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Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 19 (2012)

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 19

(2012)– [tijdschrift] Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

David McKitterick
How can we tell if people noticed changes in book design?
Early editions of the Imitatio Christi

A conference that addresses the history of changes in the presentation of texts, whether in manuscript or in print, and that ranges from the middle ages to the twentieth and even twenty-first century, presents itself with several questions. This is quite apart from the challenge of a very considerable chronological range, and the differing practices and assumptions that accompany changes in literacy, the use of the written and printed word, and the technical knowledge that itself makes change possible. At the risk of asking too much in too small a space, I propose here to examine a little of the linked - and further - challenge. How much do people actually notice change, and how can we determine this from different kinds of historical evidence?1

Many changes are directly linked to the use of books. A primary example is the introduction of verse numbering in the printed Bible. This dates not from an obvious and ambitious folio edition, as one might at first guess, but from a 16mo edition of the Greek and Latin New Testament published by Robert Estienne at Geneva in 1551.2 The practical value of the innovation was immediately recognised. Apart from being used in Estienne's complete Vulgate in 1555, it was taken up in Dutch-language Bibles in 1556 (by Gillis van der Erven, in Emden), and in English-language Bibles in the translation printed at Geneva by Conrad Badius in 1557 (in Geneva because the Catholic Queen Mary was on the English throne), and then, from 1560, in the best-selling Geneva Bible itself: this was the dominant translation and much printed in England until the second decade of the seventeenth century.3 The introduction of verse numbering allowed a new precision of allusion, whether for marginal cross-references within the Bible or for anyone - preacher or private individual - who wished to refer to a particular passage.

The typographical presentation of the Bible, and the successive alterations and experiments, is a story of quite exceptional complexity. It is not one for which there is

space here. Nonetheless, it holds a general truth. If there is an overall pattern, one that we can perceive in many different kinds of literature, it may be summed up in the ways that texts are fragmented so as to create the means for us to locate portions of longer works in a rapid and visual way before we even begin to read the text itself. This tendency can be seen, for example, in the ways that in early medieval manuscripts words were separated, and sentences were indicated by an increasing range of punctuation marks.4 The Bible is broken up into chapters, then into verses. These processes of reduction have a direct effect on meaning, in that they direct our attention to reading in particular ways. We can observe a similar process happening on computer screens, in the snapshots of information or text that are caught on each screen, in the truncated paragraphs of information or opinion that are a feature of most websites (think only of the way that news is presented in this medium), and in the well-known reluctance of most users of web pages to read more than a very few pages before becoming bored, exhausted, or merely irritated. A similar typographical revolution that led to a reading revolution is to be seen in the presentation of textual commentary on theological or classical texts, in the change from the dense wrap-round commentary familiar in late medieval manuscripts and in early printed editions to that set out at the foot of the page - or, later (and for some people a retrograde step) at the end of the volume, quite separate from the text with which it was concerned. The history of the typography of the note, with its range of referential diacriticals employing numerals, letters, and assorted signs such as asterisks offers a particularly fruitful field for the study of how we read and how we arrange texts so as to distinguish their different authorial and supplemental components.5

Obviously, new kinds of texts can require new lay-outs. In the twelfth century, the scribes and artists at Canterbury compiled a multi-text psalter, consisting of three parallel Latin texts (Romanum, Gallicanum, Hebraicum), accompanied by the English written very small over the Romanum text, and the French (incidentally among the earliest witnesses we possess of written Anglo-Norman) written in small characters over the Hebraicum text.6 In print, the Complutensian polyglot Bible (1514-17) sets out the Hebrew, the Vulgate and the Septuagint, plus interlinear Latin translations and marginal notes of the Hebrew roots. Both in print and in manuscript, columnar organisation was supplemented by inter-lining in smaller characters. As different concepts and ideas were developed, whether in mensural music exemplified in the work of Petrucci in early sixteenth-century Venice,7 or in the work of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century surveyors and cartographers, or in the mathematical tables for logarithms developed by John Napier in the early seventeenth century, or in the presentation of mathematical information by means of graphs, or in the invention of railway timetables in all their

wonderful complexity that links chronological, linear and two-dimensional topography to information about particular on-board facilities such as food,8 or in the presentation of statistical information by means of pictograms developed in the isotypes created by Otto Neurath in the mid-twentieth century,9 we see typography meeting - and further enabling - the needs of social and intellectual change.

