Printer brand
Some of the first printer attached to their works to identify clearly to their origin, so-called printer's marks : (also printer signets , printers sign in). These proof of copyright should primarily act as legal symbols and protect the printed matter against unlawful reprinting by third parties. In the absence of a binding copyright , the printer brands could not fulfill the legal function intended for them. As a result, they increasingly lost their original function, but developed into an important part of book decoration . As a result, they were used exclusively for decorative and representative purposes.
Printer marks are to be distinguished from print marks .
Origin and function
The oldest printer's signature was probably used by Johannes Fust and Peter Schöffer in 1462 in their 48-line Latin Bible . The first printer brands were in wood or metal cutting performed because these high-pressure techniques ideal with the typographic printing could be combined.
The printed works of the incunable period still appeared without a title page . Instead, the first printers often added a final text to their writings, which contained more detailed information on the authorship and the circumstances in which the work was created. The information in the so-called Colophon (also: Explicit ) was by no means always complete. It was not until the last three decades of the 15th century that complete printing notes became common, containing the name of the printer, the sponsor and the publisher , the place of printing and an exact date. In connection with these printing notes, pictorial representations and symbols appeared more and more frequently as early as the incunable period , which identified the printed matter as the product of a very specific workshop . These pictorial proof of copyright are known as printer's marks, printer's marks or printer's signets.
At the time of their creation, printer's marks served primarily as legal symbols that were intended to protect the products of an off- press shop against the widespread illegal reprinting . Furthermore, the signets were considered symbols that vouched for quality of craftsmanship and content. The fundamental difference to the commercial brands of the merchants consisted in the pictorial quality of the printer's brands . While the trademarks were quite simple marks and only served as proof of ownership and origin, the artistically designed printer's signets had a deeper meaning. Their imagery referred to the educational standards of the book printer and symbolized the close intellectual connection between author and work.
Since there was no generally valid and binding copyright law in the incunable period and the following centuries, printer brands were unable to fulfill their original function of protecting printed works as legal symbols against unlawful reprinting in a satisfactory manner. That is why the use, meaning and design of printer characters developed in a completely new direction. They now served as a representation for the signet company and became part of the artistic and aesthetic book design. Accordingly, the still quite simple signet shapes and motifs of the 15th century developed into the symbolic and narrative representations of the 16th century . What an important part of book design the printer's brands and, in their successor, the publisher's signets became, can be seen from the fact that in the 16th and 17th centuries, books without a signet were the absolute exception.
historical development
Although the earliest documents mostly still closely in their typographic and artistic design to the manuscripts of the Middle Ages anlehnten, printer brands no direct model in the manuscript tradition have. They are undoubtedly a development of the 15th century printing workshops. As far as we know today, the oldest printer's stamp can be found under the colophon of the 48-line Biblia latina from the Mainz office of Johannes Fust and Peter Schöffer, which was completed on August 14, 1462 . Fust's and Schöffers' signet, which showed two coats of arms hanging on a branch , was soon taken by other printers as a model for designing their own printer's symbols.
While printer's brands were relatively small in the 15th century and were mainly made up of coats of arms or house brands , in the following century logos with diverse and richly decorated image content were created. Due to the functional change of printer brands from legal symbols to representative book decorations, an artistic competition was started in which all signet companies tried to develop a particularly beautiful, artistically independent and individually tailored printer's logo. In the course of the 16th century, a large number of graphic miniature works of art were created that were rich in symbols, allegories and figurative representations. This sometimes even meant that the actual signet motif was pushed into the background by the overflowing decorative elements.
While in the early days of book printing the professions of printer, publisher and bookseller were mostly still united in one and the same person ( printer publisher ), this resulted in extensive specialization in these fields of activity. In the course of this development in the late 16th century, the printer's marks withdrew in favor of the publisher's mark (also: publisher's marks). At the beginning of the 17th century, the artistic design of the logos became increasingly flattened. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these then increasingly took the form of small vignettes . Soon they were completely abandoned. It was not until the turn of the 19th to the 20th century that the publisher's signature appeared again. Simplifications of historical company logos, simple symbols or monograms were mostly chosen as motifs . Printer brands had long since disappeared from the books by this time.
literature
- Ferdinand Geldner : Incunabulum. An introduction to the world of the earliest book printing (= elements of the book and library system. Vol. 5). Reichert, Wiesbaden 1978, ISBN 3-920153-60-X .
- Heinrich Grimm: German printer's signature of the XVI. Century. History, meaning and design of small cultural documents. Pressler, Wiesbaden 1965.
- Heinrich Grimm: About German letterpress of the XV. and XVI. Century. In: Philobiblion. June 1967.
- Annemarie Meiner: The German logo. A contribution to cultural history. German Association for Book Studies and Literature, Leipzig 1922 (also: Leipzig, university, dissertation, from January 17, 1922).
- Henning Wendland: printer's mark. In: Severin Corsten (Ed.): Lexicon of the entire book system. LGB 2. Volume 2: Buck - Foster. 2nd, completely revised and expanded edition. Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-7772-8911-6 , p. 367.
- Henning Wendland: Signet. German printer and publisher's mark 1457–1600. Schlueter, Hannover 1984, ISBN 3-87706-189-3 .
- Reinhard Würffel: Lexicon of German publishers from A – Z. 1071 publishers and 2800 publisher's signets from the beginning of book printing to 1945. Addresses, dates, facts, names. Verlag Grotesk, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-9803147-1-5 .
- Anja Wolkenhauer : Too difficult for Apollo. Antiquity in humanistic printer's marks of the 16th century (= Wolfenbütteler Schriften zur Geschichte des Buches. Vol. 35). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2002, ISBN 3-447-04717-8 (also: Hamburg, University, dissertation, 2000).
- Signa vides. Researching and recording printers' devices. Papers presented on 17-18 March 2015 at the CERL Workshop, hosted by the National Library of Austria, Vienna, ed. By M. Scheibe / A. Wolkenhauer , London 2015 ( CERL Studies) [digitally at https: //www.cerl .org / _media / publications / cerl_papers / cerl_papers_xiii.pdf]
- Typographorum emblemata . The Printer's Mark in the Context of Early Modern Culture, ed by Anja Wolkenhauer and Bernhard F. Scholz, Walter de Gruyter , Berlin / NY 2018 (Schriftmedien 4) ISBN 978-3-11-043919-9 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Heinrich Grimm: New contributions to the "fish literature" of the XV. to XVII. Century and through their printer and bookkeeper. In: Börsenblatt for the German book trade - Frankfurt edition. No. 89, November 5, 1968 (= Archive for the History of Books. Volume 62), pp. 2871–2887, p. 2876.