The

Manufacture of
Early Printed
Books in
Europe
P R E PA R E D B Y: G L E N N TA B U C A N O N , M B A ,
PHD
The Manufacture of Early Printed Books in Europe
The invention of the printing press changed history. With the production of the first Bible
between 1453 and 1456 using movable-type printing technology, Johann Gutenberg
started a revolution and helped the diffusion of culture. The first books produced using
the printing press are called Incunabula. This virtual exhibition will describe some
aspects of the process of manufacture of those early printed books in Europe.
The invention of the printing press
The Fifteenth century has seen many cultural and technical changes. Scholars have
observed that the invention of the printing press was perceived as a minor event,
compared to major turns like, for example, the Lutheran Reformation. Nonetheless, print
permeated immediately all fields of everyday life, bringing culture to a broader audience.
Continuity and innovation
The transition from handwritten to printed books contains elements of continuity and
innovation. On the one hand, the early printed books tried to imitate the manuscripts; on
the other hand, the use of movable-types sped up the production dramatically. Even if
typographers are to be considered pioneers in the book trading, their printings still
reproduced shape and style of the manuscripts, as they created types with similar
format and layout and used parchment.
The diffusion of printed books in
Europe
In the second half of the Fifteenth century, there were in Europe more than five hundred
workshops for printing. More than one third of the incunabula (i.e. the books printed in
the second half of the Fourteenth century) were printed in Italy. It has been estimated
that between 1455 and 1500, ca. 40.000 editions were printed, while in the Fifteenth
century the number grew up to 500.000. As a comparison, today, 500.000 editions are
printed in a single year. The book trade grew to the point of becoming an autonomous
branch of commerce. The price of books had dropped dramatically, at first thanks to the
production of paper, that had replaced the more expensive parchment, and then with the
expansion of print.
The diffusion of printed books in
Europe
The diffusion of print in Italy
During the Fifteenth century there were workshops in 75 different Italian cities. The main
centres were Rome, Florence, Neaples, Milan, and, above any other, Venice.It is in Venice
that Giovanni e Vindelino da Spira (Johann e Wendelin von Speyer), who had learned the
printing process in Mainz, introduced the first press. Many factors favoured the diffusion
of printed books in Italy: on the one hand the cultural context, influenced by humanists
who promoted the rediscovery and circulation of classical works; on the other hand,
geographic factors, such as the abundance of streams, used for the production of paper.
The diffusion of print in Italy
Paper
Tradition says that, in 105 A. D., realizing that the use of silk as a writing surface was a
waste of resources, the chinese officer Ts’ai Lun informed the emperor that a cheaper
solution existed: a support could be produced beating down rags, shreds of bark and old
fishernets to a pulp, then laid down on sieves and dried. This technology was long used
in China until, six hundred years later, the Arabs learned the procedure from some
Chinese artisans they had taken prisoners, and brought it back through the Silk Road to
the Middle East, in Samarkand (Ninth century), and eventually to Europe.
Paper
The presence of paper products in Sicily is testified from the second half of the Eight
century. The first documented presence of a paper mill is dated 1151, and it was located
in Xàtiva, Spain. In 1276 the first Italian paper mill was established in Fabriano. The
paper mill of Fabriano reached a large audience fairly quickly, large use of paper was
made for school notes and accounting books.
The movable-type printing technology
While paper was invented in China, Europe invented the movable-type printing
technology. In 1439, the German goldsmith Johann Gutenberg started working on a
project to replace the copying out by hand of manuscripts. Gutenberg had the idea of
casting single types and then combining them in words, lines and columns on a surface,
composing a matrix for a whole page to be printed.
The movable-type printing technology
The press was a well known machine in the Fifteenth century. It was to be seen in many
households, it was used to press the linen, or in some regions to press the grapes for
wine production: Gutenberg himself worked with a customized wine press from
Rhineland. A printing press was a wooden structure with two movable parts: the
movable undertable, where matrix and paper were laid and then moved under the press
and the types were inked; the platen, where the page was pressed onto the inked types.
The early presses were hand operated.