These in their turn have absorbed the possibilities of the more ordinary page. We may note, for example, the changing ways that direct speech has been presented in manuscript and in print, the invention and use of double and single quotation marks, their employment either in the margins or to mark out passages within the lines, the use of other means to indicate speech such as dashes, the deployment of paragraphs, including paragraph indentation, to present conversation, the use of italics for emphasis in the ceaseless struggle of presenting the spoken word on the written or printed page or on screen. The conventions for all this are by no means universal, and we can frequently see the ways here that the personal conventions of handwriting are translated into the conventions and formalities of printed characters and printed arrangements. Amidst all this there are the more obvious national and linguistic conventions and distinctions such as ¡! and ¿? in representing speech.

Much of the history of the appearance of print has not unnaturally followed the preoccupations of type-founders, printers and their relationships to the written word. For this we have a vocabulary which, if very far from universally accepted or universally applicable, does at least have the bones of convention that make the management of print and the type-manufacturing trade possible. The work of G.I. Lieftinck and his colleagues in the early 1950s and of Albert Derolez much more recently, has demonstrated some of the difficulties and frustrations in trying to describe, distinguish and pigeonhole different late mediaeval gothic hands.10 In 2011, Derolez published an exploration of some of the cognate problems in distinguishing and describing humanistic script.11 It might be thought that the history of the designs of printing type would be more easily agreed, but the complexities of gothic to gotico-rotunda, fere-humanistica and other hybrids, Italian traditions merging into roman faces in fifteenth-century Italian and German-speaking regions, and the debates as to what exactly represents the ‘first’ roman type, are just some of the topics that colour the discussions of type-faces in the standard works on the subject.

There are the more obvious derivations of the written word in type: the complex relationships of gothic to roman scripts, the variations of both in the typographic history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the relationship of italic handwriting to italic type, and the extent to which it was, or was not, absorbed into local and eventually national traditions, or the ways by which roman type displaced black letter faster for

some purposes than for others.12 In London at the end of the seventeenth century, the diarist Samuel Pepys noted the change from black letter to roman type in popular street ballads, and associated the change with roughly the turn of the century: ‘My collection of Ballads... continued to the year 1700. When the form, till then peculiar thereto, vizt of the Black Letter with Picturs seems (for cheapness sake) wholly laid aside, for that of the White Letter without Pictures.’13 The change in these widely sold, cheaply produced, and much printed and reprinted sheets was much more complex than Pepys suggested; but he was reacting to the most obvious change of all in English typography in the seventeenth century, as roman type was increasingly adopted across the range of printing, and black letter was mostly restricted to roles in legal and liturgical printing, and for emphasis especially on title-pages.14

If Samuel Pepys, even in so limited a field as sheet-ballads - of which he possessed an exceptional collection that remains one of the most important parts of his library - could be so approximate, and so wrong, in his summary of the English typographic tradition, how much greater is the potential for mis-judging developments and change in the infinitely more complicated issues raised in the design of books, which are created for so many purposes, subjects, social groups, and reading skills. Pepys was, of course, concerned only with English printing - or, more specifically, just with London. In that, there is a limitation that does not always help us in our understanding of the histories of typographic conventions and typographic change. For this is a profoundly international subject: international because books are traded and read internationally, printers move between countries, new editions of books may be printed far from where they were first begat, and because the very foundations of printing, the type-founding trades, are international - in the twentieth century as in the fifteenth. Such issues incidentally remind us of one of the most important issues before us, as we move away from the series of national histories of the book that have dominated much of the history of the book during the past thirty or so years. The subject is unavoidably international, and always benefits from being thought so.

Some of these issues are further addressed in the following pages, but I want to raise here a question that underlies all our studies. Apart from what as historians of various persuasions and specialities we now seek to analyse, how can we discover, and how can we measure, what is - or was - actually noticed by readers? The questions are perhaps more easily answered for writers than for readers, since they have to make a choice in the way that they present their work, so that it is fit for purpose. This may involve discussions with printers, and it will almost always involve compromises; but we can at least recognise a purpose behind it. We cannot so readily do the same with readers.

The Imitatio Christi from manuscript to print

In the rest of this article, I reflect a little on some of these questions, looking for evidence as to how we can measure change, where it can be seen as an international phenomenon. In order to do so, I turn to one of the greatest international best-sellers of all time, a short text that has found audiences among many shades of Christian opinion since the fifteenth century. My approach, to a single book in particular, is somewhat different from those adopted by the authors of the collection of essays edited in 2004 by Annie Charon and others, La mise en page du livre religieux, XIIIe-XXe siècle, who were concerned with groups of texts. Instead, I have been looking at successive editions of one text.

