When you accidentally type “moon faces” into Google instead of “moon phases.” Oops! This resting moon face is from Liber Chronicarum (1493).

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When you accidentally type “moon faces” into Google instead of “moon phases.” Oops! This resting moon face is from Liber Chronicarum (1493).
The word "incunabula" is Latin, a neuter plural meaning "swaddling clothes" or "cradle." In book history, it is used to refer to all books printed with metal type from the beginning of Gutenberg's movable type printing press, around 1455, to the end of 1500. This is an arbitrary but traditional date that marks the end of the "infancy" of printing, as it rapidly spread to centers across Europe and into the Americas. Known as "incunables" in Spanish and French (and often in English), "incunaboli" in Italian, and "incunábulos" in Portuguese, these earliest of printed books have long been of great interest to librarians, book collectors, and historians of the book.
What Are Incunabula?, The University of Chicago Library
Ink spill!
Recto and verso (front/back), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (printed by Elisabeth de Rusconibus), Venice, 1527. Madrid, Universidad Complutense.
Source: @ AntigoneJournal on Twitter
This page is from a collection of leaves from incunables - books printed in roughly the first 50 years of printing technology. It was printed in Augsburg by Hans Bämler in 1475. The woodcut shows a scene of martyrdom.
(via University of Missouri Digital Library)
Summer Series: The Spectacle of Nature
Ortus sanitatis, or “Garden of Health”
Today we are looking at a natural history book from the incunabula period, meaning it was printed before the year 1501. Hortus sanitatis (also written Ortus sanitatis, Latin for The Garden of Health), is a natural history encyclopedia that was first published by Jacob Meydenbach in Mainz, Germany in 1491. Not much is known about the author, but the Hortus sanitatis is considered one of the earliest printed natural history books and it is encyclopedic in its approach, covering plants animals, birds, fish, and stones. It is illustrated with numerous woodcuts throughout. The copy I looked from UW-Madison Special Collections is uncolored, but there are hand-colored copies that exist. The frontispiece depicts what looks like alchemists and their jars of elixirs. Along with naturalistic woodcuts of plants and animals, the book also features many biblical scenes such as Adam and Eve. A notable aspect of the Hortus sanitatis is that it was one of the last herbals to only feature Old World plants and it is in the Medieval herbal tradition. We will discuss the impact of voyages of exploration on the science of botany in later posts.
The two pages of the Valencian Bible that survived the Inquisition.
Did you know that Catalan/Valencian was the 4th language in the world that the Bible was printed in? Known as the Valencian Bible, it was printed in 1477, only after the Vulgate in Latin (1448), the translation to German (1466) and Italian (1471).
The first translation of the Bible in the Catalan language had been made by the Catholic Church between 1287 and 1290 but, as you’ll know, the printing press wasn’t invented until 1440, so before that date all books had to be copied by hand.
The printing press allowed for many more books to be produced in less time and for cheaper, and so more copies came to be in circulation.
However, in 1482 the Inquisition started an investigation because it suspected the Valencian Bible might be heretic. The Inquisition burned all the copies of this bible and imprisoned Daniel Vives, the corrector who had worked in the text and who the Inquisition considered responsible for it.
Only two pages have survived, which had been kept inside another book. In the early 1900s, it was bought by North Americans and nowadays it’s kept in New York (USA).
INVENTION | Plus vieux livre en France (À quand remonte le) ? ➽ https://bit.ly/3brWPj0 Le tout premier livre imprimé en France date de 1470, vingt ans après l'invention de l'imprimerie par Gutenberg. Son impression est d'autant plus symbolique que l'ouvrage s'adressait au domaine scolaire, aux étudiants de l'Université de Paris pour améliorer leur latin
Lucifer devours Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot in Dante’s Inferno.
Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Divina commedia. IImpressi i[n] Venesia : P[er] Bernardino Benali & Matthio da Parma, del MCCCCLXXXXI adi .iii. marzo [3 March 1491]
Inc 4877 (B)
Houghton Library, Harvard University.