The first printed book
Being handwritten, every single manuscript was an unicum. Gutenberg managed to
produce many copies of the same page, putting the arranged types under a press. After
experimenting for ten years, with the help of the copyist Peter Schöffer and the financial
support of the rich goldsmith Johannes Fust, Gutenberg assembled between 1452 and
1455 the matrices for the first book to be printed, the Holy Bible. The text was in Latin,
arranged in 42 lines per page and in two volumes. 180 copies were made, 40 of which on
parchment. 4000 types were used: letters, numbers, abbreviations and punctuation.
After this one, the first complete version of the Holy Bible in a modern language was to
be published in Venice in 1471, in an Italian translation made by Niccolò Manerbi.
The first printed book
Ink
Medieval historical sources inform us on the composition of ink used for the
manuscripts, but we do not know much about the ink formula of the early era of printed
books. Presumably the ink was prepared from the typographers themselves and
contained a composition of oleoresin and turpentine. This lack of information is
probably due to the interest of the typographers in keeping  their professional knowledge
secret. The composition of the ink used for the first incunabula was the result of a long
research as typographers aimed to reproduce the elegance and readability of
manuscripts.
The publisher
During the first two centuries after the invention of the printing press, publisher,
typographer and bookseller could be the same person. The publisher promoted the
production and distribution of literary, artistic, scientific and musical works: this profile
does not necessarily include typography or bookselling. In Italy, the figure of Aldo
Manuzio emerges: cooperating with the erudites of his time he was able to produce
works that joined technical ability, commercial flair, and high cultural level. Sometimes
the authors themselves paid to have their works printed.
The typographer
The typographers covered at first many different functions, later, to speed up the
working process and improve the quality of the product, the tasks were divided into
three figures: two printing press operators worked on the press, one hammering the
types in the forms and inking their surfaces, a second operator fastened the paper leaf
on a frame and pressed it onto the types.It was the compositor’s task to arrange all
movable-types as to reproduce the whole page to be printed.
The corrector
In each workshop there was a corrector, too. The task of a corrector was to select the
books to be printed, compare manuscript and printed text, compose forewords and
dedications. Often one could find in the workshops the greatest humanists of the time:
well known, for example, is the cooperation between Aldo Manuzio and Erasmus, who
resided in Venice in 1507 and 1508.
Titles
Like manuscripts, incunabula did not have a frontispiece, they opened with the text. In
some cases the first words of the text, containing the name of the author and the title of
the work, were printed with red ink to highlight them.

Sometimes incunabula had name of the author and title of the work printed on a
separate page before the text, called the half-title. The half-title was in some cases
decorated with an illustration or enriched with a few verses. The half-title became a
standard in the Fifteenth century and eventually became the frontispice.
The frontispiece carries the information on author, title and publication, can be adorned
with a xylographic frame or illustrations.
Colophon
The information regarding the typography and the place and date of the printing, when
available, can be found in the colophon, a small area at the end of the text. Sometimes
short notes were added, addressing the beauty of the work, apologizing to the reader for
its poor quality, thanking the gods for the accomplishment of the job. Sometimes
colophons were even written in verses.
Format
The most important part of the book are its pages: in the early times of the printing
technology, the quality and size of the sheet defined the size of the book and its form,
and mostly its content, too. The sheets could be folded one or more times: when folded
once, one obtains folio, relatively big books, used for erudite works, dictionaries and
treatises. The quarto is the size of the books, when the sheets are folded twice; they
were used to print popular literature and chivalric romance. The octavo had the sheets
folded three times: this format was used to print pamphlets, booklets, devotional books,
song books and classic literature. A further format is the sextodecimo, the liturgical
booklets of the Fourteenth century, and some Latin and Italian classical works, like
Cicerone or Dante, are printed using this size.
Quire
The unit of a book is the quire, the result of a single group of folded sheets. Ancient
books were made of sheets folded once and sewn together along the folding line.
