Page 50 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

The present copy of the Psalms, adorned with beauty of capital letters, and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any driving of the pen . . .
Published only two years after Gutenberg’s 42-Line Bible, this magnificent book was:
A. The first printed book to include a colophon giving both the name of the printer and the date of printing.
B. The first work to incorporate color printing, with initial let- ters printed in red, light purple, and blue (from an engraved metal plate).
C. The first printed book to include music—two lines of music printed with a 4-line staff.
D. The first book to contain a printer’s mark: the two linked shields of Fust and Schöffer hanging from a branch, the first of which was inscribed with the Greek letter C for Christ, the sec- ond inscribed with the Greek letter Λ (for logos = word).
Though the unusually elaborate printed graphics in the Mainz Psalter are a partial exception to the rule, by necessity printers standardized and sim- plified the graphic form of the book, incorporating those features of script for their typefaces which were essential for communication, and rejecting “the endless variation in form and function that handwriting can create.”24 Like Gutenberg’s 42-Line Bible or Fust and Schoeffer’s Mainz Psalter, many early printed books were very beautiful in their own right. The efficiency that book production gained through the mass production process of print- ing inevitably caused printed books to lose part of the artistic individuality inherent in the process of writing out manuscripts one copy at a time; what was lost by mass production was replaced by a new aesthetic of print media.
24 Hellinga, “The Codex in the Fifteenth century: Manuscript and Print,” in Barker (ed.), A Potencie of Life: Books in Society (1993), pp. 65-66.
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