Friedrich Creussner, incunable pastedowns, and the early book trade
The two items discussed in this blog post can be found under Featured Books.
What do a Golden Legend printed in Strasbourg (1502) and a teaching compendium printed in Lyons (1506) have in common? In a fascinating bibliographical symmetry, our copies of these editions were both bound using incunable fragments originating from the same Nuremberg printer: Friedrich Creussner (active 1472–1499). This blog post explores the reuse of printed material in late medieval bindings and what these two books can tell us about the early book trade in Europe.
Left to right: rear pastedowns of Legenda Aurea (1502)
and a teaching compendium (1506)
In the medieval and early modern periods, bookbinders often reused 'waste' material from discarded books to support the bindings of new ones.[1] Such pages had, for one reason or another, surpassed their usefulness textually—but remained useful to the bookbinder for their materiality. For example, fragments of manuscripts or printed books could be used to create spine linings, or serve as endpapers at the front and back of the book. Binders need not be confined to just manuscript or print for such purposes; in fact, our teaching compendium (1506) reuses fragments from both:
While the broader phenomenon of recycling in bookbinding is not unusual, what is particularly interesting in our case is that we find reused material originating from the same Nuremberg printer in the bindings of two different books—neither of which were printed in that city.
The Nuremberg printer in question, Friedrich Creussner, produced over 200 editions including the first edition in German of Marco Polo’s travels and the first separate Latin edition of Tacitus’s Germania. However, he was eventually outcompeted by Anton Koberger, who famously printed the Nuremberg Chronicle.[2]
Legenda Aurea (1502)
The rear pastedown in our Legenda Aurea (1502) derives from a copy of Creussner’s 1478 edition of Juan de Torquemada’s Quaestiones Evangeliorum de tempore et de sanctis. Creussner’s imprint is the second or third known edition of this work on the Gospels written by the uncle of Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498), First Grand Inquisitor of Spain. The surviving page quotes heavily from Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, book 1, distinctio 16—a section concerning the Holy Spirit. It features Creussner’s most notable type, 110G, which has been described as one of the finest early German Gotico-antiqua types. Its forms later influenced an early twentieth century private letterpress: the Officina serpentis in Berlin.[3]
The binding itself was almost certainly decorated in Nuremberg, as there are striking similarities to stamps used by the ‘Madonna, Nuremberg’ workshop (active 1473–1503), and likenesses to three other roughly contemporary Nuremberg workshops (see further here). Given that Creussner worked in Nuremberg, it seems that our binder had access to waste material from a local printer. Our textblock presumably travelled from Strasbourg to Nuremberg in an unbound or semi-bound state, quite possibly in order to save costs.
Wider evidence for the Strasbourg-Nuremberg book trade in this era interestingly involves Creussner himself. In c.1476-1477, he printed an advertisement for 31 editions issued in Nuremberg, Augsburg, Strasbourg, and Basel by himself and other printers (istc ic00976000). This advertisement might have functioned as a stock list for a travelling bookseller, or alternatively it might have ‘served for several deposits in various places’.[4]
Teaching compendium (1506)
Our second book was not printed in Strasbourg but in Lyon -- yet here we also find pastedowns deriving from a Creussner imprint. Specifically, the pastedowns are fragments from Creussner's only edition of Michael Lochmaier's Parochiale curatorum, printed not after 1493 (ISTC il00267000). The Parochiale curatorum is a quarto, whereas the Boethius is a folio. For this reason, bifolia (double sheets) from the former were needed to cover the large boards of the latter. As demonstrated in the diagram below, these two bifolia were in fact consecutive, both deriving from quire d of the Parochiale curatorum:
Interestingly, these sheets were probably never used as originally conceived. Conspicuously, there are no signs of stitching in the gutter, and these pages have not been corrected, as the corresponding pages in bound copies were.
When Creussner printed Lochmaier's Parochiale curatorum, several pages had the wrong headlines. As Randall Herz explains, 'Instead of reprinting the sheets with increased production costs and delay, Creussner solved the problem by having the correct headlines printed on separate paper, arranged so that they could be cut into narrow strips and pasted over the faulty running titles.' [5]
Consider sigs. d7r and d8r in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek copy, digitized here. Thanks to paste-in corrections, the recto headlines correctly read 'De penitentijs recipiendis'. Conversely, our fragments preserve erroneous headlines (De Oblacionibus).
It would appear that Creussner did not correct all copies of the Parochiale curatorum; perhaps they sold their copies ready-stitched and sewn prior to binding, in which case they would certainly know which examples to paste corrections to. In any case, when our loose sheets were eventually discarded as waste paper, there would no longer have been any need to correct the text.
