Episode 51: The Lion and the Letter-Cutter
In the 1440s a goldsmith from Mainz called Johannes Gutenberg developed a movable type printing press which catalysed the European printing revolution. It heralded a technological leap in communication tools which had far reaching consequences for the societies of the Low Countries, particularly in urban centres where print shops were established. A large market for books already existed in the Low Countries, in no small part because of the existence of Common Life schools and subsequent high rates of general literacy. With the copying and widespread distribution of texts becoming so much quicker and easier, other fields of work began to shift and develop, as different skills and networks were needed to smoothly bring content to the public. In this episode we are going to first take a look at what a 15th century printing workshop might have been like, before meeting some of the pioneers who would pull the printing presses and perfect the processes pertaining to the profitable publication of pamphlets, prayer books and other pre-16th century paper imprinted particularities.
“The Lion and the Letter-Cutter” episode artwork by Steven Straatemans
What exactly did Gutenberg create?
If we are going to talk about the earliest decades of book printing in the Low Countries then we need to have a good idea of what exactly made Gutenberg’s press so innovative and revolutionary. Prior to Gutenberg’s invention, books in Europe were of the manuscript form meaning they had been painstakingly created by people, likely being monks or nuns, working in a scriptorium. Some would be copying texts by hand, others would be decorating them lavishly with illuminations. It was a laborious and time consuming process, which meant that manuscripts were unique, valuable and precious objects. It is important to state at the outset that although Gutenberg is often heralded as being the inventor of printing, he was not. He didn’t invent moveable type (it had definitely been used in China and Korea for hundreds of years before he was born), he didn’t invent the press (he probably borrowed from similar screw presses which had been used in the creation of wine and olive oil), he didn’t invent printing (which had been done in Asia centuries earlier and had already made its way to Europe via the textile industry in the medium of woodblock printing), he didn’t invent the idea of using printing to make books (books made from painstakingly carved blocks of wood, known as xylographica, were contemporaneously created in Western Europe around the same time as he was coming up with his invention), and he didn’t invent ink. Cephalopods did that. What Gutenberg achieved, however, was combining versions of all these things in a manner, and at a time and a place, that was primed to allow for the technology to rapidly spread across the European continent. I guess also his maleness, his European-ness and his whiteness probably contributed a little bit to his becoming the perceived “great man” of print history.
With that little set of caveats out of the way: the details of Gutenberg’s creation process are hazy, as he developed the technology over the span of years, mostly in secret and in opaque business cooperation with different people with whom he later become nastily embroiled in legal battles. His life is fascinating and if he was called Goedenberg there’s a chance we’d explore it more deeply, but being the upriver man that he is, what today you might call ‘German’, we will concern ourselves only with what became known as the Gutenberg press and its profound impact on the Low Countries. The press technology is composed of several elements. The first are the “types” or “sorts”, which are basically little metal blocks with raised, backwards letters or symbols sticking out the top of them. To make them, the character would first be engraved into the end of a hard metal punch. This would then, as the name suggests, be punched into a thin plate of a softer metal called a matrix, creating an impression of the character. The matrix would be loaded into the bottom of a handheld casting device and liquid metal would be poured into it. Gutenberg’s experience in smithing lead him to developing a tin-lead alloy that expanded slightly upon setting and did not degrade easily, giving great definition to the end product. Importantly, this alloy cooled rapidly, meaning the matrix could quickly be used again to create another sort. The whole process is rapidly replicable, giving the whole operation a proto-industrial feel in its scope for production.
To create a text, you need a lot of different sorts, because you need multiple amounts of all the individual letters of the alphabet available to you, plus numbers, spaces, punctuation marks, basically all the traditional little symbols you see on your computer keyboard today. In addition, Gutenberg also created a bunch of ligatures, which are combinations of two letters that are joined together to make one individual symbol, such as a double FF, or an F and an I, or an F and an L. If these combinations of letters were done individually, there would be weird and ugly spacing issues. Ligatures make it easier to layout texts neatly, and also reduce the quantities of sorts you need to make to print out an individual page. They also make the printed text look somewhat more like handwriting. It is estimated that around 270 different sorts were used in the creation of Gutenburg’s famous 42-line bibles. The sorts would be arranged in a frame in rows and lines to correspond to whatever text the printer desired to make. The use of these sorts is where the term “moveable type” comes from, since the individual type-bearing blocks could be moved around and re-used after printing to form a new arrangement of text.
The next part of the process which Gutenberg needed to get right was the ink. Ink has to be adhesive enough with the metal type to stick to it and to remain at a consistent level, so the print will be even and also dry quickly. Gutenberg used an oil-based ink, which differed from the commonly used water-based inks that manuscripts and block prints were often made with. It is believed his compound included lamp-black, which is essentially soot, which was mixed it into gum-arabic and an oil-based concoction of turpentine oil, walnut oil, linseed oil and crushed cinnabar, which is hardened mercury sulphide, predominantly red and quartz-like. The frame with the text would go onto the press machine, face up, in a framed board called the lower platen and the letters would be covered with ink.
A sheet of paper or vellum (vellum traditionally being calf-skin parchment often used for expensive, luxury reading material) was placed over the typeface and the whole arrangement was slid on a carriageway under a much larger, heavier plate which was lowered onto it by a screw-press, squashing the ink onto the paper. Once lifted, the lower platen can be slid back out, swung open and the freshly printed sheet revealed. Gutenberg did this a few thousands times over a couple of years and - hey presto - he had 180 copies of a bible, which were completed sometime around 1455 in Mainz, Germany.