Sometimes a paper or parchment stripe was glued to reinforce the fold and give a
stronger texture to the book. The typical Italian quire was made out of four sheets
(quaternion, eight leaves) or five sheets (quinion, ten leaves). In France the typical quire
was made out of six sheets (senion, twelve leaves)
Sequence of the leaves
In the early times of printed books, pages were not numbered. To arrange the leaves in
the correct sequence, typographers followed the same method used for the
manuscripts: every quire was marked with a letter, and a number referred to the position
of the leaves in the quire. To facilitate the job of bookbinders, a ‘catchword’ was printed,
the last word of the last page of a quire was repeated as the first word of the following
page, printed at the beginning of the following quire. To make sure the book was
complete, a register could be found on the closing page of the book, which listed all
letters with the number of leaves for each quire. 
Types
The books printed between 1450 and 1480 looked a lot like medieval manuscripts. The
typographers tried to copy the style and shape of the letters used by the amanuenses.
The Gothic script was used for theology and liturgical books, the Bastarda script was
used for law texts, and the Rotunda script for the classics.
The Roman type
The Gothic script was typical for the books printed in Germany, and was known in Italy,
too. Nonetheless, the influence of the Humanism brought to the invention of a Roman
type, also called Latin script, preferred for its elegance and simplicity.
Hand decorated pages
The incunabula were often decorated by miniaturists, who embellished the pages with
painted initials or margins, following the taste and the style of the manuscripts. Hand
decoration was going to be replaced by printed decoration
Printed decoration
Woodcut is a printing technique that was used to print whole books before the movable-
types were invented. The art of carving on wood to produce matrices is also called
xylography, from the combination of the Greek words xilo (wood) and grapho (writing). A
block of wood was carved with the needed decoration, texts and images, and then inked
and pressed upon a leaf. It was not very practical to use the woodcut technique to
produce whole pages or books, this method was therefore soon abandoned. Still,
woodcut became a precious tool when movable-type printing was adopted, and was
used to print illustrations, decorate pages’ margins and letters.
Initials
The technique of woodcut was used not only for illustrations, but also for initials. In
manuscripts often the initial letter of a chapter or paragraph was decorated with small
scenes, human figures, animals or floral decoration. Alongside these figurated and
historiated initials, usually the first letter of the first line of a text was bigger than the
others, but the decoration was not so rich. 
Printed guide letters
In the first printed books, initials and drop caps were still handwritten and decorated by
miniaturists. The illumination was made after the books were printed. Sometimes the
typographer would put a small letter in the middle of a space left blank for the initial to
indicate to the miniaturist which letter was to be drawn.
Printed initials
uite soon xylography replaces handwriting and small wooden blocks were made to print
the initials. 
Printer's marks
The printer's marks are another significant part of the design of incunabula. They were
first printed in the colophon and then in the half-title, and were meant to identify the
workshop of the printer. In the first few centuries of book printing they became an
important trademark and they could be simple monograms with the initials of the
printer's or publisher's name, resemble a vignette, sometimes with a motto, or a coat of
arms.
Binding
As paper and printing expanded in Europe, books changed in their exterior aspect too.
The increasing levels of literacy were accompanied by a growing demand for books.
Binders had to sacrifice the artistic quality of their product to focus on quantity.
Luxurious bindings with leather on wood, using blind or gold tooling, and closing hooks
were still in production, but smaller books, using cardboard supports and parchment
covers became more common. Such materials made it easier for binders to attach
papers to covers, and helped make books lighter and easier to carry for readers.
 Preservation and valorisation
The preservation of these manufactured books includes prevention and protection. If
books are already damaged, restoration could be needed too. Books have to be
protected from light, humidity, dust and insects. At the same time, preservation means
also valorisation of the contents and form of such historical documents. Librarians
spread information and knowledge cataloguing these works, while curators need to be
aware of the methods of their production and the processes of aging of their materials
in order to preserve them at their best.
 Preservation and valorisation
Many libraries organise exhibitions to promote their rarest collections, but the highest
impact on research and access to such collections can be obtained with digitizations.
Internet access can eliminate geographical, economical, political and cultural barriers:
digital libraries make it possible to explore entire collections of rare books which would
otherwise remain hidden and unknown. International standards have been established
to acquire and preserve the digitizations, and this simplifies the process of cooperation,
exchange and reuse of text and digital images.
Additional Readings
Please read Meggs: Chapters 4-6