The Imitatio Christi is never out of print. It has been printed for all kinds of readers, in all kinds of formats, and in languages across the world. The fullest bibliography, by Augustin de Backer (Liège, 1864) is now very old, and seriously misleading in many respects. It listed over 2,900 different editions and translations. As some of these were only by report, and unreliable report at that, De Backer suspected that this was an overestimate. But on the other hand further editions published by 1864 have been discovered and recorded since; and to these of course must be added all those which have been published since that date.15

The necessary starting point is the manuscript, written by Thomas à Kempis, a German from Kempen (in Cleves, on the lower Rhine) who after training at Deventer with the recently established Brothers of the Common Life spent most of his life at the monastery of Mount St Agnes, in Windesheim, near Zwolle, taking an active part in the brothers' commitment to the preparation and circulation of manuscripts.16 He died in 1471, and an autograph manuscript of the Imitatio dated 1441 survives in Brussels, written ‘in monte sancte agnetis prope zwollis’. It was studied and edited by Delaissé in 1956.17 This manuscript is small, about 13 × 7 cm, and the handwriting is correspond-

ingly tiny. The foliation now on it was added in the late sixteenth or seventeenth century, perhaps, Delaissé suggests, by an owner or one of the text's editors such as the Jesuit Heribert Roseweyde whose edition first appeared at Antwerp in 1617. A facsimile edited by Charles Ruelens of the Bibliothèque Royale was published in 1879, and of this Delaissé is rightly critical.18 For our purposes it is of only limited use partly because it gives no idea of the context of the text of the Imitatio, one of several texts gathered together in this volume; it omits Thomas's general list of contents, and it omits the various autograph marginalia. (In parenthesis, by no means the least interesting part of the history of the Imitatio is the way in which it was at first published or bound up by contemporary or later owners with other religious texts, whether in the theological assembly at Augsburg or in the popular devotional traditions of the Low Countries.)

There is not space here to comment in detail on Thomas's distinctive punctuation, nor on the rhythmical nature of his prose, which was only properly recovered in the nineteenth century. But it is important to remember its small format - in common with many of the manuscripts that were copied out of this text during the rest of the fifteenth century as well as long into the following century. Several hundred manuscripts of the Imitatio were made: a widely accepted figure suggests eight or nine hundred.19 The first printed edition bears only a limited relationship to the original, and for many years the text was far more circulated in manuscript than it was in print. Nonetheless, it is a help to notice when we turn to the printed editions that not only the manuscripts attributable to the Brothers of the Common Life, but also those from further afield in Germany and elsewhere, tend nearly all to be quite small. The text enjoyed a popular circulation during Thomas's own lifetime, and there were many variants, later to be reflected partly in the printed editions. As for the authorship, while there was a long tradition that attributed the work to Jean Gerson, the Augsburg tradition clearly attributed the work to Thomas.

For a study of changes in typographical taste, the Imitatio offers an unusual opportunity. In its original form it is a straightforward text, divided into four books and each book divided into numbered chapters which are given titles, ‘De doctrina veritatis’, ‘De meditacione mortis’ and so forth.

The first edition of this book was printed after Thomas's death, at Augsburg by Günther Zainer in 1472 or 1473.20 Unlike those manuscripts for popular circulation and convenient for meditation, it was a small folio, printed on chancery paper (fig. 1). It was printed - and published - as part of a collection of tracts by Jerome, Augustine, Jean Gerson and others that survives in various groupings, all in the same typeface and evidently intended to be issued and studied as a group: unusually, Zainer also printed, on a separate sheet, a list of this group: copies of this list survive pasted into the front of

several bound-up collections. The number of texts bound up together vary in number, perhaps according to what stocks were available, rather than what individual readers and customers desired.21 In the autograph, Thomas makes frequent use of the colon to punctuate and give rhythm. Leaving aside the various minor differences in the text, Zainer's edition is minimally punctuated, using a full stop and a mid-point that occasionally coincides with the colon in the autograph. The text, set solid, depends on rubrication for navigation beyond the main chapter headings.