The smells and sounds of a 15th century print shop
So having taken a look at the basic mechanics of what Gutenberg’s press did, let’s dive a bit more into the details of how an early printer’s workshop might have operated. To do that, we are going to enter the “fiction” section of this bookshop and try to get a feeling of what one of these operations might have been like during this early period, by which we mean before 1501, since that’s the arbitrary date by which book historians have chosen to divide book history into different chapters. There are so many components in this procedure that the production of a book requires strict organisation, assembling enough skilled workers, each able to adequately perform a specific role and so cooperate in broad, collaborative operations.
Before we walk through the door, it is worth remembering two things: Firstly, later printing operations would occupy large, well lit workshops, for which there would need to be big and many windows. There would be more generally standardised layouts and methods. In these early days, however, printers would have set up where they could and they also varied in how much of the entire process they did themselves on-site, so workshops would have looked different. There were still many mistakes to be made and lessons to be learned in this industry; experience to be gained which would refine the processes. The early printers were pioneers in their field, (we will look more closely at some of the “non-fiction” people involved in the second half of this episode) and they were learning on the go while also teaching apprentices who would, themselves, go on to expand the industry.
Secondly, the entire process of publishing a printed book even at this time required a lot of foresight and organisation, before any forge, ink or paper became involved. The early print shops required investment as, for all the composite parts and elements of a Gutenberg press to come together, expensive material and technology was required. We are going to stay away from that logistical side of the operation for now and just look at the practical steps within the print shop. In those early stages of printing, these operations were under the purview of a master printer who had different assistants completing different tasks, all of which had a lot of potential to go wrong or draw mistakes.
We are an inexperienced farm boy in the market for a job. We hear that a German guy has recently come downriver and set up a printing press in the town close to where we grew up. The workshop that we walk into is a professional one, wherein every step of the process is conducted on site. Let’s consider the smells and sounds. Historian of communication Professor Bill Kovarik says that the predominant smells of a fully functioning print shop would have been grease and urine. The grease would be lathered on moving parts of the press, the carriageway, the screw and the handle, while the urine would have been for tanning the leather to be used on the inking daubers, which are specialised tools for applying ink to the typeface. For your imagination’s sake, daubers look like oversized leather lollipops, or balloons on sticks. Whether very early printers were so sophisticated as to have their own tanning operation going on is hard to say, but this is our imaginarium so we’ll make it smell like piss if we want to. The smells of paper and vellum would have been noticeable. These are both natural products that degrade while being highly affected by environmental conditions like moisture, letting off a variety of volatile compounds that cause odours. That is why books smell differently depending on their age. The smell of vellum, which are two very satisfying words to put together, varies depending on its environment,. Associate Professor of English Holly Dugan, whose scholarship concentrates heavily on sensory history in renaissance era literature, says of the smell of vellum that it is “distinctive, hard to describe, clinging to my hands after I leave the archive. Animalic, not unpleasant, faint, and unsettlingly familiar. It is skin… It’s also hard to generalise about the smell of vellum: each piece has its own unique aroma that denotes both its origins and its history. Its slightly spongy surface, especially on its flesh side, tended to absorb grease from handling it, so it was often dusted with pounce, chalk, ash, even powdered glass mixed with bread. But we smell it now as an amalgam of provenance, use, and preservation. Its perfume is both animalic and bibliophilic.”
So the varying, organic smells of paper and vellum have hit us, and let’s not forget the general odour of working humans. Then there is the ink which, you might remember, contains a bunch of different oils, including walnut, as well as turpentine, which is made from odorous pine sap.
Then there are the sounds. Printshops would not have been super loud, but certainly bustling. The workers on each team depended on each other’s efficiency and work rate for a smooth running operation, since each step in the process depended on the person before you having done their work properly. Amidst the sound of workers chatting, instructions being delivered or analyses confirmed, you might hear the sound of a punch cutter chiselling or filing a new punch, punctuated by an occasional dull thud of a mallet. The clinking sound of metal hitting metal as type sorts are moved around the place. This workshop has a forge and is casting its own type, so there is the occasional sound of an oven being stoked and bubbling liquid metal. There would also have been the swishing sound of the ink daubers being rubbed together which would have sounded something like this swishswish which would be followed by an even duller and, dare I say it, wetter rhythmic thud than the punchcutter’s mallet, as the daubers repetitively and evenly brought ink down upon the type. There would also be the swishing sound of sheets of paper being lifted up and pressed into the pins which held them in place on the press. The press itself was hand-made from wood, which changes shape with the temperature and almost certainly would have creaked and groaned with repetitive use and time. Then let’s not discount that we would probably hear the odd expletive or, at the very least, an exasperated groan from a worker or the print master as mistakes are identified, making previous work obsolete.
The various jobs within the print shop
So we walk in, take all this in and scan the scene in front of us - a bright room, in which sunlit dust motes float through the air and busy workers tend to their tasks. The high likelihood is that they are all men, but it is not at all beyond the realms of possibility that women are also involved. There is evidence of women working in printing around Europe during this period and, by the mid-16th century, this was certainly the case in the Low Countries. The foreman, who commands the workers on behalf of the printer, greets us and begins explaining everything happening in the workshop.
