An essay on colophons : with specimens and translation . Ill COLOPHONS AT VENICE. HILE to Mainz belongs the su-preme credit of having broughtprinting to the position of apractical art, the city in which itattained its highest perfection andpopularity in the fifteenth centurywas undoubtedly Venice. Theoutput from the Venetian pressesrepresented some forty per cent, of the entire book pro-duction of Italy, and its quality was at least as remark-able as its quantity. It is natural, therefore, to turn fromMainz to Venice in our quest for interesting colophons,as wherever printers did good work and
An essay on colophons : with specimens and translation . Ill COLOPHONS AT VENICE. HILE to Mainz belongs the su-preme credit of having broughtprinting to the position of apractical art, the city in which itattained its highest perfection andpopularity in the fifteenth centurywas undoubtedly Venice. Theoutput from the Venetian pressesrepresented some forty per cent, of the entire book pro-duction of Italy, and its quality was at least as remark-able as its quantity. It is natural, therefore, to turn fromMainz to Venice in our quest for interesting colophons,as wherever printers did good work and took pride in itwe may expect to find correspondingly good at Venice we have no ground for disappoint-ment in this respect. The Venetian colophons are plenti-ful and full of information, though chiefly about thepublishers side of printing. What makes them a little 3° COLOPHONS AT VENICE 31 alarming to the pedestrian editor is that so many of theearliest and most interesting specimens are in verse. Thebooks most favored by the first Venetian printers weree
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Keywords: ., bookauthorpollardalfredwalfredw, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900
