Printing history rewritten?

Press, 20 April 1982, Page 21

Printing history rewritten?

By

BEVIS HILLER

“The Times”

Twelve smudged red initial letters printed on a fif-teenth-century prayer book to be sold at Sotheby's on June 21 may mean that the history books have to be rewritten. It nas always been accepted that the art of printing in Europe was invented by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz about 1450.

But Dr Christopher de Hamel, who at the age of 31 is in charge of the medieval manuscripts at Sotheby’s, believes the red initials date from about 1430 and that they may have been printed in Haarlem.

If he is right, the glory of inventing printing must be reassigned, 20 years earlier to a different inventor in another country. “The Book of Hours,” written in brown ink on vellum and exquisitely illuminated in colours and burnished gold, has been sent for sale by Prince Furstenberg, among 20 Western illuminated manuscripts from the fifth to the fifteenth century which Dr de Hamel selected from the Prince’s library at Donaueschingen, a castle at

the source of the Danube in Swabia, near tne Swiss border.

The manuscript has 12 full-page miniatures by a Dutch painter, Nicholas Brower. What Dr de Hamel has done is to build a daring hypothesis.

“In- the late fifteenth century and principally in the sixteenth century,” he said, “there was a story going round in Holland that printing was not invented by Gutenberg in Mainz in the 1450 s but was invented in Haarlem in the 14305.”

It is one of the oldest jokes in bibliographical legends. It occurs over and over, again in Dutch accounts of, the sixteenth ■ century and has done ever since. The man is supposed to have been called Laurens Coster, He is a sort of local folk hero now, and there is a statue of him in the square at Haarlem: but np-one actually believes the story. „

“There is no evidence of printed books in Holland before the . 14705. There are various early block books surviving, crude things,. and people used to argue, perhaps these are the work of the mysterious Coster: but, they can now be assigned on grounds of watermark and other reasons,, to a date well into the second half of the fifteenth century.

“But it Suddenly occurred to me, as here is a book made in Haarlem in the 143(is bearing printed marks, and as Coster is supposed to have been using printing in Haarlem in the 14305, is this the same thing? And when one looks back at the Coster legend, all the sources actually say is that this man used stamped letters in the making of books. “The Coster legend explains that he made these letters, that he then died very suddenly, before he had really expanded the thing

. and that one of his servants took his story to Gutenberg, who played around with it and perfected it. Well, the fact that the workshop suddenly stops would suggest at least the possibility that, either the man went out of business or died. “So what I am doing is taking a very old story that has been around for some 400 years and saying, perhaps it is true after all. Does the whole of modern printing actually owe itself to tiny, fuzzy red marks in the corner of books? Prince Furstenberg’s ‘Book of Hours’ is some 25 years older than the Gutenberg Bible. Whether or not it is by Coster, it represents the oldest example of printing in Europe.” Nicolas Barker, head of conservation at the British Library," commented on Dr de Hamel’s theory: “A great many discoveries are being made now about the interrelation of early printed books and manuscripts, which show that the two were by no means as separate as has, been supposed. This is a most interesting further contribution to the debate.”