Among the high rafters and tall windows the large, wooden printing press stands dominant, with two workers next to it. One is the puller, who pulls the handle to make the press screw down, and the second is the master printer, examining the finished product. He is most likely to have been the person who has done a mountain of prep work up until this point to do with design and layout of the intended book. The original work which is to be copied and printed is called, creatively, the copy. This could be a manuscript, or even a previously printed book which is being reprinted. The length of the text, the amount and size of the paper you have available, how many copies you want to make, the size and quantity of your fount (which is a complete set of types), among a bunch of other factors, are all variables which interweave with each other to determine how the words have to be laid out on each page. If you don’t figure it all out beforehand, you run the risk of wasting a bunch of expensive paper and ink and ending up with an incomplete book. A nice example of this can be found in the original Gutenberg bible. It’s known as the 42 line bible, because each page featured 42 lines of text. When he first started making it, however, each page had 40 lines, but presumably he realised that he was going to run out of paper if he kept to that structure, so by adjusting the line spacing he was able to fit 42 lines per page. As such, on some of Gutenberg’s bibles, pages 1-9 and pages 256-265 have 40 lines each, page 10 has 41 and the rest have 42. Like we said earlier, these early printer’s were pioneers and were learning from their mistakes as they went along. So the printer would have counted out lines on the copy and made marks to let the compositor know where one page would have to end and the next would begin.
The copy is attached onto a visorium, which is just a fancy name for a clip, that hangs in front of the compositor, who sits at a desk with large, wooden, compartmentalised boxes in front of him called ‘typecases’. Each compartment in the typecases holds all the sorts of one character. The compartments are of varying sizes, since some letters and characters are needed more than others. For example, in the Dutch language, the letter E is used much more regularly than, for example, the Z; so you’d need a lot of E’s and a subsequently larger compartment in which to hold them. Of course this differs from language to language. Like, in Polish would there be any compartments with vowels? You wanted to have enough sorts to complete the text because, well, if you ran out then… you would be out of sorts. The compositor is holding a composing stick, into which the individual type sorts will be loaded. The compositor knows that he can also get the capital letters from the ‘upper case’, and the smaller ones from the ‘lower case’. Just gonna let that sit for a moment. The compositors at this stage had to be literate and could freely apply their own preferences and understandings of words (i.e how they were actually spelled) to their work. Languages were not by any means standardised in the late 15th century and were regionally variant, so how words appeared on print was very much at the compositor’s whim. Also, if there were too many words to fit exactly on a page, they might just chuck a few abbreviations in to make it fit.
We watch the compositor fill his composing stick with a few lines of text before transferring it into a kind of tray called a galley. We’ve been taught how to read at a Brethren of the Common Life School, but even so we don’t immediately recognise the text in the galley. Suddenly we realise that that’s because it’s upside down… and backwards. We decide to be helpful and point out to the compositor his mistake. He barely pays attention to us as he reaches into the typecase to begin filling his composing stick again, “yes yes, of course it’s backwards child, that way the print will come out the correct way”. We blush at our ignorance when a test print, or proof, is made from the text he had just laid out and we see that it is, indeed, the right way around. The master printer takes the proof and scans it quickly, looking for any errors in the composition. Once he and everyone is content, the text in the galley is locked into a frame called a forme, which holds the type tightly together.
The complete forme is placed into the lower platen of the press and the next person in the workshop takes over. He’s holding big leather balls on sticks, one in each hand. We are told these are called ‘inktballen’, inking balls. He dabs them onto a puddle of ink on the table, then rolls them together until the ink is spread evenly across the top of them. It all looks rather gentle. But then comes the fun part, the beating. He firmly stamps the daubers down across the typeface until the characters are completely covered in ink. This process demands skill and experience to do correctly. If he hits too hard, it might shift the neatly composed types out of place and make it look bad. If he hits too lightly, the typeface might not get covered sufficiently, meaning the print won’t transfer properly. On the other hand, if too much ink is used, it might fill the gaps in the letters, resulting in ugly, smudged prints which make the text illegible.
Once the type has been inked, the paper, which has been slightly and uniformly moistened to help it absorb all the ink off the typeface - itself a delicate job - is brought up to the press. We watch as another man, the puller, carefully positions the paper onto a hinged board on the lower platen by way of frames and pins which hold it in place. If the paper is misaligned, the print will end up skewed to one side. Once it is perfectly in place, the ink-beater swings the frame which holds the paper on its hinges into position to sit above the typeface and the entire lower platen is slid under the press. As soon as it’s in position, the puller pulls on the handle of the press, causing the upper platen to squish the paper firmly against the ink covered typeface. After this, the lower platen is slid out from the press, the frame is swung open again, the newly printed paper is removed and hung up to dry, the type is reinked and a new piece of paper is put into position. After repeating this process a few times, they’re finished with that particular forme and are ready to go onto the next one. Ink residue is cleaned off the type with a chemical called lye and the individual sorts are disassembled from the forme. We watch as an apprentice carefully places the sorts back into the correct compartments of a typecase. If they put them in the wrong place, they will slow down the compositor, wasting his and everybody else’s time. We notice the apprentice place a piece of type into a compartment, then quickly grab it and place it elsewhere. We hear him muttering to himself “I have to mind my p’s and q’s!”
