DENNIS E. RHODES AND LOTTE HELLINGA

Cornelius de Zyrickzee and his practice of

reissuing incunables from other presses

Since 1976 work has been in progress on the preparation of a census of incunabula in the British Isles on the lines of Mr. F. R. Goff's census for the U. S. A. As a first step the many small collections of incunabula in London (some fifty libraries in all) are being systematically examined. The rule that every copy seen of a fifteenth-century book (or, for that matter, a book of any period) ma y throw light on the history of printing proves itself once again. In this case one of the more mysterious presses in the Low Countries, the Printer of the Mensa Philosophica, is the one to benefit from such an examination. Bibliographically speaking, we have here an itinerant printer, for whom it is impossible to indicate with certainty the town, or even the country, where he worked. The one type used in his editions is an entirely inter- national rotunda in the Venetian style which is found throughout the field of fifteenth-century book-production. The identification of the place of printing can therefore only be sought in the paper used, which has not yet been investigated, in some possible connection with another press, or in the provenance of copies and their history. Proctor linked the press with the equally anonymous 'Printer of the Oraison du Saint Espierit' which he ranged among the unlocated presses of France, no doubt because of the language of one of its products. When the French volume of BMC was prepared, it was decided to transfer the two presses to the Low Countries.' In BMC ix the argument was put forward that the choice of texts seemed to point to a relation of some sort with the press of Johannes de Westfalia at Louvain.2 The history of copies was taken into consideration in HPT,3 where it was argued that various copies are found together with Antwerp editions of approximately the same date; the possible dating for this press was here for the first time put at circa 1487, based on an owner's inscription. In the cautious bal- ancing of possibilities and probabilities the book in the Middle Temple, London, which is the subject of the present contribution adds some weight to the arguments for Louvain.

1 BMC viii, p. lxxxvii. 2 BMC ix, p. 210. 3 W. & L. Hellinga, The fifteenth-century printing types of the Low Countries (Amster- dam 1966), vol. i, P. 74. 144

I. Title-page of GW 5792, Middle Temple copy, printed in the types of Cornelius de Zyrickzee