incunabula

Incunabula is the plural of Latin incunabulum, from in- (in) + cunae (cradle). Cunae gives us the English word 'cradle' through a Germanic route, and the Latin itself described the earliest stage of any endeavor — the cradle years, the beginning. Bibliographers began using the term in the 17th century to describe books printed from Gutenberg's first press in approximately 1450 to the end of 1500. The singular incunabulum is rarely used; books come in collections, and the cradle years produced roughly 28,000 surviving editions.

The incunabula era was a period of radical experiment. Printers did not know what a book was supposed to look like in this new medium. Early printers mimicked manuscripts almost exactly — using type designs based on regional scribal hands, leaving spaces for hand-rubricated initials, avoiding title pages (manuscripts had none), and printing colophons at the end rather than title information at the beginning. The Gutenberg Bible of 1455 is so close to a manuscript that contemporaries sometimes could not tell them apart.

Within a generation, printers discovered what print could do that manuscripts could not. Venice became the publishing capital of Europe, with Aldus Manutius leading a revolution: smaller portable books, italic type derived from humanist handwriting, page numbers (almost absent from manuscripts), title pages, indices, and punctuation that served readers rather than scribes. By 1500, the book had become recognizably modern. The incunabula period captured the pivot between two worlds.

The great incunabula collections are held in the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bodleian, and the Library of Congress. They are handled with cotton gloves and stored in acid-free boxes. But they were not always precious. Many incunabula were printed in editions of 200 to 1,000 copies, read, passed hand to hand, annotated, rebound, and worn out. The survivors are survivors partly by accident — which is what makes every colophon from before 1501 a small miracle.