Now, after all that collaborative work, it’s not like everybody gets to go stand around, hold the freshly printed sheet up and admire the achievement. A book is more than just one sheet. Pages are printed in an order that depends on how the sheets of paper will eventually be folded into the final product. If you look closely at the spine of a book, you will see that its pages are composed by sections of many sheets, folded and put next to each other. So the pages were not being printed in the correct reading order, but rather so they could be folded and arranged in order. Someone would have to think about and coordinate all that and, in a big operation in which hundreds of copies of a book are being made, it is easy to imagine how many stacks of papers there must have been to arrange. In this printshop of our minds, this is happening on big tables, by teams of attentive workers closely communicating with each other and operating by ever more established methods as they gain more and more experience. Having witnessed this busy and confusing work environment, staring at the seemingly endless stacks of paper being fussed over by people who really look like they know what they’re doing, we’ve decided to go find easier work elsewhere. So we turn our backs on all this parchment and machinery and head off to meet our non-printing destiny doing far simpler work, like looking after cows, gutting herring or searching for sphagnum as a peat-farmer.
The printing press floats down river into the Low Countries
So having explored in the first part of this episode how it might have been in one of these early printing operations, we’re going to spend the second part of today’s episode looking at who some of the earliest printers were in the Low Countries. After Gutenberg commercialised his technology it rapidly spread out from Mainz, as people who had worked with him took the concept and brought it with them elsewhere. As an example and without going into it too deeply: no man is an island, and Gutenberg worked closely with and had financial support from two guys called Johannes Fust and Peter Schoeffer (remember earlier we said Gutenberg became embroiled in legal disputes? It was with these two.) One of their workers was a young man named Ulrich Zell, who at one point left Mainz and went to Cologne to start that city’s first ever print shop. Over the next decades he printed over 200 titles. This seems to have been much the pattern of the time: German speaking print workers saw how successful their masters had been and so set off to replicate them, migrating along already established trade routes to set up shops in new places. In his book chapter titled The Beginning of Printing, historian David McKitterick wrote: “Printing and publishing, dependent on capital and on communications, thrived and became established only in towns with good trade connections”. Mainz is built at the confluence of the river Main and the river Rhine. If you set off on a boat in any direction from Mainz, you’ll come to cities where the first presses were set up: Strasbourg, Cologne and Basel, as well as Bamberg, Nuremberg and, further south in Bavaria, Augsburg. Two German men by the name of Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz set up the first printing press in Italy in at the foundational Benedictine monastery at Subiaco in 1464 and another German named Johannes de Spira set up the first press in Venice in 1469, and that town would become the focal point for Latin-language printing throughout the 15th century. And do you know what happens if you keep sailing down the Rhine river a little further from Cologne? You’ll come to another place filled with people who enjoy dabbling a bit in commerce and trade.
There is much discussion about when and where printing presses were first set up in the Low Countries, since a lot of the early material doesn’t have dates printed on them, or if it does, there’s sometimes speculation about how accurate those dates actually are. In the 1560s, so just over a hundred years after the advent of the press, a West-Frisian humanist called Adriaan de Jonghe who wrote under his fancy Latinised name Hadrianus Junius, coined a term to describe books which were printed before the year 1501. He named them incunabula, which means “cradle” or “swaddling clothes” in Latin, the implication being that these books were created during the infancy of the publishing industry. In Dutch they are called wiegdrukken, meaning the same. Although there are some undated incunabula which some people speculate may have been created in the Netherlands in the 1460s, the oldest known dated incunabulum is a book called Historia Scholastica by Petrus Comestor. In this book’s colophon, which is an emblem that included the printing and publishing details which was sometimes added onto the back of a book (and I say sometimes because remember, like we suggested at the beginning, nobody really knew what they were doing in this infancy stage of printing so there were no real standard procedures and even things like title pages hadn’t been invented yet) it says that it was printed by Nicolaus Ketelaer and Gerardus de Leempt., in Utrecht (which also happens to be a town on a branch of the Rhine river) in 1473.
In the same year, in Aalst - which is halfway between Brussels and Ghent - a workshop operated by Johannes de Westfalia and Dirk Martens printed Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans), an extremely popular collection of stories compiled probably in the 13th century and meant as a guide for church pastors, a genre known as pastoralia. Martens had visited Venice in 1470 where he met Westfalia and was introduce to the world of printing. He would go on to have a long and successful printing career which spanned 56 years. He became most associated with humanist literature and in his lifetime he would print more than 50 books by Erasmus, be the first person to publish Utopia by Thomas More, one of the first to publish Christopher Columbus’ letters upon his return from his voyage and was also the first person to print in Greek and Hebrew in the Low Countries. His grave in the Sint Martinuskerk in Aalst is proudly inscribed with the text, “here lies Dirk Martens, the first letter printer in Germany, France and these Low Countries”. Like Martens, a bunch of people either laid claim to being the inventor of the printing press or had this claim attributed to them by others who had suddenly seen printed works emerging from a cutting-edge workshop for the first time. Some examples of people who have at various points been labelled the inventor printing include the two guys who were working with Gutenburg, Fust and Schoeffer, as well as the first printer in Strasbourg, Johann Mentelin, one of the earliest printers in Venice, Nicolas Jenson, and a printer from Bruges Johannes Brito, who in 1476 finished a book with the words “Printed by Johannes Brito, citizen of Bruges, who invented this wonderful art himself…without anyone showing it to him”. If I was gong to make up a lie, that’s almost verbatim how I would do it. There’s another very famous example of a person being attributed as the inventor of the printing press which we will come back to at the end of the episode. After Utrecht and Aalst, it was not long before there were printing operations in Bruges and Leuven as well. The first (or oldest dated) printed sheets came out of Brussels in 1475, Delft, Deventer and Gouda in 1477, Zwolle in 1478, Nijmegen in 1479, Oudenaarde in 1480, Antwerp in 1481, Ghent in 1483 and ‘s-Hertogenbosch in 1484.