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Figure 1: The first edition of Thomas à Kempis, Imitatio Christi. Folio (Augsburg: Günther Zainer, 1472 or 1473). Trinity College, Cambridge


Format and typography

The sequence of editions of the Imitatio after this first edition from Augsburg in 1472 or 1473 is a reminder of the continuing power of the manuscript as a means of circulation. This did not become an instant best-seller in print. Apart from an edition of the first book (alone) printed at Metz in 148222 and a Catalan translation printed at Barcelona in 1482, the next edition appeared at Venice, not until 1483 - ten years after Augsburg.23 There was no edition in the Low Countries until an undated one by Johannes de Westfalia at Leuven in the mid 1480s. It was a quarto. It too ignored Thomas's punctuation, and used mid-points for full stops, besides introducing a few vertical slashes roughly where we might now put commas.24

Given the appeal of this book in small format manuscripts to northern European audiences, it is perhaps surprising that the first octavo edition appeared south of the Alps, at Brescia in 1485 - twelve years after the editio princeps. It was also the first printed in roman type. The printers were Angelus and Jacobus Britannicus, who had established their press at Brescia only a few months earlier, and who in 1486 were to follow their edition of the Imitatio with one of Augustine's Sermones ad heremitas set in the same type, and to a very similar page design. For the Imitatio (here idiosyncratically attributed to St Bernard) the printers set the lists of chapters at the start of each book, and added a preface commending the book to the faithful reader.

With these points in mind (the varying textual traditions, the move in format from folio to quarto to octavo, the move from gothic to roman type, the variations in author attribution, the changes in punctuation), let us now turn to some further typographical changes in the presentation of a text that was, at its heart, short and comparatively simple. Such a book ought to suggest some of the broader changes in typographical conventions over the years. Before moving to questions of detail, there are several general developments to be observed. Whereas the earliest editions of the Imitatio, whether in Germany or Italy, made little attempt to break up the text, and instead presented it as a dense, almost continuous mass of print, there was a substantial movement to offer a text that was better articulated typographically with regard to meaning, and paying attention to the changing needs of readers. This is not a movement driven by printers. It can only have been in response to demand, whether from editors and translators, or from those who used the book. It is a part of the revolution in reading practices that occurred in the late fifteenth and then - more dramatically - in the sixteenth century. In turn, the design of the page dictated the ways in which the book was to be read. It was

fragmented. While much was made possible by the increasing typographical resources available to printers, and their willingness to invest in ranges of type-faces, the articulation of white space was instrumental in this revolution.

So, we may summarise very briefly some of the changes in the principal features of the early editions. I have here been deliberately brief, for my purpose is not to offer a survey of all changes and relationships. The istc, for example, lists seventy-seven separate editions, and the sixteenth century produced several hundred.

After choice of format and paper size, the most obvious is the choice of number of columns. The first edition, a small folio, was in one column; those printed at Venice in 1485 and 1486 were in two. The Augsburg quarto of 1488 was also two columns. As a typographical context to this we might place first the introduction of running heads, and changes in their use. This is as much a feature of the relevant printers' normal practice as of any particular considered appropriateness to the Imitatio. The earliest editions have no running heads. Nor does the early octavo edition, printed at Brescia. A quarto Venice edition of 1485, simply has the Liber number at the head. The running heads in the quarto edition printed at Augsburg by Erhard Ratdolt in 1488 display the book number (Liber i etc) set in roman capitals, where the text is set in a Venetian style of gothic.

The earliest editions had no title-pages. They were used, for example, in the closely related editions printed by Flach (Strasbourg, 1487) and Trechsel (Lyon, 1489) and became normal in the French editions.25 The introduction of title-pages brought also opportunities for an illustration of a generic kind, designed to assist meditation, for example in the first French translation, printed at Toulouse in 1488 and with a woodcut of Christ carrying the cross.

The introduction - and exploitation - of the range of text (as distinct from display) typefaces - black letter, roman and italic - with which we are now familiar is of course a principal theme of the period between roughly the 1480s and the 1540s. It followed different trajectories in different countries. Apart from the main letter-forms, the introduction of an extended choice of sizes and weights of type brought new means of emphasis. By the time that Josse Badius Ascensius printed Thomas a Kempis's collected works at Paris in 1523, he was using black letter increasingly sparingly, and only for display.26 By the 1530s, roman type was increasingly established, for example in the 16mo Antwerp edition of 1536 issued by the humanist Joannes Steels,27 where earlier Low Countries editions in Latin and vernacular had been in black letter. As was to be expected, the Italian version printed by Francesco Bindoni and Maffeo Pasini at Venice in 1538 was in roman type.

The use of type in hierarchical ways developed from long experiments in the manuscript traditions. But whereas scribes were limited only by their skills and by the size of the page onto which they had to fit their text, for printers the limitation was a technical one as well as a commercial one, involving investment in a range of fonts of type.

