Als die Lettern laufen lernten: Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert. Inkunabeln aus der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München (review)

The witty title is the only part of this bilingual German-English exhibition catalogue that is (wisely) left untranslated. With some 20,000 items representing about 9,700 different editions, the Bavarian State Library (BSB) houses one of the world's two largest collections of books printed with letters 'learning to walk' — or incunabula.

The exhibition aims to demonstrate the development of processes in book production that transformed the appearance of printed books in the incunable period, and thus show a general public interesting aspects of early printed books that usually remain the domain of specialist literature. Such an enterprise is wholly in line with admirable developments in the BSB itself. After many thousands of incunabula were assembled in Munich in the early years of the nineteenth century as a consequence of the secularization of the Bavarian monasteries, the vast collection became the basis for Ludwig Hain's comprehensive Repertorium bibliographicum that was published from 1826 to 1838. But it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the library undertook the responsibility for making its exceptionally rich holdings of incunabula fully accessible in a published catalogue, with emphasis on the description of individual items, particularly significant in a collection where so many editions are represented in multiple copies. The seven volumes, published between 1988 and 2009, are now digitized and freely available online. A digitization project of individual incunabula in the BSB is in progress. The BSB also excels in giving strong support to two collaborative projects recording incunabula worldwide — the ISTC based in London and the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke based in Berlin. The progress of these activities is set out in the Preface to the exhibition catalogue by Dr Rolf Griebel, Director General of the BSB.

For the quasi-didactic purpose of the present exhibition eighty-five items were chosen, including a few manuscripts and block-books (and two loans). Many belong to already famous highlights of the collection. But instead of being representative of the composition of the collection, or of following long and venerable tradition in demonstrating the spread of printing, the compiler of the catalogue, Bettina Wagner, has chosen to group them within themes such as the development of layout, the introduction of small formats, various techniques for illustration with particularly successful examples of in-house decoration by printers, proofreading, and evidence for production and for the book trade. Each item is extensively described in a miniessay and illustrated with at least one splendid colour plate. That the descriptions are the work of eighteen expert contributors reinforces the impression that the catalogue aims to show that the study of incunabula should no longer be the preserve of the few.

If there is one quibble with this beautifully produced book, it is that by far the majority of the exhibits (fifty-seven in all) are printed in the German lands, and even on this basis in a skewed proportion. Sixteen of the eighty-five items are printed in Mainz; Nuremberg and Augsburg have eight each; as does Venice, the most productive centre of printing in the fifteenth century. But there are only two books printed in Cologne, two in Basel, one from Leipzig. One may wonder whether this does full justice to the 'notabilia bibliographica' already recorded in the catalogue of the collection; and even whether the transformational processes this exhibition sets out to demonstrate might have been shown by what duplicate copies — the unique strength of the collection — can reveal about production processes when placed side by side. Perhaps this may be explored in another exhibition. For now, a large non-specialist public may have its eyes opened and joyfully learn to walk with this generously presented guidance.