Varia bibliographica

EUROPEAN PRINTING MUSEUMS

9:MAINZ The Gutenberg Museum in Mainz is too famous to need introduction here. In 1900-1 the city in which printing with movable type was invented finally fulfilled its duty to devote a museum to the inventor. During the last war it was largely destroyed, but was reopened in all its glory in 1962. A single glance is enough to tell one that this is more than a one-man museum; and the 'subtitle' Weltmuseum der Druckkunst is more than a hint that the Museum's aim is to exhibit five centuries of printing. Alongside a department devoted to the history of writing, where the various writing materials (e.g. palm leaves and wax tablets) may be examined, as well as a somewhat disappointing reconstruction of a medieval scriptorium, there is also a small section on the history of paper. The circumstance that a reconstruction of Gutenberg's workshop could not be left out of a museum such as this may temper one's judgement somewhat, but it has to be said that the reconstruction of the press on which the first printer is supposed to have worked c. 1454, a reconstruction dating from 1925, is based not on contemporary evidence (there is none) but on information which not only dates from a century later but is also unreliable (especially a woodcut used by Froschauer in Zurich in 1548). In the Museum's workshop demonstrations are given of casting and printing. A reconstruction of an early eighteenth-century printing shop elsewhere in the enormous building makes a much more satisfactory impression. Here the press is a replica of an authentic wooden press which had been preserved in Leipzig but was destroyed in the war. It has a (peculiarly German) spindle-platen guiding by means of four iron bars, a variant of the Blaeu system which has two bars. Nineteenth-century printing technology is represented here by a reconstruction of Sene- felder's lithographic press, a model of Koenig & Bauer's perfecting machine of 1814, two iron hand presses (a German imitation of the Columbia and a press of the Hagar type), an iron copperplate press and as the high point an early printing machine: a cylinder machine by Klein & Forst of Johannisberg dating from 1846 in which the forme is moved backwards and forwards on rails. As to composing machines, they are represented by early examples of Monotype, Linotype and Typograph. The bookbinding department has a particularly fine collection of hand binding tools with a wide range of binder's stamps. Of the older techniques of illustration woodcut, line engraving, steel engraving, mezzotint, lithography and nature printing (Naturselbstdruck) are shown. There are one or two twentieth-century printing machines and a small offset printing shop, but the museum is well endowed with photocomposing machines. Apart from the prototype of the first successful photosetting machine, the Lumitype of 1946, the museum has on display a complete Lumitype set-up of the 1960s, with an exhibition of books to show that very good work can be done with photographic composing methods. Then there is a Linofilm and an Intertype Fotomatic, both of them already museum-pieces. One case is devoted to modern punch cutting, com- plementing another case showing Gutenberg's method. Fortunately it was decided not to leave it at printing machines and tools, but to include in the exhibition the products of the technology on display. The museum has a superb collec- tion of books, the stars of which are two copies of the forty-two-line Gutenberg Bible, here dated '1452-55(56?)', referring to which the catalogue states quite bluntly that the copy purchased in 1978 cost DM 3.7 million. This catalogue, incidentally, confines itself to the 231 general outlines of the history of the book, and thus fails to do justice to the treasures in the museum. But in the museum itself this tendency towards the general is also discernible in some measure: for example, there is no clear exposition of exactly how one went about the actual manufacturing of a printed book-the composing, make up, imposing, proofing, proof-reading, printing, etc. That when it comes to books the incunabula period is extremely well represented is understandable. Twentieth-century private presses, too, are present in strength (Bremer- Presse, Cranach-Presse, Ernst-Ludwig-Presse etc.), but the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are distinctly under-represented. At the same time, these books are sometimes rightly placed in the direct context of the printing technology and methods exhibited, either by judicious positioning or by explanatory notes; as a rule, however, this is not the case, so that the product is divorced from its technical background and becomes a purely aesthetic object; and this, again, is tied up with the museum's general underestima- tion of the ordinary book. An ideal printing museum would show the final product (including aesthetically inferior ones) in the immediate context of five centuries of technological and social history (the latter aspect being barely touched on in Mainz).

10 :ANTWFRP

If one divides printing museums into three types, viz. those which exist in their own right (e.g. the Mus6e de l'Imprimerie at Lyons or the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz), those which are departments or sections of museums of technology (e.g. the Deutsches Museum in Munich or the Mus6e National des Techniques in Paris), and company museums (e.g. the Ensched6 Museum in Haarlem or the Museo Bodoniano in Parma), then the Plantin- Moretus Museum in Antwerp must be accounted one of the last. At the same time, however, there is no denying that it occupies a special place within that category: it is neither a museum maintained as a sideline by an existing company, nor is it a museum of memories of a company long gone-it is a company as a museum. Very special historical circumstances have brought this about: circumstances whereby a firm which for three centuries operated in the same building and with largely the same instruments could be transformed at the end of the nineteenth century into a museum which cannot be compared with any other. Christopher Plantin established his printing business in Antwerp in 1555, and in 1576 he moved into the premises on the Vrijdagmarkt which now houses the museum. Up to about 1870 he and his successors (the first being his son-in-law Jan Moretus) printed some four thousand titles there. That building, equipment, products and archives have been preserved may be attributed to several factors: a trait of Plantin and the Moretuses, born of family pride and a sense of history, to throw nothing away, a tradition of testamentary dispositions such that the firm could never be sold or split up, and finally the fact that the later Moretuses (having become extremely wealthy and, since the end of the seventeenth century, the bearers of a noble title) had no need to make a profession of printing books, so that the company could survive any economic decline and there was no need to adapt the equipment to the demands of the age (in particular, of course, the industrial revolution). In 1876 the City of Antwerp, driven to it by nineteenth-century sentiments of nationalism and histor- ical awareness, purchased the business and turned it into a museum. To the readers of Quaerendo the museum is too well known for a survey of its treasures to be necessary here. It comprises the house occupied by the master printer, the type foundry, the composing, printing and proof-readers' rooms, and the shop, office and li- brary, and possesses numerous hand moulds, thousands of punches, matrices, wood blocks and copperplates, many type cases and chases with their bars, and seven printing presses (wooden, naturally). Two of these are the oldest surviving presses in the world. It is assumed