Like those of scribes, so printers' and compositors' decisions and choices were also subject to the size of the page. As the most expensive part of the costs in printing any book, paper was the major determinant. To print hundreds of copies rather than write just one was an entirely different kind of investment. Hence it is worth considering what kinds of printers printed a particular text, and considering why, if they possessed a considerable range of types, they chose particular ones. Most of these who printed the Imitatio, at least in the first years, possessed comparatively little in this respect. Zainer, the printer of the editio princeps, owned just one size of gothic type at the time of printing the Imitatio.28 The Britannicus press at Brescia possessed only one roman text type small enough for the format required. More ambitiously, the octavo Cologne edition of 1501 printed by Martin of Werden (fig. 2) uses a large formal black letter on the title-page, with an illustration of the Christ-child with his mother and St Anne, then uses three sizes to launch the text: ‘liber primus’, ‘Incipit...’ (notice the two capital C's in Christi and the oddball Capitulum), and the text itself.



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Figure 2: Thomas à Kempis, Imitatio Christi. Octavo (Köln: Martin of Werden, 1501). St John's College, Cambridge


Page numbers took the place of folio numbers quite late, for example in the 16mo edition produced at Antwerp by Steels in 1556, one of a number of editions for which he was responsible.29 Although the same tiny format as Steels's edition of 1536, again with 20 lines to a page and with a type marginally smaller, this new one in fact differed in important ways. The work was now attributed to Thomas à Kempis rather than to Gerson. The chapter heads and numbers were centred on the page, which they had not been in 1536, where the heads had been inserted with an opening paragraph mark, and with the chapter numbers set against the right-hand margins.

In all this, we can see a connecting thread, in the changing provision being made for readers, and in the increasing influence of the printer as the arbiter of textual presentation. Script gives way to print, most obviously perhaps in the introduction of decorative initials at the beginnings of sections, in place of small printed guide letters that characterise the early editions. We find historiated initials as well as merely decorative ones, and we find the use of metal cast decorative initials, as in the Giunta edition published at Florence in 1509. That these innovations were not always of an expected kind is illustrated in the Venice edition of 1500, with its decorative opening Q[ui sequitur me] showing (rather incongruously) two huntsmen following a dog.

Illustrations were a key part of devotion, manifest in innumerable prayer books, either painted or printed, or as printed images pasted in. The Imitatio was comparatively lightly illustrated for many years. It is noticeable, for example, in a copy of the Amerbach edition of 1489 bound up with Bertholdus of Ratisbon's Horologium devotionis circa vitam Christi, printed by Amerbach in the same year, that the Bertholdus has hand-coloured woodcuts, but the Imitatio has no pictures at all.30 That some readers found a need for images is demonstrated in a copy of the edition printed by Jean Petit at Paris in 1515, bound up with Bernard of Clairvaux's Meditationes and Augustine's Sermones ad heremitas. An early owner has added at the front a crude coloured drawing of Christ's suffering.31 When printed illustrations were introduced, they were for many years of the very simplest: a crucifixion scene (Paris, 1498), a small image of Christ (Venice, 1500). The octavo Cologne edition of 1501 has just a woodcut of the Christ-child between the Virgin Mary and St Anne. The Venice edition of 1538, in Italian, broke with this tradition, instead using a woodcut of Christ calling a disciple, with the words ‘Sequere me’, Follow me. More ambitiously, a later and undated Italian edition printed at Venice by Mattio Pagano was described on the title-page as ‘di belle figure adornate’.32 Apart from an opening woodcut of the road to Calvary, the chapters in this edition were headed with smaller woodcuts, often repeated.

All this bears on the typographical relationships between editions, and the extent to which they were imitated visually. Peter Löslein's Venice printing of 1483 was followed closely by Peregrinus de Pasqualibus two years later, both editions in two columns with

type similar in size, and occupying the same number of pages. I have already mentioned the 16mo Antwerp editions. Another instructive pair for comparison is the two Giunta editions published at Florence in 1509 and 1514. Basically, they are very similar: both the same octavo format. Both are printed on the same size of sheet of paper. But in the latter, page numbers were added, running heads were added, and the use of a new and more compact typeface resulted in a saving of a whole sheet of paper - the volume ending with sheet h, rather than sheet i. In other words, an edition was produced more economically but in a way that is better articulated for the reader.

Finally in this very summary list, it is pertinent to note the treatment of the margins. Much here depends on the size of the sheet of paper, the type area taken up on each page, and the size of the type. For books that were to be sold cheaply, it was desirable not only to use an economical type, but that the proportion of the type area to the page size should be as high as possible. The generously designed octavo edition printed by Johann Zainer at Ulm in 1487 is in a larger type (82 mm) than the octavos printed at Brescia (77 mm) and by Johannes Leoviler at Venice (64 mm) in the previous two years. It also has a wide margin, suitable for annotation. The Imitatio is replete with biblical references, but in the early editions no attempt was made to add guidance for readers. Where space was available, early owners occasionally wrote in their own references to the passages of the Bible alluded to in the text, as (for example) in a copy of the Cologne, 1501 edition.33 We shall return to this question of marginal references a little later.

