Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/535

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His conclusions, and the method of research by which he reached them, the German bibliographers of the present day have adopted and amplified into a bibliographical and typographical “system,” which professes to examine minutely the form and size of every letter, capital or small; the combined letters like do and de cast on one type; the signs of contraction above, or by the side of or through certain letters, the marks of punctuation, the habits and workmanship of the printer, the arrangement of the quires, the paper and its water-marks, &c.

The bibliographers who deal with the incunabula enumerated above, in accordance with this “system,” regard the books in which they find these chief and by-forms used in their proper places as the earliest, and therefore as the products of Gutenberg’s “creative genius and skill,” while they ascribe the books which bear evidence of the misuse of those forms to other printers, but their types to him. But this is an uncertain guide, as by errors in the distribution of the types after the printing of the first or second pages this misuse may already occur in the third and further pages of a book. In this way, however, the

“system” arranges the books enumerated above in the following approximately chronological order:—

A peculiarity of the above-mentioned “system” is that it ascribes two types, so different in size, shape and form, as those of B36 and B42, to one and the same printer, merely because they “resemble” each other. This shows that the “system” takes no account of the fact that the inventor of printing, and all the early printers who came after him, in manufacturing their types necessarily imitated the forms of the written characters of their time. Hence if two printers simultaneously erected their presses in one town, their types, though cut and cast independently, were apt to resemble each other, as appears from various examples. The printers of B36 and B42 are no exception to this rule; they each took a MS. as their model, and the types which they produced are simply imitations of the Gothic or Church hand, which, from its first beginnings in the 10th century, if not earlier, can clearly be traced down to, and reached its greatest development in, the 15th century.