8a. REPRINTING GUTENBERG?

BALBUS, Johannes (d. 1298). Catholicon. Mainz: [Johannes Gutenberg?], 1460.

Johannes Gutenberg, meanwhile, remained in Mainz and nearby Eltville until his death in 1468. He appears to have continued printing small works with his old D-K type until the time of the 36-Line Bible (c. 1458-60), and possibly with the type of the 42-Line Bible, as well, although this type may have been the property of Fust and Schoeffer by then. Toward the end of the 1450s, however, an un-named printer in Mainz had developed the smaller “humanistic” type that was used in the unsigned Mainz Catholicon, dated 1460. Although most scholars now attribute this vast Latin dictionary to Gutenberg, a few have maintained that it was not printed until 1469 or later, most likely by Peter Schoeffer, and that it had no connection with the deceased Gutenberg.

The controversy has centered on the fact that the Catholicon was issued in three almost entirely identical type impressions, each on one of three distinct paper stocks: (1) Bull’s Head watermarks, datable c. 1460; (2) Galliziani watermarks, datable c. 1469; and (3) Tower and Crown watermarks, datable c. 1472-74. Since a book explicitly dated “1460” could not be printed on paper that did not exist until a decade later, some scholars dated all three impressions to the early1470s, despite the “1460” date. However, in 1982, Paul Needham argued convincingly that some copies of the Catholicon were printed on Bull’s Head paper in 1460 with solid two-line slugs of cast type, and that a “stereotype” process was used to print more copies on the later paper stocks in about 1469 and 1472-74.

Bridwell Library’s Catholicon is from the first issue on Bull’s Head paper, datable to 1460. It is the copy that until 1914 was in the library of Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke (d. 1733), at Wilton House, Salisbury, Wiltshire, where it was described in Samuel Palmer’s General History of Printing in 1733.

Full page view          Catholicon leaf  c.1469