incunabula

Incunabulum (plural: incunabula) comes from Latin incunabula, the plural of incunabulum, meaning 'cradle, birthplace, origin,' from in- ('in') and cunae ('cradle'). The Roman word incunabula named a baby's swaddling clothes and cradle — the apparatus of earliest infancy — and by extension, any beginning or origin. The word entered book history in the seventeenth century when German bibliographers began systematically cataloguing the earliest products of European printing. The 1455–1500 window was understood as the infancy of the press — a period before the technology and conventions of printing had fully matured, when printers were still experimenting with fonts, formats, and page layout, often imitating manuscript conventions they were in the process of replacing. An incunabulum was a book from the cradle-time of printing.

The choice of the 1501 cutoff is arbitrary in the way that all periodization is arbitrary — printing did not undergo a decisive change at midnight on December 31, 1500 — but it is a useful convention. The approximately 28,000 surviving incunabula (representing perhaps 30,000 or more editions) document a period of extraordinary technological and cultural change. Gutenberg's press of the 1450s was followed within decades by printing establishments in Strasbourg, Cologne, Basel, Rome, Venice, Paris, London, and dozens of other cities. The Venetian press of Aldus Manutius, founded in 1494, produced elegant octavo volumes in roman type that established the template for the modern book. Within fifty years of Gutenberg, the technology had spread across Europe and the book had changed from a hand-produced luxury to a mass-produced commodity — though incunabula, by modern standards, still appeared in very small print runs of a few hundred copies.

Incunabula are among the most studied objects in the history of books and reading because they document the specific moment of technological transition. Early printers faced decisions about format, type design, decoration, and layout that had been resolved for scribes over centuries of manuscript tradition but were open questions for the new technology. The earliest printed books — including Gutenberg's Bible itself — were designed to look like manuscripts, using typefaces modeled on manuscript hands, employing rubricators (hand-decorators) to add colored initials and marginalia that the press could not produce. The technology was new; the aesthetic conventions were old. The transition from manuscript to print aesthetics happened gradually through the incunabular period, and surviving books chart the process with remarkable clarity.

The word incunabula has been extended metaphorically, as most book-world words eventually are. 'The incunabula of cinema' or 'the incunabula of the internet' name the earliest products of a new medium — the cradle-time before conventions are established and anything seems possible. In digital preservation circles, the early internet is sometimes described in incunabular terms: a period whose artifacts are already fragile and disappearing, whose earliest documents are already rare, whose cultural production was not systematically preserved. The lesson of the printed incunabula — that the early products of a new technology deserve special attention because they document a moment that cannot be reconstructed — has been imperfectly applied to digital culture.