Which binding workshop gave these sheets a new lease of life? By comparison with the Legenda Aurea, the exterior of this binding is far less easy to localise. The leather to the spine was replaced c.1700 with alum-tawed pigskin, and as such yields no clues to the binding's origin. The original hook clasp fastenings are still in situ, but are of a kind 'common in Germany and Austria'[6], complicating efforts to pin down a more specific region. Nonetheless, given the presence of Creussner's unused sheets in the pastedowns, it seems highly plausible to us that this book was bound in Nuremberg using local printer's waste, as we saw with the Legenda Aurea above.
Moving East
A further connection between these two books concerns their later provenance: in the sixteenth century, both books appear to have moved eastwards into Austria and surrounding areas. Our copy of the teaching compendium (1506) appears to have been at the Benedictine Abbey of Garsten Abbey (discussed further here). For comparison, the Legenda Aurea (1502) has an ownership inscription connected to Christopher Collatinus, alias of Christoph Pühler (approx. 1500–1583), a mathematician born in Siklos, Hungary. In his Ein kurtze vnd grundliche anlaytung zu dem rechten verstand Geometriæ [A short and systematic introduction to the right understanding of geometry] (1563), Pühler claims to have been taught in Vienna by Peter Apian (1495–1552), an influential mathematician and astronomer who is perhaps best known for his visually impressive Astronomicum Caesareum. As Pühler is known to have spent time in Siklos, Vienna, and Passau, the book could theoretically have moved with him between any of these places.[7]
Closing Remarks
In sum, the two books surveyed in this blog post offer fascinating parallel stories that coalesce around Friedrich Creussner and the book trade in Nuremberg.
The earliest possible date for each binding is provided by the imprint date of the textblocks (1502 and 1506 respectively). Conspicuously, both bindings must therefore postdate Creussner's last known professional activity (1499) -- but perhaps not by long. This raises the interesting possibility that waste paper was discarded en masse when (or shortly after) Creussner ceased printing, perhaps causing an influx of sorts. It might, in fact, help to explain how several decades could pass between the printing of Creussner's Quaestiones Evangeliorum de tempore et de sanctis (1478) and the appearance of a fragment from that print run in the binding of a Legenda Aurea at the turn of the sixteenth century. With the current evidence, of course, this can only be speculation.
Further research might shed interesting light on this topic, especially if other Creussner fragments in pastedowns were to come to light. We note with interest that ISTC records further fragments for both of the Creussner imprints discussed in this blog post, though these are beyond the present scope.
Notes
[1] See example Ryley 2022.
[2] Ohly 1957.
[3] Ohly 1957.
[4] Hellinga 2018, p. 36.
[5] Herz 2011, p. 69.
[6] Szirmai 1999, p. 260.
[7] Cf. Morel 2017, p. 160.
Bibliography
Hellinga, Lotte, Incunabula in Transit: People and Trade (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
Herz, Randall, 'Three Fifteenth Century Proof Sheets with Manuscript Corrections from Nuremberg Presses', Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 86 (2011): 56-76.
Herz, Randall, 'Proof sheets as evidence of early pre-publication procedures', in Geri Della Rocca de Candal, Anthony Grafton, and Paolo Sachet (eds.), A Companion to Mistakes and In-House Corrections in Renaissance Europe (1450-1650) (Oxford: OUP, 2023), pp. 51-69.
Morel, Thomas, ‘Bringing Euclid into the Mines: Classical Sources and Vernacular Knowledge in the Development of Subterranean Geometry’, in Sietske Fransen et al. (eds.) Translating Early Modern Science (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 154-81.
Ohly, Kurt, ‘Creussner, Friedrich’, Neue Deutsche Biographie 3 (1957), 412, last accessed 15 December 2022 via https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd135725259.html#ndbcontent.
Ryley, Hannah, Re-using Manuscripts in Late Medieval England: Repairing, Recycling, Sharing (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2022).
Pickwoad, Nicholas, 'Unfinished Business: Incomplete Bindings made for the Booktrade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century', Quaerendo 50(1-2): 41-80.
Pollard, Graham, and Albert Ehrman, The Distribution of Books by Catalogue from the Invention of Printing to A.D. 1800 based on Materials in the Broxbourne Library (Cambridge: Printed for presentation to members of the Roxburghe Club, 1965).
Szirmai, J. A., The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding (London, Routledge, 1999).