Incunable

The term appears in 1639 under the pen of Bernhard von Mallinckrodt, who speaks of the « first cradles of typography » (prima typographicae incunabula) to designate the period ending in 1500; Cornelius van Beughem made it a book title in 1688 with his Incunabula typographiae, the first repertory of its kind. The cut-off date of 31 December 1500 is thus a bibliographers' convention, not a technical threshold, but it has become universal: the repertories of Hain (1826-1838), then of Copinger and Reichling, the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke begun in 1925 and the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue of the British Library today record around 27,500 editions, from Gutenberg's forty-two-line Bible (c. 1455) to the Venetian presses of Aldus Manutius. Printings from the years 1501-1520 are termed post-incunabula.

An incunable is described differently from a modern book. The title page did not exist before the 1480s and only became general in the sixteenth century: the printer's name, place and date appear in the colophon, when they appear at all. Initials are often painted or rubricated by hand in spaces left blank, the text is in gothic or roman type depending on region and genre, the paper is strong and laid, and the early binding, of leather over wooden boards, sometimes still bears its clasps. Identification proceeds through collation, through measuring the type over twenty lines and through comparison with the repertories; a proper description cites the ISTC or GW number of the edition and states what is particular to the copy: rubrication, provenance, missing or replaced leaves. Value depends on the edition, completeness and condition far more than on date alone.

The word is often wrongly applied to any old book, or extended to printings of the early sixteenth century. One encounters isolated leaves, detached from incomplete copies, sold as « incunabula »: these are fragments, and should be described as such. Nineteenth-century facsimiles of famous pages, particularly of the Gutenberg Bible, still circulate and deceive the unwary eye; the paper, the tint of the ink and the absence of impression in the type betray them. Finally, an incunable bound in the nineteenth century is no less an incunable, but its binding should be described as later.