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Summary:
Gutenberg is the inventor of printing in the Western world, or so we were taught in school. Historians are less than convinced, since there is no direct evidence or testimony that this is the case. Historians work as detectives and gather clues out of the printed books themselves and out of archive documents. This is how the Gutenberg story was written, reaching the conclusion that his major achievement was printing the Bible in Latin by the year 1455 in Mainz, Germany.
This presentation comes to share a new detective work that brings to light an earlier printer and printed book. To follow the investigation some review of the historical paper manufacture process and 16th century print technology is needed.
In Avignon, France, in 1890 Pierre Henri Requin published results of his survey of notarial archives. He found out about Procope Waldvogel, a silversmith from Prague living in Avignon, who conceived a new method called ars artificialiter scribendi, the art of artificial writing. He is known through notarial contracts he signed with people he recruited, under non-disclosure clause, as partners, apprentices and money lenders. The contracts mention sets of metal letters, tools and equipment like a screw. For Requin there is no doubt that Waldvogel’s secret invention was printing. All this happened in the years 1444 - 1446, before the time when the 1455-Bible came off the press of Mainz.
Waldvogel recruited a local Jew, Davin de Caderousse, an expert in fabric dying. Waldvogel prepared for Davin Hebrew types in metal. After the dissolution of their partnership in 1446, Waldvogel left Avignon and relinquished the Hebrew types in the hands of Davin. This is the first mention in history of Hebrew metal moving types.
In 2015 a set of Hebrew printed sheets was discovered in Jerusalem inside the binding of a Hebrew book. They were shown to experts at the National Library of Israel. One obvious detail is the watermark found on one of the sheets, that they identified with a known watermark recorded in Perpignan, France, and dated 1418. The design of this watermark is made of three hills inside two rings, with a cross on the central hill. (See picture below) They easily recognized the font used in this print as Spanish semi-cursive, pointing to that side of Europe as an origin, rather than Ashkenazi types which refer to Central Europe. The experts’ conclusion was that the discovered sheets are a probable product of the Avignon 1444 - 1446 printing endeavor.
In 2018, a team of the Institute for Computerized Bibliography of the Hebrew Book took upon itself to revisit all evidences. The team visited libraries and archives to see the watermarks with the specific three-hill design in their context. After a year of visits an intermediate conclusion could be reached. Three hills inside two rings, with a cross on the central hill is a not so common design. The design belongs to a limited range of years, between 1418 and 1439. None of the visited watermarks had the same chain line distance as the investigated sheets, except one found in Fabriano, Italy. The Fabriano watermark, though, was found on a document bearing the date of 1536. The context analysis could accommodate the fact that the document was written a century after the paper was manufactured, although in general it is assumed that the time between manufacturing and usage is much smaller. But what about printing? Can it be stated that the paper was manufactured in 1439 and the sheets were printed in 1536?
By taking high-resolution pictures of a book, image processing allows to attribute to this book a metric that reflects the homogeneity of the printed letters. The metric was applied to three books, the investigated sheets, a book printed in Lisbon in 1489 and a book printed in Venice in 1519. All selected books use the Spanish semi cursive Hebrew font. The quantitative result of this analysis showed that the 1519 Venice book exhibits good homogeneity, the 1489 Lisbon book is less homogeneous. The investigated sheets have by far a lower score testifying for poor printing skills and most likely pointing at an early stage of the development of the printing craft.
Checking for known print shops using Spanish semi cursive Hebrew fonts in the 15th century and early 16th century, no match could be found with the sheets under investigation.
Following evidences gathered from the investigated sheets help reach a conclusion:
- Type inhomogeneity points at early 15th century print
- Presence of a watermark design recorded in the years 1418 - 1439
- No other known print shop using matching Spanish semi-cursive Hebrew font
Based on those evidence, the most plausible conclusion that those sheets are the product of the Avignon print shop led by Procope Waldvogel whose activity is recorded between the years 1444 - 1446.