Incunable, or sometimes incunabulum (plural incunables or incunabula, respectively) is a book, pamphlet, or broadside,[1] that was printed — not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe. "Incunable" is the anglicised singular form of "incunabula", Latin for "swaddling clothes" or "cradle"[2] which can refer to "the earliest stages or first traces in the development of anything."[3] A former term for "incunable" is "fifteener," referring to the fifteenth century.
The first recorded use of incunabula as a printing term is in a Latin 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.[4] The term came to denote the printed books themselves in the late seventeenth century.
The end date for identifying a printed book as an incunable is convenient but was chosen arbitrarily. It does not reflect any notable developments in the printing process around the year 1500, and many books printed for a number of years after 1500 continued to be visually indistinguishable from incunables. The term "post-incunable" is sometimes used to refer to books printed after 1500 up to another arbitrary end date such as 1520 or 1540.
As of 2008, there are between 28,000 and 30,000 distinct incunable editions known to be extant, while the number of surviving copies in Germany alone is estimated at around 125,000.[5][6]
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There are two types of incunabula in printing: the Block book printed from a single carved or sculpted wooden block for each page, by the same process as the woodcut in art (these may be called xylographic), and the typographic book, 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.[7]
The spread of printing to cities both in the north and in Italy 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 handwritten scripts and calligraphy employed by humanists.
Printers congregated 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 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 written by Hartmann Schedel and printed by Anton Koberger in 1493, and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili printed by Aldus Manutius with important illustrations by an unknown artist. Other well-known printers of incunabula were Albrecht Pfister of Bamberg, Günther Zainer of Augsburg, Johannes Mentelin and Heinrich Eggestein of Strasbourg, Heinrich Gran of Haguenau and William Caxton of Bruges and London.
The first incunable to have woodcut illustrations was Ulrich Boner's Der Edelstein, printed by Albrecht Pfister in Bamberg in 1461.[8]
The British Library's Incunabula Short Title Catalogue now records over 29,000 titles, of which around 27,400 are incunabula editions (not all unique 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 Walter A. Copinger and Dietrich 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. North American holdings were listed by Frederick R. Goff and a worldwide union catalogue is provided by the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue.[9]
The largest collections, with the approximate numbers of incunabula held, include:
Library | Location | Number of copies | Number of editions | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
Bavarian State Library | Munich | 20,000 | [10] | |
British Library | London | 12,500 | ||
Bibliothèque nationale de France | Paris | 12,000 | ||
Vatican Library | Vatican City | 8,000 | ||
Austrian National Library | Vienna | 8,000 | ||
Württembergische Landesbibliothek | Stuttgart | 7,076 | ||
National Library of Russia | Saint Petersburg | 7,000 | ||
Huntington Library | Pasadena, California | 5,600 | ||
Library of Congress | Washington, D.C. | 5,600 | ||
Bodleian Library | Oxford | 7,000 | 5,500 | [11] |
Russian State Library | Moscow | 5,300 | ||
Cambridge University Library | Cambridge | 4,600 | ||
Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III | Naples | 4563 | [12] | |
John Rylands Library | Manchester | 4,500 | ||
Danish Royal Library | Copenhagen | 4,500 | ||
Berlin State Library | Berlin | 4,431 | [13] | |
National Central Library (Florence) | Florence | 4,000 | [14] | |
Jagiellonian Library | Cracow | 3,671 | [15] | |
Harvard University | Cambridge, Massachusetts | 4,389 | 3,627 | [16] |
Yale University (Beinecke) | New Haven, Connecticut | 3,100, others 425 | ||
