A Brill Calendar: July 9

Few cities maintain as intimate a bond with books as Leyden.

It is an old affiliation: when Paul Hoftijzer, Leyden Professor in the History of Books, hosted an exhibition on his subject in 2008: ‘City of Books – manuscript and print in Leyden 1620 -2000’, it resulted in a superbly edited and printed monograph, with five contributing authors, each of them an expert in his field of expertise; a token of civic pride, enabled and sponsored in many ways by a Gideon’s Band of local organizations and companies (Primavera Press & Uitgeverij Ginkgo, Leiden MMVIII). It is seldom that a city can be seen as both a producer of books and as a product of books; creator and creature at the same time. Venice, Oxford and Boston are other cases.

What is particularly fascinating in this show-case of typographical beauty is the attention and care André Bouwman and Ed van der Vlist devote in Part I (pp 1 – 152) to the period before Leyden’s world-famous siege and its reward ensuing from it, the University (1575); the pre-history of the typographical era.

‘Prototypography’ – defined as printed matter without mentioning its printer, the city in which it was produced and year of publication - starts in the Low Countries around 1460. The oldest known book printed at Leyden carrying a year of publication – 1483 – is a chronicle and history of northern provinces; its printer is one ‘Heynricus Heynrici’, without doubt a Hendrick son of Hendrick.

The final page, the ‘colofon’, is even more precise and gives July 9 1483 as the calendar day that saw completion of Hendrick’s innovation. Books printed before January 1 1501 – in a rather arbitrarily chosen distinction – are traditionally called ‘incunabula’, the word is derived from the Latin for ‘cradle’. Leyden has fulfilled the role of a cradle for books for more than seven centuries.