Collecting Incunabula and Fifteenth-Century Printed Books
The term incunabula refers to books printed in Europe from the beginnings of printing with movable type to the end of 1500. The word derives from the Latin incunabula, meaning swaddling clothes or beginnings, and came to describe books produced during the formative decades in which printing developed from an experimental technology into one of the principal means by which texts circulated across Europe.
These books occupy a distinctive position between manuscript and print. Early printers worked within a visual culture still shaped by handwritten books, and many incunabula deliberately imitate manuscript conventions. Spaces were left for initials to be supplied by hand, headings might be added in red by a rubricator, and decoration could range from simple penwork to elaborate painted initials. Individual copies were then bound, annotated, corrected and used by their owners, so that two examples of the same edition can preserve very different histories.
For collectors, this material therefore extends well beyond the identification of an edition. The press, printer and date are fundamental, but the physical history of the individual book can be equally important. Contemporary and early bindings, manuscript annotations, ownership inscriptions, coats of arms, library marks, rubrication and other evidence of use can establish where a copy travelled and how it was read. Condition and completeness matter, but an imperfect book with important provenance or extensive contemporary annotation may sometimes be historically more revealing than a cleaner copy.
The fifteenth century also saw extraordinary geographical expansion in printing. From Mainz the new technology spread rapidly through the German lands and into Italy, France, the Low Countries and elsewhere. Major centres including Venice, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Basel, Cologne and Paris developed distinctive printing traditions, while individual printers experimented with type, page design, illustration and the organisation of texts. Classical authors, theology, canon and civil law, medicine, philosophy, chronicles and devotional works all entered print on a scale that would have been impossible in manuscript alone.
Incunabula can also be important sources for the intellectual history of Poland and Central Europe. Books printed elsewhere in Europe circulated into Polish ecclesiastical, academic and private collections, while Polish scholars, clerics and travellers participated in the wider networks through which texts and ideas moved. Provenance can therefore transform what appears at first to be a German, Italian or French printed book into evidence for Polish collecting, scholarship or institutional history.
At Antykwariat Woodward, we approach incunabula as historical objects as well as bibliographical ones. Our cataloguing considers the edition and its place in the history of printing, but also the individual copy: its binding, annotations, provenance, decoration, later ownership and any connection it may preserve with a particular person, institution or place. Particular attention is given to material of Polish significance and to copies in which the surviving evidence permits a more complete reconstruction of their history.
The books offered here form part of that continuing research. Some are important for their texts or editions, others for the circumstances of their production or survival, and others because the individual copy preserves a history that cannot be understood from bibliography alone.
Read our specialist guide to incunabula here.
