Luke 5:2-6:4
Luke 5:2-6:4
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Luke 5:2-6:4 |
Luke 5:2-6:4 |
B) Folio. One leaf from the 1462 Fust and Schoeffer Bible, 15⅞ x 11⅝ inches. Printed on paper; gothic (5:118G), double column, 48 lines. Initial and capital strokes added by hand in red; headline on both sides added by hand in alternate red and blue letters; signed "r4" in contemporary hand. § BM I 22 (IC.101); GW 4204; Goff B-529; ISTC ib00529000.
This is the first edition of the Bible printed by Anton Koberger (ca. 1445–1513), the printer and publisher who would produce more Bibles than anyone else during the fifteenth century. His production became so extensive that scholars estimate he may have operated as many as twenty-four presses. In addition to printing, he also served as publisher for works printed at various presses outside of Nuremberg.
The beauty of these pages results in part from the book’s typographical history. The Bible of 1475 is a column-by-column reprint of the Fust and Schoeffer Bible of 1462. What we have, then, is an early example of a previously printed book serving as the compositor’s copy. The visual impression of the Koberger is that it is more generous in its spacing and finer in its kerning. The compositor gained flexibility for subtly altering the original’s layout by using a slightly smaller font size.
One of the great advantages to having a compositor’s design for an entire book is that it allows for several presses to work simultaneously on the same project. This is a particularly important consideration for the printing of large books such as the Bible.
The most common textual changes are the resolutions, or improvements, of abbreviations. A great impediment to the fluent reading of most medieval manuscripts of the Bible lies in the decipherment of abbreviations, a difficulty with many early printed Bibles as well. Some printers, however, began attempting to achieve greater clarity by limiting abbreviations to only the most familiar ones. This had the added advantage of reducing the amount of type in a font—remember that each symbol for an abbreviation required the designing, casting, and punching of a piece of type.
The Fust and Schoeffer pages were also corrected for the Koberger compositor, probably by someone consulting a different imprint (or a manuscript) of the Bible. Our example from the 1462 Bible, illustrated by a leaf from the Ryrie Collection, shows an intriguing passage in Luke 5:[22] corrected in the Koberger edition to "quid cogitatis mala in cordibus vestris" (What evil things are you thinking in your hearts), whereas the Fust and Schoeffer text did not have mala (evil things). Interestingly, modern critics of this passage side with the Fust and Schoeffer reading, even though some Greek manuscripts have the reading ponéra (wicked things), which would justify the Vulgate reading of mala.
Literature: Eichenberger and Wendland 1971.