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Psalter. Mainz, Fust and Schöffer, 1457. THE FIRST PRINTED COLOPHON.

Again he calls attention to the boast of John of Speier at Venice, "primus in Adriaca formis impressit aenis," by which he asserts his individual priority over any other firm in that city. And here is the rhyming colophon used by the same John, in which he boasts with some ambiguity of the number of copies of Cicero which he has printed in his two editions:

From Italy once each German brought a book.

A German now will give more than they took.

For John, a man whom few in skill surpass,

Has shown that books may best be writ with brass.

Speier befriends Venice; twice in four months has he

Printed this Cicero, in hundreds three.[6]

In wording their colophons, the early printers were only following the constant practice of medieval scribes, of whose many colophons a selection of examples is given in Bradley's Dictionary of Miniaturists.

The moving of printers from one town to another, transference of their stocks, their quarrels, their boastings and pleas for favor with those in high places, all are followed, and much information gathered in the Essay. There is simple pathos in the colophon of the Chronicles of the londe of England printed at Antwerp in 1493, which records the death of its famous printer, Gerard Leeu,

a man of grete wysedom in all manner of kunnyng; whych nowe is come from lyfe unto the deth, which is grete harme for many of poure man. On whos sowle God almyghty for hys hygh grace haue mercy. Amen.

"A man whose death is great harm for many a poor man must needs have been a good master, and a king need want no finer epitaph," writes Dr. Pollard.

The days when we find the book trade highly organized and the functions of printers and publishers clearly separated, are pictured in the following colophon:

Here you have, most honest reader, six works, etc. It remains, therefore, for you to make grateful acknowledgement to those who have produced them: in the first place to that eminent man Master Simon Radin, who saw to their being brought to light from the obscurity in which they were buried; next to F. Cyprian Beneti for his editorial care; then to Jean Petit, best of book-sellers, who caused them to be printed at his expense; nor less than these to Andrieu Bocard, the skilful chalcographer, who printed them so elegantly and with scrupulous correctness, June 28, 1500. Praise and glory to God.[7]

Here are men making aspersions on the editions of rival publishers, with warnings against them:

Here end the Decretals, most correctly printed in the bounteous city of Rome, queen of the whole world, by those excellent men Master Ulrich Han, a German, and Simon di Niccolo of Lucca: with the ordinary glosses of Bernard of Parma and his additions, which are found in few copies; both printed and corrected with the greatest diligence. Purchase these, book-buyer, with a light heart, for you will find such excellence in this volume that you will be right in easily reckoning other editions as worth no more than a straw.[8]

We find that the Nuremberg Chronicle is the only book which Dr. Pollard can call to mind that gives explicit information as to its illustrators, Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenworff; and finally we come to books where the author takes a hand, and we sometimes have a double colophon, as in the case of the Morte d'Arthur. Here we have Sir Thomas Malory's colophon, requesting the reader's prayer for his deliverance, and for the repose of his soul, and William Caxton's business-like statement as editor, printer and publisher.

The author's struggle with the printer, to obtain his own way, is no new thing, as proved by this late colophon of the musician, Johann von Cleve, affixed to his Cantiones, 1580:

As I come to the end of my task it seems worth while to inform students and amateurs of music that this collection of Motets was in the first place entrusted to Philip Ulhard, citizen and printer of Augsburg, to be printed, and that he (as often happens), being made unreasonably capricious by bodily ill-health, often did not carry out our intention, and compelled me, by leaving out some motets (which however, if life bears me company and God helps, will shortly be published), to abridge the work, and more especially as the same printer, when the work was not yet finished, came to an end of his days, and there upon the work was entrusted to Andreas Reinheckel to be completed, if anything, therefore, is found which might disturb a connoisseur, I pray musicians to bear with it with equanimity. Farewell. In the year of the Lord 1580, in the month of January.

We have noted one rhyming colophon, a mannerism much affected by Italian printers. Another fanciful custom by which the early printers called attention to their colophons was the use of eccentric arrangements of types, by which these final paragraphs appeared in the shape of wedges, funnels, diamonds, drinking glasses and the like.

The earliest known title page is in a Bull of Pius IX, printed in Mainz by Fust and Schöffer in 1463, but it was some twenty years before the custom became common. At first the title only, taking the form of a single sentence, appeared at the top of a title page, but it was not long before, either in the interests of decoration or of advertising, a simple woodcut or the device of the printer appeared below the title. In his A Treatise on Title-pages, 1902, Mr. De Vinne proposes the following ingenious explanation of the evolution of the printer's mark: "It was hoped that the distinctiveness of a peculiar device would be remembered by the book-buyer who had forgotten the name of his preferred printer.

"In the beginning the device was put at the end of the book, above or below the colophon. It was at first a small and simple design ... but the eagerness to have a device that should be striking led to its enlargement and afterward to an entire change of position. When the greater part of the last page was preoccupied by the last paragraph of the text, the device required a separate page. This led to making full-page devices and afterward to the putting of the device on the first page."

As time went on it was only natural that the remaining space at the foot of the title pages should be utilized for brief details of printing and publishing, but the transition was gradual and unsystematic. Indeed, some printers continued to use colophons alone well into the sixteenth century, and there are frequent instances during that century of books containing both title pages and colophons, the latter being a repetition, at the end of the book, of the imprint, as the few business-like lines at the foot of the title page had come to be named.

By the time that title pages were firmly established, publishing had become a separate business, and the publisher was not long in assuming the ascendency, often pushing the printer altogether into the background and appearing alone in the imprint. For a long time the printer modestly tucked in his name wherever he could, sometimes on the verso of the title page, and sometimes at the bottom of the last page, but in a formal manner, without the naive and often delightful and useful details which make the early colophons so interesting.

With the nineteenth-century revival of interest in typography, the printer came to the fore again and we see his name appearing in a new place, the certificate, preceding the title page—an entire leaf, moreover, on which are set forth the details in which he is interested, the paper, number of copies, and so on. This use seems to have been introduced by the finely printed volumes of the French book clubs, with their "Justification du tirage," and it was followed through the later decades of the nineteenth century, in the publications of book clubs and many other privately and finely printed volumes. Simultaneously with these came the publications of the Kelmscott and other private presses, which revived the use of colophons in the early manner. The separate page, placed at the end of the finely printed book of today, giving details of the making of the volume, is the result of this modern impetus in book-making[9]—the interest in fine production of the person for whom the book is made, added to the desire of the modern printer for recognition of himself as the producer.

St. Bernard. Sermones. Rostock, Fratres Domus Horti Viridis, 1481. COLOPHON WITH PRINTER'S MARK.

This is but the very logical expression in the books themselves of the modern trend, so assiduously cultivated, toward the making of good books, and the return to prominence of the printer after the long period of his subservience to the publisher. In the present-day notice of its makers, on the final page of a book, the colophon is revived, and once more the printer has the last word!

COMPOSED IN GARAMOND TYPES