An essay on colophons Author:Alfred William Pollard Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: COLOPHONS AT MAINZ 5T was said at the end of our first chapter that the presence of a colophon in an old book is to be taken as a sign of its printer's p... more »ride in his work. This being so, it would seem only reasonable to expect that the very earliest books of all, the books in which the new art made its first appearance before the book-buying world, should be found equipped with the most communicative of colophons, telling us the story of the struggles of the inventor, and expatiating on the greatness of his triumph. As every one knows, the exact reverse of this is the case, and a whole library of monographs and of often bitterly controversial pamphlets has been written for the lack of the information which a short paragraph apiece in three of the newly printed books could easily have given. What was the reason of this strange silence weare left to guess. It will be thought noteworthy, perhaps, that all three of these too reticent books are Latin Bibles ? the 42-line Bible variously assigned to Gutenberg and to Fust and Schoeffer, the 3 6-line Bible variously assigned to Gutenberg and Pfister, and the 48-line Bible known to have proceeded from the press of Johann Mentelin of Strassburg. It is indeed a curious fact, and it is surprising that the folly of Protestant controversialists has not leapt at it, that not merely these three but the great majority of Latin Bibles printed before 147 5 are completely silent as to their printers, place of imprint, and date. Of the fourteen editions which in the catalogue of the British Museum precede that which Franciscus de Hailbrun and Nicolaus of Frankfort printed at Venice in 1475, only textit{hoc opufcufuj fim'tu ae eoptctu .et ad cufebtaj tet mduftrie in cuutatc (pagunttj crjobannc fiift auc.ct jSctru fcboiffljer te cncu fciotrp c...« less