Richard Pafraet
In Deventer, it was Richard Pafraet who first set up shop. He had come from Cologne and was probably taught by Ulrich Zell there. Deventer was already renowned for its book and manuscript production, in a region culturally influenced by Modern Devotion, the lay devotional creed begun around a century before in this same city by Geert Grote. Adherents, the so called brethren and sisters of the Common Life, set up schools which enabled and encouraged literacy rates to soar. Furthermore, Deventer, along with the nearby cities of the Ijssel river, Zutphen, Zwolle and Kampen, had long been linked into the vast continental trade networks established via the Hanseatic League. There were five continental fares held there annually. All in all, the towns in this region were richly populated by educated, religiously dedicated commoners who could read. They enjoyed a local culture of learning and book collection and were tapped into nearby social networks and more distant trade networks that went beyond borders. In Deventer, Pafraet printing potential was supported from the beginning, as he entered a milieu favourable to learning and communication. He was able to buy the house he lived in in 1480 and got a housemate called Alexander Hegius, who would soon be the principal of Deventer’s Latin school and who we actually met already in the previous episode. If you recall, it was Hegius who learned Greek and Latin from Rudolph Agricola, leading Humanist in the Low Countries. Hegius would go on to be a teacher of Erasmus. Not long after, Pafraet married a local woman of means, Stijne Becker, with whom he had (at least) 9 children, one of whom, Albert, would carry on the business.
The legendary late book historian Hendrick D.L Vervliet relates the occasion of the 7th of April, 1484, when Pafraet, Stijne and their housemate, Alexander Hegius, hosted Rudolph Agricola at their house for supper. Apparently the great and famous humanist brought with him a text known as a panegyric, which heaps praise on someone or something, that was dedicated to the Virgin Mary’s mother, St. Anne. Pafraet rushed off to his printer to knock up ten copies and, upon returning, excitedly handed them back to Agricola. According to Vervliet there were several errors, which the Granddaddy of humanism in the Low Countries just had to live with.
Gheraet Leeu
One of the most prolific and influential of the early printers in the Low Countries was a man named Gheraert Leeu, whose career spanned from 1477 until 1492. Not much is known about Leeu’s early life, but it is believed that he was the son of a miller from Gouda. The first book to be printed by Leeu was titled Alle die epistelen ende ewangelien van den gheheelen iaere, a religious text translated into Dutch which was first published on Pentecost eve in 1477. Leeu remained in Gouda for 7 years, where he is believed to have printed around 69 different books, over half of which were printed in the Dutch language. If you compare that to Pafraet, who was printing almost exclusively in Latin, you get an idea of how Leeu worked. He was a canny business operator who was able to see where there were gaps in the market and figure out how to use them to improve and innovate his own products and therefore make a nice profit for himself. An example of this was having the groundbreaking idea of printing books which weren’t about Jesus. Shocking! The first non-religious book to be printed in the Netherlands was Die hystorie vanden grooten Coninck Alexander, a history of Alexander the Great, in the Dutch language. He also printed other books which we have definitely talked about in previous episodes such as History of Reynaert the Fox and the so-called Gouda Chronicle, which is a history of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht. One of his most famous books was the Dialogus creaturarum moralisatus, a collection of 122-Latin language fables of about anthropomorphised animals. Each chapter in the book is illustrated with a woodcut print and ends by imparting a moral lesson. Some of these fables come from Aesop. Leeu printed three editions of this book in Latin, as well as 2 in Dutch and 1 in French. The use of woodcut illustrations helped make the Dialogue of Creatures Moralysed a bestseller and they would later be copied by other printers.
Leeu was a real trailblazer in the art of printing, not only in what he put onto his presses but importantly in the way that he made them look. In their essay “Towards a Uniform Written Dutch”, historians Ann Marynissen, Daniela Bock and Amelie Terhalle write “Leeu attached great importance to innovation. He worked tirelessly to improving the design of his books. He introduced new typefaces and experimented with new book formats. He added a real title page and alphabet tables to his prints and invested in attractive woodcuts.” Perhaps realising that Gouda was a bit too far on the periphery compared to the real urban hotspots in the region, in 1484 Leeu packed up and moved south. He registered with the St Johns Guild of printers and booksellers at Bruges in 1484 but in September of that year produced his first print from…Antwerp. 1484, you’ll recall, was right in the midst of the first Flemish revolt against Maximilian, for which the famous old city would be punished heavily. Bruges was on the decline, Antwerp was on the rise and Leeu clearly saw which way the wind was blowing. In the words of historian Koen Goudriaan “...the fact that Leeu correctly assessed this development as early as 1484 speaks to his business acumen.” His time in Antwerp was again prolific, printing over 160 different books, but now he had the benefit of operating in the the town which was becoming the biggest international marketplace on the planet. His chosen content focused more on Latin language works, although still around ⅓ of the works he printed were in Dutch, whilst he would also print other books in French and in English.