Biblioteca Nacional de España | Madrid | 3,300 | ||
Herzog August Library | Wolfenbüttel | 3,000 | ||
Biblioteca Marciana | Venice | 2,883 | ||
Uppsala University | Uppsala | 2,500 | [17] | |
Biblioteca comunale dell'Archiginnasio | Bologna | 2,500 | [18] | |
Bibliothèque municipale | Colmar | 2,500 | [19] | |
Bibliothèque Mazarine | Paris | 2,370 | [20] | |
Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire | Strasbourg | circa 2,300 | [21] | |
Morgan Library | New York | 2,000 (more than) | ||
National Central Library (Rome) | Rome | 2,000 | [22] | |
National Library of the Netherlands | The Hague | 2,000 | ||
National Széchényi Library | Budapest | 1,814 | ||
University Library Heidelberg | Heidelberg | 1,800 | ||
Abbey library of Saint Gall | St. Gallen | 1,650 | ||
Turin National University Library | Turin | 1,600 | [23] | |
Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal | Lisbon | 1,597 | [24] | |
Biblioteca Universitaria di Padova | Padua | 1,583 | [25] | |
Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève | Paris | 1,450 | [26] | |
Walters Art Gallery | Baltimore | 1,250 | [27] | |
Bryn Mawr College | Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania | 1,214 | ||
Bibliothèque municipale | Lyon | 1,200 | [28] | |
Biblioteca Colombina | Seville | 1,194 | ||
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign | Urbana, Illinois, USA | 1,100 (more than) | [29] | |
Bridwell Library | Dallas | 1,000 (more than) | [30] | |
Newberry Library | Chicago | 1,000 (more than) | ||
Bibliothèque municipale de Besançon | Besançon | about 1,000 | ||
Free Library of Philadelphia | Philadelphia | 800 (more than) | ||
Princeton University Library | Princeton, New Jersey | 750 including the Scheide Library | ||
Leiden University Library | Leiden | 700 | ||
Bibliothèque municipale | Grenoble | 654 | ||
Bibliothèque municipale | Avignon | 624 | [31] | |
Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne | Paris | 614 including the Victor Cousin collection | [32] | |
Bibliothèque municipale | Cambrai | 600 | ||
Humanist Library of Sélestat | Sélestat | 550 | [33] | |
Médiathèque de la Vieille Ile | Haguenau | 541 | ||
Bibliothèque municipale | Rouen | 535 | ||
Boston Public Library | Boston | 525 | ||
Biblioteca del Seminario Vescovile | Padua | 483 | [34] | |
Univerzitná knižnica v Bratislave | Bratislava | 465 | ||
Bibliothèque de Genève | Geneva | 464 | ||
Bibliothèque municipale | Metz | 463 | ||
Fondazione Ugo Da Como | Lonato del Garda, Italy | 450 | ||
Bancroft Library | Berkeley, California | 430 | ||
University of Zaragoza | Zaragoza | 406 | ||
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia | Philadelphia | 400 (more than) | ||
Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin | Austin, Texas | 380 | [35] | |
University of Chicago Library | Chicago | 350 (more than) | [36] | |
Médiathèque de la ville et de la communauté urbaine | Strasbourg | 349; 5,000 destroyed in the fire of 1870 | [37][38] | |
Bibliothèque municipale | Bordeaux | 333 | [39] | |
Smithsonian Institution Libraries | USA | 320 | ||
Bibliothèque universitaire de Médecine | Montpellier | 300 | [40] | |
Bibliothèque municipale | Douai | 300 | ||
Bibliothèque municipale | Amiens | 300 | ||
University of Seville | Seville | 298 | [41] | |
Bibliothèque municipale | Poitiers | 289 | ||
Bibliothèque du Grand Séminaire | Strasbourg | 237 | [42] | |
Library of the Castle Kynžvart | Bohemia | 230 | ||
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America | USA | 216 | [43] |
The data in this section were derived from the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue.[44]
The end date for identifying a printed book as an incunable is convenient but was chosen arbitrarily. It does not reflect any notable developments in the printing process around the year 1500. Books printed for a number of years after 1500 continued to look much like incunables, with the notable exception of the small format books printed in italic type introduced by Aldus Manutius in 1501. The term post-incunable is sometimes used to refer to books printed "after 1500 — how long after, the experts have not yet agreed."[45] For books printed on the Continent, the term generally covers 1501–1540, and for books printed in England, 1501–1520.[45]