The Fifteenth-Century Printing Practices of Johann Zainer, Ulm, 1473–1478 by Claire M. Bolton (review)

The books produced by the printer Johann Zainer in Ulm from 1473 show an unusual number of traces of minor mishaps in the printing house: inky smudges, blind impressions of lines of type and quads, risen spaces, skewed pages, and other irregularities. Claire Bolton, with the authority of working with a hand-press for decades, is ideally suited to interpret the traces left in Zainer’s books and to recognize them as witnessing successive steps taken by the men working for him. Her analysis highlights stages of the development of the printing press in the early decades of printing with movable type with a level of detail never achieved before; it also brings new insight into the practices of Zainer’s printing-house that are no less relevant to the working methods of his contemporaries, even if many of them aimed at more fastidious standards of perfection.

The work of the two Zainer brothers, Günther in Augsburg and Johann in Ulm, is best known for their pioneering of woodcut illustration, combined with woodcut borders and initials. In Johann’s work famous sequences of woodcuts appear in the translations into German of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, Aesop, and smaller texts by Dr Heinrich Steinhöwel, humanist and Ulm’s local medical doctor who supported at least this part of Johann Zainer’s enterprise. The pages combining letterpress and woodcuts of various sizes (such as borders and initials) display a lively but complicated layout. Bolton discovered the standard of measurement that made it possible to fit these diverse elements together in a forme: the ‘em’, defined as the square of the size of the body of the type in which the text is set. The woodcut components of the pages were also measured by the em. The quads and spaces on Zainer’s pages that failed to remain invisible were the cue that led to this insight. Bolton surmises that compositors set their lines in sticks fixed to a measurement of a multiple of ems. She investigated further, and found that this method was applied by many, perhaps most of the early printers, the size of the em varying with the body of the type used. Thus the width of the page or column, even when including woodcut elements or sections set in a different type, would always relate to the size of the type used for the text-block. Body-sizes gradually became more standardized and in the sixteenth century such terminology as ‘primer’, ‘pica’, ‘nonpareil’, etc. took over. The present-day incunabulist, used (since Proctor) to identifying type by the measurement in millimetres of 20 lines, has only to divide this identifier by 20 to find the em-size in millimetres for each individual fount of type. As Bolton observes (p. 115), ‘The em quad is such a fundamental part of the printing method that it ought to be in the forefront of any scholar’s mind when trying to unravel some of the problems of understanding fifteenth-century printing methods.’

If this is the most striking example of Bolton’s success in ‘following [the printer’s] thought processes as he approached his planning’ (p. 4), the scrutiny of multiple copies of the thirty-eight books printed by Johann Zainer in the five-year period she has chosen to define her project (1473–78) brought other remarkable rewards. Her abiding interest is in the presses in Zainer’s printing house. Through careful analysis of the pinholes (or point holes) left by fitting paper on his presses, taking account of earlier observations by A. W. Pollard, Paul Schwenke, Irvine Masson, Martin Boghardt, and others, she arrives at a plausible speculation. The earliest presses, long before they were first pictured at the end of the fifteenth...