Probably the biggest influence which can be attribute to Leeu is in how his work contributed to the dedialectisation of the Dutch language in favour of a variant of Dutch which could be understood more broadly. Remember that this was at a time of localised languages across the regions of the Low Countries, where things like rivers, islands, city walls and political boundaries played a huge role in splintering the way that people spoke. If you were trying to sell books in Dutch to as many people as possible, you would want them to be able to understand what you’re putting on the page. Using a localised dialect like Hollandic or Brabantic would prevent you from doing that. Marynissen, Bock and Terhalle write that when in Antwerp, “If Leeu worked with a Hollandic typesetter… the Hollandic features were probably consciously removed by Leeu’s employees in Antwerp during the typesetting process and not or hardly replaced by Brabant dialect forms, but by their supra-regional variants. With the dedialectization of his language, Gheraert Leeu was one of the pioneers of the transition from dialectal Late Middle Dutch to less regional Early New Dutch, which manifested itself in Holland and Brabant prints around 1500”. The consequences of this are huge, as the language we use plays a key role in our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. We unite behind how we sound and, with this changing process happening under the advent of printing, more people over a broader scope of land would be able to identify as speaking a uniform language, rather than the older, smaller and more diverse dialects.
The Lion and the Letter-Cutter
As mentioned earlier, another of the ways in which Leeu innovated was in his use of different typefaces. There were several different styles of type which were common in these early days such as “blackletter” which is that Gothic style, almost illegible script you probably associate with old German writing. Another common form was “Roman” which you are probably used to seeing all around you. Leeu realised that by using different fonts in the same book, you could make things look more attractive and he was not shy of experimenting with such. Leeu is thought to have used 12 different fonts throughout his career. Remember how we explained at the beginning that creating a fount of type was a lot of work and required specialised skills. As such, Leeu employed a letter-cutter by the name of Hendric van Symmen, who is most commonly referred to by the name Hendric de Lettersnijder, Hendric the Letter-Cutter.
Hendric de Lettersnijder was probably born in Rotterdam in 1470. By the time he was 19 years old, he had made his way to Antwerp and into the employ of Gheraert Leeu, where he got busy cutting letters. Throughout their time working with each other, Lettersnijder provided Leeu with 5 different fonts, all of extremely high quality. One evening, in December 1492, whilst Leeu was busy printing an English language book called The Chronicles of the Londe of England, Lettersnijder informed his boss of his intentions to leave the company and then set up his own workshop and go into business for himself, going on strike to get his way. This clearly upset Leeu, as an argument erupted. It is unknown what was said and done exactly, but it came to blows and was all punctuated when Hendrick de Lettersnijder picked up a piece of type and, in the words of a contemporary account, gave Leeu “a little stab in the head.” It can’t have been such a little stab, though, since two or three days later Leeu succumbed to his injury and died. I guess that put a full stop to the end of that argument. Or was it an exclamation mark? Either way, Lettersnijder had to pay 40 guilders into the duke of Burgundy’s coffers as punishment for his crime, which honestly, seems like he got off pretty lightly. The rest of Leeu’s workers continued on with the job of printing The Chronicles of the Londe of England, with it being published in 1493 “a man of grete wysedom in all maner of kunnyng whych nowe is come from lyfe unto the deth, which is grete harme for many a poure man. On whos sowle god almyghty for hys hygh grace have mercy. Amen.”
So having got lucky with a very lenient punishment, Lettersnijder got busy doing what he had always intended to do and went into the printing business for himself. In 1496 he opened his own printing house in Antwerp. What makes it quite unique is that he seems to have been printing mostly as a means to advertise his letter cutting skills. A priest/book historian by the name of Bonaventura Kruitwagen wrote about him in 1923 saying “As a printing house, the establishment was indeed insignificant, but apparently Hendrik did not set it up to practice the book printing business ex professo… but rather to print advertising booklets for his typesetting business. What modern type foundries try to achieve by sending their type specimen to their customers, our type cutter tried to achieve the same by printing small booklets, which could also be marketed as independent trade items.” And this worked superbly well for him, since his letters ended up being used extensively across the Low Countries. Between 1493 and 1540, there were about 70 different printers across the Low Countries, of which 43 of them used a textura lettertype which was created by Hendric de Lettersnijder. His basic designs were altered over the years to look more German or French depending on the fashions of the time, but nonetheless were the standard letters that people all across the Low Countries became familiar with over hundreds of years. Kruitwagen went on to say that Lettersnijder was the man who “captured the shape and character of our gothic, Dutch book letters in certain fine drawings, which, without people being aware of it, has been enjoyed by thousands and thousands of readers for centuries and helped to confirm and strengthen the national consciousness”. I’m not sure if that quite stacks up a century after it was written, but it is interesting to think about as regards the influence that one man can have when he really dedicates himself to his work and manages to punch more letters than bosses.
Laurens Janszoon Coster
As we move towards the end of this episode, I want to go back to the foreshadowing I did earlier about one final and famous story of a person being attributed as the inventor of the moveable type printing press in the Low Countries. One of the downsides of podcasting is that although the audience can hear me speaking, we cannot see the audience staring back at us, nor see your reactions. If we could, I’m sure that when I said at the beginning that Gutenberg invented the art of printing, some listener in the town of Haarlem, North Holland, probably choked on their cheese sandwich enraged at this slight on their town’s history. If you ever find yourself in Haarlem, you can wander into the main square, the Groote Markt, and find a statue of a man standing next to the town’s main church, the Groote Kerk. He stands proudly, holding a book to his chest with his left hand, whilst in his right hand he holds a piece of type aloft with the letter A on it. Underneath the statue, in text written in both Latin and Dutch, are the words “Inventor of the art of book printing with movable metal cast letters, Laurens Janszoon Coster, Hero of the Dutch People” and the year that it was erected, 1856. That’s right, according to this legend, Laurens Janszoon Coster actually beat Gutenberg to the ‘punch’ - pardon the pun - and created a printing press first. This is not just a local folk story, however, but rather something that became swept up in the tides of history so as to be passed off as history itself.
