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Four Strasburg Incunables Incorrectly Assigned to Anton Koberger of Nuremberg

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Four Strasburg Incunables Incorrectly Assigned to Anton Koberger of Nuremberg FOUR STRASBURG INCUNABLES INCORRECTLY ASSIGNED TO ANTON KOBERGER OF NUREMBERG PAUL NEF.DHAM l\n R incuiiiihlcs, undiucd and anonymous as to place and printer, have for many generations been assigned to the Nuremberg press of Anton Koberger, and have in tact been cla.ssed as his very earhest productions.* They are: 1. Johannes Nider, Manualc confessorum. foL: a-e'^^ p, 58 leaves. Hain, *ii834; Goff, \-178; Proctor, 1961; B.M.C. ii, 411 (IB. 7103). 2. Johannes Nider, De moralt lepra. fol.: a-e^^ fg^ h^^, 76 leaves. Hain, *ii8i3; Goff, N-I8Q; Proctor, i(^6o; B.M.C. ii, 411 (IB. 7104). V Ilonorius Augustodunensis, De praedesttnatwne et libero arbitrio. fol.: a-d'^^, 40 leaves {d 10 blank). Hain, *88oi; Proctor, 1962; B.M.C. ii, 411 (IB. 7106). 4. Puihcnuw Idttmim. 8 in quarter-sheets: a-q^^, 192 leaves (q 8-12 blanks). Hain, I ;^457; Proctor, 1964; B.M.C. ii, 41 T (IA. 7112). All are printed with the same type, a Gothic face of which 20 lines measure, according to B, irC, 113 mm. It is closely similar to a 115-mm. type used by Koberger in \arious editions, signed and unsigned, the earliest of which to contain an explicit date was completed on 24 November 1472.' Ofthe four editions printed with the ri3-mm. t\pe, several copies survive with purchase or rubrication inscriptions dated 1471.^ If these arc Koberger's productions, his activity as a printer must be pushed back to at least .1 \car before his tirst dated book. But are the\ Koherger's' Doubts were expressed already in 1912, in B.M.C. ii, 409, where it was stated that 'Koberger's connexion with these books [printed with the I n-mm. type] ... is in need of further proof. As was there noted, this type is indistinguishable in face from' that used in 1473-4 by the Strasburg printer C. W., iivts .-iri^ennriensis, measuring (again according to B.M.C.) no (tos) mm. 'Notably better presswork and a ditlierence in height of 3 mm. in twenty lines thus separate this [11 ^-mm.] group trom the books assigned to C. W. It is quite possible that its ascription to Koberger originated from a confusion between this 113 and the closely similar 115 t>pe used b\ him in his tirst signed book ... but in deference to Hain and Proctor the tour books m this 113 type are left, doubtfully, under Koberger, until some other printer is found for them.' Since B.M.C. ii appeared, no other printer has been found f(.r them; every subsequent catalogue listing one or more of these incunables has contmued to assign them to Koberger, though occasionally with a query. 130 However, the doubts expressed by B.M.C, ii are fully confirmed by a closer examination of the four incunables in question. It may be concluded with certainty that they have nothing whatever to do with Koberger, nor with Nuremberg. They are Strasburg incunables, printed either in the shop of C. W., in a hitherto-unsuspected earlier stage of its activity, or in another, anonymous Strasburg shop, whose types came later into C. W.^s possession. Koberger's connection with the books is simply this: that when he began printing in 1472 he procured a fount copied from that ofthe Strasburg press. This is, indeed, an argument in itself that the 113-mm. type was not Koberger's. For if it was his, why should he go to the considerable expense of procuring, as his second type, a close facsimile of the first, produced by newly cut punches? The clue to a proper assignment of the four editions, and of a fifth member of the group to be mentioned shortly, may be found in their paper stocks. The two Nider editions must have been produced together. A printed advertisement survives, billing them as a single entity, and they often survive bound together.^ Two stocks of paper, both marked with the letter P surmounted by a quatrefoil (figs. 1-4), are mixed through both editions and are—with one small exception—the only papers of those editions.'^ The third edition, Honorius of Autun, De praedestinatwne, is uniformly printed on a third stock of paper, marked with a Bull's head/X (figs. 5-15). This stock is ofa kind that I have elsewhere called multigeminate.^ That is, it is made up of more than a single pair of twins, no doubt because it was manufactured in a mill producing a single stock of paper by mixing the output of several vats. The fourth edition is the small and very rare Psalterium printed on quarter-sheets. Its papers are a mixture ofthe two P-stocks ofthe Nider editions, and ofthe Bull's head/X ofthe Honorius of Autun. A fifth edition also belongs, according to its paper stock, to this 'pseudo-Koberger' group: 5. Sixtus IV, Regulae, ordinationes £5' constitutwnes cancellariae [after 19 Dec. i47t]. 