The Summa grammaticalis quae vocatur Catholicon, or Catholicon (from the Greek Καθολικόν, universal), was a Latin encyclopedia / dictionary which found wide use throughout Christendom. It was created by John Balbi (Johannes Januensis de Balbis), of Genoa, a Dominican[1] who finished the work on March 7, 1286.
The Catholicon is a Latin dictionary, which was compiled by Johannes Balbus and served in the late Middle Ages to interpret the Bible "correctly". The educated citizen could gather from it the substantial knowledge of his time. From 1286 to the late 15th century it was available mainly in manuscripts held by monastic libraries.
The Catholicon was one of the first books to be printed, using the new printing technology of Johannes Gutenberg in 1460; it is unclear who did the printing though Gutenberg himself was once regarded as the printer responsible. It was printed with a newly cut Gothic Antiqua, a small but easily readable, still gothically influenced, printing type, using sixty-six lines of forty letters in each column.
The Catholicon was printed in three editions, which, on the basis of the types of paper, in each case can be assigned to the years 1460, 1469 and 1472. The typesetting of these three editions is similar. For the explanation of this phenomenon the historian of printing Lotte Hellinga puts forward the thesis that the Catholicon was printed in the same year, but on three different presses by three different printers, who cooperated in a joint venture. Paul Needham does not accept this and he presents the revolutionary opinion, that the Catholicon was printed by means of plates or stereotypes, thus by firm printing forms created from the original typesetting. Thus this form of printing would be three centuries before its "official" invention. The correct attribution of the Catholicon to its printers is one of the knotty problems of incunabula research.
The colophon of the book (in Latin) refers to the technology used: "With the help of the Most High ... this noble book Catholicon has been printed and accomplished without the help of reed, stylus or pen but by the wondrous agreement, proportion and harmony of punches and types, in the year of our Lord's incarnation 1460 in the noble city of Mainz of the renowned German nation ...". S. H. Steinberg in his book Five Hundred Years of Printing (1955) makes these observations "the type is about a third smaller than that of the 42-line Bible; it is considerably more economical and thus marks an important step towards varying as well as cheapening book-production by the careful choice of type"; "the book contains a colophon which it is difficult to believe to have been written by anybody but the inventor of printing himself".[2]
A summary of the problem is to be found in (only in German): Andreas Venzke: Johannes Gutenberg – Der Erfinder des Buchdrucks und seine Zeit. Piper-Verlag, Munich, 2000