English innovations

Most of the comments so far on the early editions of the Imitatio have concerned the Latin text and translations into Italian. While differing in detail, the same kinds of questions apply to other translations. But with the first English translation, in 1503, we are in entirely different territory - typographically as well as geographically. It was printed at London by Richard Pynson, and is a small quarto.34 As the title explains, it was translated ‘at the specyalle request and commaundement of the ful excellent Princesse Margarete moder to our Souerayne lorde Kynge Henry the. vii. and Countesse of Rychemount and Derby’ (fig. 3). Lady Margaret Beaufort was famously devout, and an enlightened patroness not just of translators and printers, but also of education: two Cambridge colleges owe their existence to her.35 Above the title was a woodcut of the Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ.36 But the full-page woodcut at the opening of

the text left no room for doubt (fig. 4). This was political, personal and religious. It repeated the sacred monogram, ihs, five times. It also included the Tudor rose and portcullis four times, two of the portcullises having the English crown above them. This same inclination to politicisation is to be seen in the English translation after Castellio's adapted text by Edward Hake printed by Henry Denham in 1567.37 Facing the opening of the text in this small octavo edition was the device of the Duke of Norfolk, whose religious affiliations - Protestant or Catholic - were repeatedly in doubt, and whose political volatility brought him to the executioner's block in 1572.



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Figure 3: Thomas à Kempis, A ful deuout and gostely treatyse. Quarto (London: Richard Pynson, 1503). Title-page. St John's College, Cambridge




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Figure 4: Thomas à Kempis, A ful deuout and gostely treatyse. Quarto (London: Richard Pynson, 1503). Opening of the text. St John's College, Cambridge


The Imitatio was, first and most importantly, a devotional text, to be read (for example) in preparation for receiving mass. The multitude of small format editions, some of them tiny, are eloquent testimony to this purpose, and in this it also fits well with other devotional texts, whether in the Low Countries, France or Italy. As we saw earlier, it began life as a part of a collection. If we leave aside the various collections of the work of Thomas à Kempis alone, which were by no means universal in including the Imitatio amongst his writings, we do not find very many folios. The folio collected works printed by Hochfeder at Nuremberg in 1494 opens with the Imitatio, and has an important exchange of letters between Georg Pirckheimer and Peter Dannhausser at the start, but it was typographically and editorially straightforward. So, for all its French renaissance modernity, was the folio edition of the collected works printed by Badius Ascensius in 1523. The same tendencies can be seen in Jean Roigny's folio edition of the works printed at Paris in 1549,38 which opens with the Imitatio, now firmly established as the work of Thomas à Kempis.

By the English translation of 1580, the work of Thomas Rogers and printed at London by Henry Denham, this popular devotional work, so much in demand by people of all kinds of wealth, religious persuasions and backgrounds, and printed in all kinds of formats and sizes from 16mo to folio, had taken on a significance that varied as its audiences changed, overlapped, disagreed, accepted received - and often much altered - versions of the text, and were presented with a book of varying length where the text became a field for experiment among multiple religious and textual authorities.



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Figure 5: Thomas à Kempis, Of the imitation of Christ. Duodecimo (London: Henry Denham, 1580). Title-page. St John's College, Cambridge


The translation printed at London was a disarmingly small book, in duodecimo. It was, in the words of Rogers, ‘now newlie corrected, translated, and with most ample textes, and sentences of holie Scripture illustrated’. It was a modern attempt to produce

an elaborate and specifically Protestant version of a text that had, by general consent, much in it that was spiritually and morally good but that could hardly be taken wholesale into the Protestant tradition.

