An Example of Netherlands Prototypography in the Huntington

Abstract

P erhaps the most often printed and ill surviving fifteenth-century book is the elementary grammar of Donatus, Ars minor. The Incunabula ShortTitle Catalogue has nearly four hundred entries unter this title, although the number of editions or even physical books these entries represent is far from certain. The Donatus grammar was one of the first books printed; copies were well used and read to pieces. Nearly all of the earliest extant examples (those from the printing centers of Mainz or the Netherlands) are fragments that were used as binding material in other books. Very few of these fragments are housed in American libraries, and we have recently discovered (or rediscovered) fragments of an early Netherlands edition in a binding at the Huntington (see fig. 1).' These fragments are the only fifteenth-century example of the Ars minor recorded in the Huntington's collection, although it is possible that our ongoing survey of incunable bindings may turn up additional examples. The book containing these fragments is from the Van Ess collection, a group of nine hundred incunables sold by Leander Van Ess to Sir Thomas Phillipps in 1824, most of which were sold to Henry E. Huntington in 1924. Van Ess books are generally preserved in their original bindings and, including the example at the Huntington, they have so far have yielded up two fragments of early Dutch printing.2