Trevitt (London: British Library and New Castle: Oak Knoll, 1996)
Febvre, Lucien and Martin, Henri-Jean, The coming of the book, new edition, translated by David Gerard (London: NLB, 1976)
Clair, Colin, A history of printing in Britain (London: Cassell, 1965)
Carter, Harry, A view of early typography up to about 1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969)
1 In this essay I will refer to this volume (book object) as ‘the modern Bible’ or ‘the Common Bible’ by which I mean this particular example rather than a type of book.
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vellum (30 January 2006)
3 Febvre p 30
4 Steinberg 1996 p 3
5 Twyman p 13
6 Steinberg p 9
7 Steinberg p 10
8 Steinberg p 16
9 Steinberg p 11
10 Twyman p 38
11 Twyman p 26-27
12 http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla66/papers/081-174e.htm (30 January 2006)
13 Twyman p 32
14 Twyman p 27
15 Febvre p 104
16 Febvre p 105
17 Febvre p 106
18 Febvre p 105
19 http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/special_collections/early_books/pix/Engbib.htm (30 January 2006)
20 Clair p 1
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no subject
Date: Wednesday, 31 January 2007 05:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 31 January 2007 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 31 January 2007 07:48 am (UTC)Since she's doing book conservation and things at the moment, you might find it productive to have a chat and swap ideas/notes with her, because it sounds like there's quite a bit of overlap.
no subject
Date: Wednesday, 31 January 2007 11:53 am (UTC)In response to the comment from
no subject
Date: Wednesday, 31 January 2007 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 31 January 2007 02:07 pm (UTC)The Bible is a good choice, too, combining popularity with conservatism of design. I didn't know that verse numbering was introduced so late, nor by one of the Estiennes!
no subject
Date: Wednesday, 31 January 2007 02:52 pm (UTC)I picked the Bible because I wanted to be able to include the political bit :)
Some forms of verse numbering existed at that time and earlier in the Jewish tradition, but they're not quite analogous (I think they were more to do with reading aloud, cantillation, etc.) Quite possibly my friends will correct me here :)
no subject
Date: Wednesday, 31 January 2007 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 31 January 2007 03:13 pm (UTC)