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Figure 6: Thomas à Kempis, Of the imitation of Christ. Duodecimo (London: Henry Denham, 1580). Opening showing marginal Biblical references and two-line running headlines. St John's College, Cambridge


As Rogers put it in the introduction, ‘I haue rather folowed the sense of the Author, than his verie wordes, in some places.’ ‘I haue left out nothing but what might be offensiue to the godlie.’ Rogers in fact did rather more than this, restoring some passages that had been lost, changing one of the chapter divisions. Slightly apologetically, he remarked that he had not followed the example of Erasmus in editing a text, noting the textual alterations. He explained that his work was ‘for the simpler sort’. He at first omitted the fourth book, the Soliloquium animae, which appeared separately a little later. He worked with his printer, to present not only a better than usually produced devotional book, but also to present it as a scholarly text. The references to Aristotle, Plato, Demosthenes and others in his introduction were hints of

how he came to his task. Most importantly, he was a pioneer in showing how the text related to passages in the Bible: ‘Besides, I haue not onlie shewed the chapter, but the verie sentence also of euerie chapter where what is written maie be found: a thing which, that i heare of, none afore me hath done.’ In its crowded title-page, with the title of the book in a woodcut cartouche at the head, through the unequivocal author statement, through Thomas Rogers' own name set in small capitals, the three quotations from the New Testament - that from St Mark highlighted in brackets, to the imprint and the royal privilege at the foot, here was a title-page not only providing information and an invitation, but also one that uses different type-sizes, italic, roman lower case, and capitalisation for the whole of the most significant words (fig. 5). In a carefully planned display, the printer contrived a lay-out that in its sequence of long and short centred lines suggested a chalice, with the cup at the top, a series of waists, and the foot represented by the imprint at the bottom. For a book designed to be read prior to receiving communion, it was a specific visual as well as textual introduction where word and image complemented each other.

When we move inside the book, we find the same consideration to articulating the text, and to presenting it in a way that will help readers (fig. 6). The body of the text is broken up into short paragraphs, most of them consisting of a single sentence. The marginal Biblical references that Rogers alludes to in his introduction as an innovation are signalled in the text by superior small letters. The page heads are set in two lines and in two sizes of type, so that the chapter number, the subject of the chapter, the page number and the title of the book can all appear. The format of the book - duodecimo, with accordingly very narrow pages into which two columns have to be fitted, one in a smaller size of type than the other - is not ideal, as can be seen in the superior reference letters left hanging at the start of some lines, but this is an ambitious and creditable performance.

Into the seventeenth century

By the end of the sixteenth century, this popular devotional book, published in several languages, across much of Europe and in various formats, was changing into a text demanding some attention as to its received accuracy. The important editions in this respect did not appear in large formats: it is noticeable how many of them are very small indeed. Sebastian Castellio (or Castalio) at Basel in 1563 had not only altered the book to suit his Protestant tastes; he had also apparently wantonly altered the Latin. In 1575, Franciscus Tolensis, at Antwerp, dealt with some of Castellio's changes to the Latin, but left the text substantially the same. Then in an edition dated 1599 Henricus Sommalius tackled the book again, using various German manuscripts and another at Liège, in an edition printed by Jan Moretus and, once again, in a disarmingly small format considering the care claimed for its editing. Yet another version appeared, this time in Paris, when the edition of Constantino Caietano produced his edition in 1616, edited ‘ex veteri manuscripti’.

Some of these ideas are to be seen in the important and much longer-lived edition of the Latin text edited by the Jesuit Heribert Rosweyde (1569-1629), first published by the Moretus press in Antwerp in 1617 and printed on dozens of occasions since, down to modern times.39 Again, and again disarmingly, this was a duodecimo edition, this time enhanced with a small engraving on the title-page depicting the road to Calvary. It included the commendations of various great men (‘magnorum virorum’) concerning the Imitatio. Again, it included marginal biblical references, but this time without the superior identifiers in the text. As in Sommalius's edition printed by Moretus, the paragraphs were numbered, and there was an ‘index rerum’. But the most important part was Rosweyde's long ‘vindicia’ of Thomas à Kempis as the author, followed by his biography.

Inevitably, and rightly, we tend to concentrate on typographic changes and conventions as they apply to a text that is primarily to be read. But best-selling and long-term books such as the Imitatio also generate another kind of interest. Perhaps especially in the case of books of devotion, manuals where practical convenience and personal taste play so large a part, they can become as appealing for their physical presence as for their texts. The Imitatio was far from unique in this respect. In the design and in the materials of this and innumerable other books, printers acknowledge - and exploit the fact - that their value lies not only in their content, but in their appearance, their contribution to dress and to personal presentation. Countless portraits, painted and engraved, of men and women, pious, educated, scholarly, or practical, testify to the importance attached by individuals to being associated not just with books, but with particular kinds of books. As contributions to dress and fashion, whether in pictures or attending church, books become liable to all kinds of experiment, in their bindings, in their shape, their bulk and their outward and inward design. Books acquire a social purpose that is a part of their meaning.

