by Gertrude Burford Rawlings
New York D.Appleton and Company 1901
occurred to the first printers, we should not have to sharpen our wits on the hundred and one doubtful
points with which the subject of early bibliography bristles. To-day, the title-page not only introduces the
book itself, but declares the name of the writer and the publisher, and the time and place of publication.
But during the first sixty years of printing title-pages were rare, and the old methods followed by the
scribes in writing their manuscript books still obtained. The subject matter began with" Incipit" or "Here
beginneth," etc., according to the language in which the work was written, and such information as the
printer considered it desirable to impart was contained in the colophon, or note affixed to the end of the
book.
More often than not these colophons are irritatingly reticent, and withhold the very thing we want to
know. At other times they are informing, and in some cases amusing. Dr. Garnett has suggested that as
a literary pastime some one might do worse than collect fifteenth-century colophons into a volume, for
the sake of their biographical and personal interest, but I am not aware that his idea has been carried
out. Two colophons have already been quoted here, the first printed colophon (see p. 97), and one which
is possibly from the pen of Gutenberg (see p. 95).
A quaint specimen found in a volume of Cicero's Orationes Pililippicce, printed at Rome by Ulrich Hahn,
about 1470, descends to puns. It is in Latin verse, and supposed by some to have been written by
Cardinal Campanus, who edited several of Hahn's publications. It informs the descendants of the Geese
who saved the Capitol that they need have no more fear for their feathers, for the art of Ulrich the Cock
(German Hahn = Latin Gallus = English Cock) will provide a potent substitute for quills. A colophon to
Cicero's Epistolce Familiares, printed at Venice in 1469 by Joannes de Spira, declares with pardonable
pride that he had printed two editions of three hundred copies in four months.
The first book with any attempt at a title-page is the Sermo ad Populum Predicabilis, printed at Cologne in
1470 by Arnold Therhoernen, but a full title-page was not generally adopted till fifty years later. The first
English title-page is very brief, and reads as follows :
Machlinia. A later development of the title page was a full-page woodcut, headed by the name of the
work, as in the Kynge Riecharde cuer du lyon, printed in 1528 by Wynkyn de Worde. The same woodcut
does duty in another of the same printer's books for Robert the Devil.
Early title-pages in Latin sometimes render the names of familiar places of publication in a very unfamiliar
form. London may appear as Augusta Trinobantum, Edinburgh as Aneda, Dublin as Eblana. Some towns
are easily recognized by their Latin names, such as Roma or Venetire; others are less obvious, such as
Moguntia, or Mentz; Lutetia, or Paris; Argentina, or Strasburg. Several places had more than one Latin
form of name. London, for example, was Londinum, and Edinburgh, Edemburgem.
Pagination, or numbering of the pages, was first introduced by Arnold Therhoernen, in the same book in
which he gives us the first title page, and to which reference has already been made. He did not place the
figures at the top corner, however, but in the centre of the right hand margin.
The practice of printing the first word of a leaf at the foot of the leaf preceding, as a guide for the
arrangement of the sheets, was first employed by Vindelinus de Spira, of Venice, in the Tacitus which he
printed about 1469.