Gutenberg’s invention of an early form of stereotyping

34 Johannes Balbus, Catholicon

Mainz: [printer of the Catholicon, probably Gutenberg workshop] “1460” [or rather: reuse of the set of stereotypes of the Catholicon of 1460, c. 1472, or 1469]. Third printing of first edition.

2°, 405 x 285 mm. 373 leaves: a-f10 g4 h-t10 v4+1 x-y10 aa-qq10 rr4; handwritten quire-numbers preserved almost throughout.Watermarks: tower and crown. – 2 columns of 66 lines, type I:82G. Rubrics throughout, lombards, several larger initials with pen-flourishing of great originality, partly with Maiblumen on pale green. – With very wide margins. Generally excellent condition, except for slight traces of humidity in the upper margins, some rare tears (fol. 367-368) expertly restored, the five last leaves re-margined in their upper portions, the last leaf (verso blank) backed. – Light brown 18th-century English calf binding in the ‘Kalthoeber-style’, spine and covers richly gilt: on stamped ground, one rhomboid central panel on each cover left without decoration, edges and turn-ins gilt. The joint of lower cover restored.

PROVENANCE: 1. Armorial ex-libris of Sir George Shuckburgh(-Evelyn, 1751-1804) with shelf-mark B.2. The collection of the English politician and astronomer was passed on by way of inheritance to 2. Major N. D. Martin and was eventually sold at 3. Christie’s, London, 4 April 1962, lot 38. 4. H. P. Kraus, cat. 103, no. 2, 1965 sold to 5. Collection Otto Schäfer, Schweinfurt, OS 503.

TEXT: In 1286 the Italian Dominican Johannes Balbus of Genoa completed his Summa que vocatur Catholicon, a work of reference of the Latin language, which offered the reader not only grammatical, orthographic, metrical, etymological and rhetorical explications but also an extensive dictionary. An indispensable tool for theologians, it circulated widely, as is shown by the hundreds of surviving or recorded manuscripts. Up to the beginning of the 16th century, when humanists revolutionized the study of Latin philology, reducing medieval encyclopaedias to waste paper, the Catholicon was a work of fundamental importance and therefore provided a reliable source of income for any printer (cf. Schneider, p. 202).

PRINTS: According to the famous colophon, the Catholicon was completed in Mainz in the year 1460. Although the printer’s name is not given in the colophon, Johannes Gutenberg could well have been the author of these lines as well as of the entire printing project. Our copy is the third printing of the first edition, and the typesetting is almost identical to the first printing of 1460.The three printings can be distinguished on the basis of their watermarks, the widely accepted dates of which are around 1460 (paper marked with bull’s head), c. 1468/69 (Galliziani paper) and not before c. 1472 (paper marked with tower and crown, as in the present copy). The almost identical typesetting in all three editions is extremely unusual. There are two principal hypotheses, which seek to explain this (cf. also no. 33).According to Paul Needham, printing forms were cast, each consisting of two lines of individually set movable types. These so-called stereotypes were then used for the actual printing process. Whereas after printing one page, the typeset of this page was usually broken up so that the individual types could be reset for the next page, the two-line stereotypes could be preserved for later use. This technique explains the different dates of the various sorts of paper as well as the lower quality of the print. Johannes Gutenberg himself may have been the inventor of this technical device, and the Catholicon would accordingly have to be attributed to his workshop. With the exception of two small texts using the same type (cf. no. 33), this technique, however, was uncommon in the early history of printing. In contrast to Needham’s suggestions, Lotte Hellinga claims that the Catholicon cannot have been printed before 1469 and that a consortium of various printers produced the three variants simultaneously. The paper with the bull’s head watermark could be a left-over from the workshop of Gutenberg after his death in 1468.The paper with tower and crown can already be found in a Bible by Eggestein, which could have been on the market as early as 1469. She claims that the two-line structure visible in the print is due to individual types that were fixed by wires so as to form two-line elements. Those couplets, mounted in turn and fixed to form an entire page could be transported between the workshops involved. The types show signs of wear as they had been in use since 1461/62 for letters of indulgence. Furthermore, Hellinga states that the date given in the colophon must either be wrong or deliberately encrypted. In this case Johannes Gutenberg cannot be the printer of the Catholicon, although he could still have been the first owner of the Catholicon-types as well as the printer of the indulgences of 1461/62 and 1464.


RARITY: Very rare. Whereas the Catholicon is quite frequently found in the great public libraries of the world, there are only very few copies in private hands. On the whole, the three prints of our edition appear on the market extremely seldomly. In the last three decades only two copies have been sold at international auctions, in Germany not a single one since 1950.

LITERATURE: Hain/Copinger 1895, 2254; BMC I, p. 39; GW 3182; Goff 1964, B-20; BSB-Ink B-8; Geldner 1968, p. 28f; Needham 1982; Arnim 1984, no. 31; Wolfenbütteler Notizen zur Buchgeschichte 13, 1988; Hellinga 1989; Hellinga 1993; Schneider,C. 2000; Needham 2004; ISTC ib00020000.