4" in half-sheets: a b^^ (b 10+i), 21 leaves. Goff, S-576; D. Reichling, Appendices ad Haimi-Copingeri Repertonum bibliographicum . Siipplementum (1914), r8o; I. Hubay, Incunabula der Umv.-Bibl. Wurzburg (V^xQ^hdidtn, T966), 1938. All three catalogues cited above assign this edition to the Strasburg printer C. W. (Gotf with a query). The state of its type will be discussed below; for our immediate purposes it wall be sufficient to note that it is printed on the first of the two P-marked stocks, found also in the Nider editions and in the Psalterium latinum. Both the P-stocks of this group were in all probability manufactured in or near Alsace. The twins of the first P-stock (figs, i and 2) are apparently identical with Piccard, Buchstabe /*, Abt. ix, nos. 426 and 407, which he notes as twins.^ He found them in documents from Stift Selz, Alsace, 1473. His tracings ix, 425 and 427 are very similar to 426, and may be variant states of the mark; he found them in documents from, respectively, Strasburg, 1470; and from Kloster St. Blasien in the Schwarzwald, 1470-1. The precise P-mark of fig. i appears in an edition of Petrarch, De contemptu mundi, printed in Strasburg by Adolph Rusch, not after 1473 (Hain, 12800; Goff, Fig. J. mh . mR Fig. 4. mR Fig, 3. mR Fig. 5. mR Fig. 6. mR Ftg. 7. mR Fig. y. mL Ftg. 10. mR Ftg. II. mR Ftg. 12. mL Fig. 13. mL Ftg, 14. mL Fig. IS. mR P-4i-i). However, its twin differs from tig. 2, and I believe Rusch was probably using a slightly later stock from the same mill. 1 he .second P-stock twins (figs. 3 and 4) are very close to, and perhaps identical with, Piccard, Buchstabe P, Abt. ix, nos. 634 and 629, though these he does not note as twins. The former he records iti unspecified Strasburg incunables of 1473-5; ^"^ the latter, in documents from Ettlingen (Baden), Frankfurt am Main, Trier, and Stift Sel/, 1471-2. Botb P-stocks are localized by Piccard generally in Burgundy-Lorraine. 1 he Bull's head/X stock found in Honorius of Autun, De praedestinatione, and in the Psalterium appears to come from roughly the same region. Piccard's Ochsenkopf albums are obviously far from complete in their record of Bull's heads ofthis particular t\pe, but t)ne ot his tracings, Abt. ix, no. 6 (Zutfen, 1473) may be identical to fig. I z ot our stock.'' He localizes papers with this general class of tnark in Burgundy-Lorraine. Now, it is in the nature of paper to travel, and the use of given stocks in and around Strasburg does not exclude a priori their use in Nuremberg. But, in fact, we find that the paper stocks ofthe early Nuremberg printers entered that city by entirely different trade routes. Their papers generally like those ofthe Augsburg and Ulm printers of the same time—came not from eastern France but from northern Italy. This may be seen by examining any of the early editions securely assigned to Koberger, or any of the earh editions of Nuremberg's first printer, Johann Sensenschmidt (1470-8). Sheet after sheet, all that will be tound in these books is Italian paper.^ We know, theretbre, that the five incunables listed above are printed with a type which, perhaps in different castings, was used in 1473-4 by a recognized Strasburg printer, C^. \V.; and on papers made in the vicinity of Strasburg and widely marketed in that cit\. We know by contrast that Koberger's earliest firmly attributed books are printed with a txpc mpwd trom that in our group, and on papers imported from northern ltal\. It is evident that there is no rational basis for locating our group an\ where but in Strasburg. The reason tor the group's original attribution to Koberger is indeed that suggested by B.M.C. ii: a confusion between its type and Koberger's facsimile' ot the type. This confusion goes back at least as far as the late eighteenth century, and may have originated with Michael Denis.^ The weight of inertia has kept the mistaken attribution alive to this day, almost two centuries after it was first made. \n interesting question remains: were these five incunables printed in the shop of C W ,, whose acti\it\ must then be extended back to 1471; or in a heretofore unrecognized Strasburg shop whose types subsequently passed into the hands of C. W.? This question cannot be answered with any real certainty, but the relevant evidence suggests that the former alternative is the likelier, or at least fits more closely the conventional criteria for assigning anonymous editions to discrete presses.
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