Читать книгу Early Printed Books онлайн

18 страница из 42

ssss1Conway’s Woodcutters, p. 13.

The only place, then, with which the Speculum blocks are definitely connected is Utrecht, and there they must be left until some further evidence is forthcoming respecting their origin; nor have we any substantial reason for believing that when they passed into the possession of Veldener they had been in existence for more than ten or twelve years.

Some among the late block-books are of interest as having been produced by men who were at the same time printers in the ordinary sense of the word. There is part of a Donatus in the Bodleian, with a colophon stating it to be the work of Conrad Dinckmut, a printer at Ulm from 1482 to 1496. In the British Museum is a German almanac of about 1490 produced by Conrad Kacheloffen, who printed a number of books, many with illustrations, at Leipzig. For a book so small as the Donatus, a book which was always in demand, it would be almost as economical to cut blocks as to keep type standing, and we consequently find a number of such xylographic editions produced at the very end of the fifteenth century. In the Bibliothèque Nationale are two original blocks, bought by Foucault, the minister of Louis XIV., in Germany, and probably cut about 1500 or shortly before. The letters are cut in exact imitation of type, and with such regularity that a print from the block might almost pass for a print from ordinary type, did not the bases and tops of a few letters overlap.