How the town of Haarlem managed to end up with this claim to being the birthplace of the printing press is traced out neatly in a a book titled Laurens Janszoon Coster was zijn naam, (Laurens Janszoon Coster was his naam) by Lotte Hellinga-Querido and Clemens de Wolf, which we are going to heavily lean on for these last few minutes. In 1499, a book was printed in Cologne by Johann Koelhoff de Jonge titled Die Cronica vander hilliger Stat van Coellen, “The Chronicle over the holy city of Cologne”, written by an unknown author. In this chronicle, the author claims to have spoken to Ulrich Zell, the printer who had worked with Fust and Schoeffer in Mainz before setting up the first printing press in Cologne. In this chronicle, Zell confirms that the printing press was invented in Mainz by Johannes Gutenburg, BUT he prefaces this by saying “Although the art as it is now common was invented in Mainz, the first precursor was invented in Holland and used for printing Donatuses (a very basic Latin grammar book which was used in school), which were even printed there earlier. And this is how this art started; and this came to require much more skill and had a more refined result than the first method, and demanded more and more craftsmanship.” What exactly Zell was referring to here is unclear. Could he mean xylographica, those books printed from carvings on wooden blocks?
Regardless, the next time Holland is linked to the invention of printing was in the preface of a 1561 edition of Cicero’s De Officiis, or as it is sometimes called On Obligations, printed in Haarlem by Jan van Zuren and Dirck Volkertsz Coornhert. They first dedicate the book to the mayors, magistrates and council of Haarlem, before claiming that a primitive form of printing first began in Haarlem, but then a “faithless servant” took the technique to Mainz and improved it so much that now everybody believes that Mainz was where it all began. They go on to say “However, a truth is no less true when it is known only to a few, and for my part I certainly believe in the truth of what has been written above, because of the credible testimonies of very old, venerable and mature persons, who not only told me family of the inventor here locally, but also his first and last name, have often mentioned the primitive way in which printing was done and have pointed the finger at the printer's house.” So having made this claim that Haarlem inventing printing, it’s worth pointing out the irony that prior to setting up their print shop, van Zuren and Coornhert had had borrowed 1000 guilders from Haarlem’s government interest-free in order to set up the company. So in the preface of this book by Cicero, which is all about what to do when the honourable and the expedient conflict with each other, they decided to follow the expedient route and bestow a bunch of honour on the town which had bestowed a bunch of cash upon them. But, you know, “a truth is no less true when it is known only to a few”.
From this point on, the story gathered steam and more details got added to it in subsequent retellings. Perhaps the most famous version is by Hadrianus Junius, that West-Frisian humanist scholar we mentioned earlier who came up with the incunabula moniker for super early printed books. Junius was extremely well connected and with support from William the Silent (don’t worry we will eventually get to him), in 1566 he was able to get himself appointed as the official historiographer of the States of Holland. The States wanted him to get busy collecting evidence of their rights to convene without the approval of the central government in Brussels, whereas Junius himself wanted to write a sweeping history of Holland in three parts. When he approached the states 5 years later having finished the first part and asking to be paid for his work, they baulked. The political situation had drastically changed over the last 5 years (this being right at the beginning of the Dutch revolt), and they did not want to publish anything which might be misconstrued by the central authority. He was only given a small part of the fee they owed him, they told him not to bother finishing his work and Junius died in 1575, leaving behind an unprinted manuscript. This manuscript was not printed until 13 years after his death in 1588, under the title Batavia and in it he became the first person to mention the name Laurens Coster.
We’ll translate the relevant segment into English and quote from it now pretty extensively because, well, why not! You’ve waited a long time for a new episode, and we have already gone pretty long, so let’s just do it.
“There lived in Haarlem 128 years ago in a substantial house on the Market close to the castle Laurens Janszoon, with the surname Coster. This Coster rightly claims the fame of inventing the art of printing, which others have stolen like thieves. By all rights we should award him the honour of the greatest of all triumphs.
One day Coster was walking in the forest near the town, as is the custom of citizens who have time to spare after meals or on holidays, and he began to cut sticks with letters from beech bark, with which he amused himself by turning them upside down, as if they were stamps, to be used to print a few lines on paper as a toy for his grandchildren. When this was successfully accomplished, he began to make further plans, for he was resourceful and persistent. Above all, he made a new kind of ink that was sticky and thicker than the ink used by writers, for he noticed that ordinary ink would bleed. He invented this ink together with his son-in-law Thomas Pieter, who had four children who almost all later held public office. I share this so that everyone will know that the art originated in an honourable and finely cultured family, by no means subordinate to others. He then printed entire blocks of wood with figures and letters…later the inventor replaced the wooden letters with lead, and then with tin, which is a stronger and less flexible material which remains usable longer. Wine jugs were cast from what remained of this type material, which, being very old, can still be seen today in Laurens’ house…
Since a new invention, as it happens, arouses interest, and new merchandise never seen before attracts buyers from all sides, thus a lot of profit was made, enthusiasm for the new art grew and the business expanded. Therefore servants had to be employed, and herein lay the root of the ruin. One of them, a certain Johannes with the ominous surname Faust - or so I suspect - was faithless and brought disaster to his master. Or maybe it was a servant by another name. I remain silent about this because I do not want to disturb the peace of the ghosts of those who have passed away, especially when I know that they were tormented by their conscience during their lives.
