INCUNABULUM

An 'incunabulum' is a book, single sheet, or image that was printed — not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe. These are very rare and valuable items. The origin of the word is the Latin ''incunabula'' for "swaddling clothes", used by extension for the infancy or early stages of something. The first recorded use of ''incunabula'' as a printing term is in a pamphlet by Bernhard von Mallinckrodt, ''De ortu et progressu artis typographicae'' ("Of the rise and progress of the typographic art"), (Cologne, 1639), which includes the phrase ''prima typographicae incunabula'', "the first infancy of printing", a term to which he arbitrarily set an end, 1500, which still stands as a convention. The term came to denote the printed books themselves from the late seventeenth century. The plural is 'incunabula' and the word is sometimes Anglicized to 'incunable'. A former term is ''fifteener'', referring to the fifteenth century.

Contents

Types

Famous examples and collections

Notes

See also

External links

Types

There are two types of ''incunabula'': the ''block-book'' printed from a single carved or sculpted wooden block for each page, thus ''xylographic'', and the ''typographic'', made with individual pieces of cast metal movable type on a printing press, in the technology made famous by Johann Gutenberg. Many authors reserve the term ''incunabula'' for the typographic ones only.
The ''end date'' for identifying a book as an ''incunabulum'' is convenient, but was chosen arbitrarily. It does not reflect any notable developments in the printing process around the year 1500. ''Incunabula'' usually refers to the earliest printed books, completed at a time when some books were still being hand-copied. Some fastidious book-collectors of the fifteenth century eschewed printed books in their personal libraries.
The gradual spread of printing ensured that there was great variety in the texts chosen for printing and the styles in which they appeared. Many early typefaces were modelled on local forms of writing or derived from the various European forms of Gothic script, but there were also some derived from documentary scripts (such as most of Caxton's types), and, particularly in Italy, types modelled on humanistic hands. These humanistic typefaces are often used today, barely modified, in digital form.
Printers tended to congregate in urban centres where there were scholars, ecclesiastics, lawyers, nobles and professionals who formed their major customer-base. Standard works in Latin inherited from the medieval tradition formed the bulk of the earliest printing, but as books became cheaper, works in the various vernaculars (or translations of standard works) began to appear.

Famous examples and collections

Famous ''incunabula'' include the Gutenberg Bible of 1455, the ''Peregrinatio in terram sanctam'' of 1486, printed and illustrated by Erhard Reuwich, both from Mainz, the ''Nuremberg Chronicle'' of Hartmann Schedel, printed by Anton Koberger in 1493, and the ''Hypnerotomachia Poliphili'', printed by Aldus Manutius with important illustrations by an unknown artist. Other well-known ''incunabula'' printers were Albrecht Pfister of Bamberg, Günther Zainer of Augsburg, Johann Mentelin of Strasbourg and William Caxton of Bruges and London.
The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue now records over 29,000 incunabula editions (not works). Studies of incunabula began in the seventeenth century. Michel Maittaire (1667-1747) and Georg Wolfgang Panzer (1729-1805) arranged printed material chronologically in annals format, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Hain published, ''Repertorium bibliographicum ''— a checklist of incunabula arranged alphabetically by author: "Hain numbers" are still a reference point. Hain was expanded in subsequent editions, by W. Copinger and D. Reichling, but it is being superseded by the authoritative modern listing, a German catalogue, the ''Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke'', which has been under way since 1925 and is still being compiled at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. The British Library has compiled the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue which includes the holdings of most libraries world-wide.
The largest collections, with the approximate numbers of incunabula held, include:


★ Bavarian State Library at Munich (19,900) ^[1]

★ British Library at London (12,500)

★ Bibliothèque nationale de France (12,000)

★ Vatican Library in the Vatican City (8,000)

★ Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek at Vienna (8,000)

★ Württembergische Landesbibliothek at Stuttgart (7,076)

★ Russian National Library at Saint-Petersburg (7,000)

★ Huntington Library (5,600)

★ Library of Congress (5,600)

★ Bodleian Library (5,500)

★ Russian State Library at Moscow (5,300)

★ Cambridge University Library (4,600)

★ John Rylands Library (4,500)

★ Danish Royal Library (4,500)

★ Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (4,400)

★ Harvard University (3,600)

★ Yale University (Beinecke 3,100, others 425)

★ Biblioteca Nacional at Madrid (3,300)

★ Koninklijke Bibliotheek at The Hague (2,000)

★ Országos Széchényi Könyvtár at Budapest (1814)

★ Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen (1,650)

★ Biblioteca Colombina at Seville (1,194)

★ University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1,130)

Notes

1. Bavarian State Library in numbers

See also

★ History

★ Library

★ Book collecting

★ Blockbooks

External links

★ UIUC Rare Book & Manuscript Library

★ Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW)

★ History of Incunabula Studies