I have concentrated on editions down to the early years of the seventeenth century. In other words, I have stopped short of the most famous edition of all, the large folio that marked the beginning of Richelieu's new Imprimerie Royale in 1640. A great deal has been written about this printing venture, but the lavish edition of the Imitatio is in fact best viewed in the context of both circles of patronage and mid-seventeenth-century French typographical experiments. Others sought different kinds of markets, such as the octavo French translation in Moreau's script type (1643), dedicated to Anne of Austria, ‘La Reyne Regente’, to whom Moreau had already dedicated an edition of a Book of Hours, engraved throughout (fig. 7).40 Some of these decorative and illustrative ideas can be traced elsewhere, such as the copiously illustrated editions printed at Rouen in 1653 and 1656, or the 24mo edition published at Rouen also in 1656. Sébastien Cramoisy's French edition, dedicated to the King and decorated with vignettes, was a serious textual exer-

cise, translated (according to the title-page) from the original manuscript. It has been calculated that between 1600 and 1670 there were no fewer than thirteen French versions on sale.41 The mid-seventeenth century witnessed considerable editorial activity for the Imitatio, as rival editions jostled for market share; but the impression that emerges is one where it had become something more than itself. This book, designed as a profoundly serious religious meditation, was sometimes in danger of become a typographical bauble. This tension between need and ornament, between piety and display, remains visible in the range of editions available for sale in the years since.



illustratie
Figure 7: Thomas à Kempis, L'imitation de Jesus-Christ. Octavo (Paris: Pierre Moreau, 1643). St John's College, Cambridge


In conclusion

I began with two questions. How much do people actually notice change, and how can we determine this from different kinds of historical evidence? In approaching this, I have deliberately eschewed any attempt to assemble personal comments by readers: there is a considerable danger in this approach of descending to the anecdotal, and, moreover, anecdotes deprived of proper contexts. While it can be difficult to formulate general answers that are composed of more than banalities and commonplaces, we may seek some common ground. If it is true that we are speaking both of groups of people and of individuals, it is also true that in this context we are speaking of groups of books characterised by physical uniformity within each edition. As a result, we can also address easily measurable differences between copies - between (for example) different materials and decorations in their bindings. On this occasion we are concerned with the typography and other physical features of editions in their multiplicity of identical or near-identical copies: looking at them both two-dimensionally, on their pages of text, and three-dimensionally, in their bulk. In assembling books, printers must, subject to their resources, choose type sizes and styles, the size, quality and weight of paper to be employed, and the nature and extent of illustrations or other decoration, if any. All these in turn affect prices charged to customers, who thus face choices that have been determined by the printer and publisher. It is at this point that our questions must be applied: to the objects, printed books made to particular specifications, that now lie before customers and readers. Our opening questions, of course, apply to both new and second-hand books, but on this occasion we have been concerned only with new ones.

As individuals, some readers take more notice of differences than others. To the surprise of some, many readers possess little visual, tactile or manual discrimination. For those who, typographically alert or not, exercise choice, whether of appearance or of cost, or (most commonly) a combination of the two, the evidence lies ultimately in the physical specifications of books. Accordingly, there is every reason to pay more attention to the details of book design than is commonly the case among historians of the book, and historians of reading in particular.

Beyond this, we need to pay more attention to the tensions between the local and the regional, the national and the international. While much has been accomplished by scholars who have set books in linguistic groups, we still know too little detail - especially for popular books - about what was involved in a world where for some books the lingua franca of Latin made cross-boundary communication easy. For so cherished and much-read a book as the Imitatio Christi, widely printed and thus widely available from reasonably local sources, both in Latin and in vernaculars, how important was international or inter-regional trade? In sixteenth century Italy, production of the book was overwhelmingly dominated by Venice, and a few other cities in northern Italy contributed other editions. Cities further south - and not least Rome - are notably absent in the roll-call of places of printing. Is this only a feature of religious preferences? Furthermore, in some parts of Europe, a high proportion of those able to read were bi-

lingual, or virtually so. What differences does this make to choice? These are issues for other occasions.

The design of books, and responses to it, are the results of creative tensions that are in the first place defined bibliographically: tensions between authors, manuscripts, compositors, printers, type-founders, paper-makers and their agents, ecclesiastical or secular authorities in the supervision of texts, booksellers, bookbinders, readers and (not necessarily the same, for not every owner is a reader, and not every reader is an owner) owners of books. In the last pages, by offering some very limited comments on a selection of editions of a major international best-seller, I have tried to suggest some of the ways in which these relationships and tensions might be pursued. The answers will contain also elements of educational, social, physiological, psychological and circumstantial difference. They cannot be entirely bibliographical, but that is the most reliable starting point.42


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