Now this servant, who had been initiated under an oath of secrecy into the art of typecutting, then into that of typesetting, and who had gained experience in typecasting, as well as in other aspects of the business, took his chance at a favourable moment that he really couldn’t have imaged better, namely Christmas night when everyone used to gather for the solemn mass. He stole the entire technical equipment of the company, especially the type stock, made a bundle of all the beautiful tools that his master had acquired for this technique, and leaving the house with his loot he hurried as quickly as he could, first to Amsterdam, then to Cologne, until he finally arrived in Mainz, which sheltered him with impunity as if he were an exile. There he set up a printing house and enjoyed the rich harvest of his thieving work…
This is close to what I have heard from dignified and elderly old men who protected this knowledge as a precious commodity, knowledge that was passed down through the generations, from hand to hand, like the flaming torch of an Olympiad.”
The Coster story was discussed at length in a 1628 publication by a Dutch philologist and antiquarian by the name of Petrus Sciverius called the Laurecrans. In this book, Scriverius collates all the evidence he can find to support the claim that Laurens Janszoon Coster invented the art of printing in Haarlem. In her discussion of this, Lotte Hellinga-Querido says “however, the evidence itself remains lacking. By modern standards, the argument remains stuck between loyalty to the Haarlem tradition and the evidence. The beginning of the modern method, which we think we recognize in the collection of sources, is less strong than the need to recreate history and thereby meet a need that arose due to the new sense of identity of the young Republic. A new identity requires a new past: in the past, new heroes had to be found.” Despite the efforts of historians in the centuries since, no hard evidence has been found to prove Laurens Janszoon Coster actually existed. There haven’t been any prints discovered which bear his name. Haarlem’s archives suggest that there were two citizens called Laurens Janszoon who lived around this time period, but one never used the surname Coster, and the one who did would have been way too young to be the mythical inventor. Most people agree now that the story is just a legend.
But the enduring power of the legend is perhaps more important than its factual veracity. The Coster story informs us of the value that was put on the art of printing from pretty much as soon as it hit the scene. It would have been an intriguing thing to see someone turn up in your town with some big, unfathomable and fancy equipment, and then start producing books at a speed that no scriptorium could ever hope to match. People not involved in the industry saw the results of its productivity and there would have been local pride in having a printshop in your town. It is no coincidence that more than a few of those early printers have some version of ‘was the inventor of printing’ on their graves. The Coster story, over the course of nearly four centuries, has allowed people from Haarlem, Holland and, eventually, the Netherlands to lay proud claim to something that was so drastically world-altering, regardless of there being zero evidence of it. This was an era of excitable and pioneering collaboration in publishing so it really is no surprise that confusing myths and counter-stories emerged and were sustained through time. The truth, no matter how many people know it, is that this was just the beginning of what would become a globally influential relationship: book printing and the Low Countries. By the 1520s Antwerp would be the centre of book printing in Europe, really only challenged by Venice and, in the 17th century, this incredibly influential industry would shift substantially northward to Amsterdam, but NO SPOILERS. And anyway, that is all for future episodes of History of the Netherlands.
Sources used:
Drukker zoekt publiek, Gheraert Leeu te Gouda 1477-1484 by Koenraad Goudriaan
Zwolse boeken voor een markt zonder grenzen, 1477-1523 by Jos M. M. Hermans
Laurens Janszoon Coster was zijn naam by Lotte Hellinga-Querido and Clemens de Wolf
“Gutenberg and Mass Production” by Robert O. Woods
“The Beginning of Printing” by David McKitterick in The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume VII c.1415 - c. 1500
“The Art of Printing” at National Diet Library.
“Women in Printing History Part 1: Female Incunabula Printers” at The International Print Museum
“Gutenberg Prints the 42 Line Bible” by Jeremy M, Norman
“The Utrecht printer Nicolaus Ketelaer” by Gisela Gerritsen-Geywitz in Querendo
“Deventer, Richard Pafraet, 1509” by Hendrick D. L. Vervliet in Post-Incunabula en Hun Uitgevers in de Lage Landen / Post-Incunabula and Their Publishers in the Low Countries
The Dialogues of Creatures Moralysed: A Critical Edition edited by Gregory C. Kratzmann, Elizabeth Gee
Early Printed Books by Edward Gordon
“De incunabeldrukker en lettersteker Henric Pieterssoen die lettersnider van Rotterdamme (c. 1470-1511)” by F. J. Kruitwagen
Officia Ciceronis, leerende wat yeghelijck in allen staten behoort te doen, bescreuen int Latijn by Marcus Tullius Cicero
“Movable Type, Movable Printers: Printers and Typography as Agents of Cultural Exchange in Fifteenth Century Europe”, Masters thesis by Jacob A. Gibbons
INCUNABULA The Art & History of Printing in Western Europe, c. 1450-1500
A Medieval Mirror Speculum Humanae Salvationis 1324–1500 by Adrian Wilson & Joyce Lancaster Wilson
“Een drukker en zijn markt Gheraert Leeu (Gouda 1477 - Antwerpen 1492/3)” by Koen Goudriaan
Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek. Deel 6(1924) by P.J. Blok and P.C. Molhuysen
De Nederlandsche spectator: weekblad van den ouden heer Smits, Volume 3
“Living and Printing in Antwerp in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, A Social Enquiry” by Renoud Adam
A History of European Printing by Colin Clair
“Op weg naar een geschreven eenheidstaal: De ontdialectisering van de schrijftaal bij Gheraert Leeu, drukker in Gouda en Antwerpen” by Ann Marynissen, Daniela Bock en Amelie Terhalle