Printing materials and technologies in the 15th–17th century book production: An undervalued research field
Introduction
We performed an extensive physical/chemical investigation of sixty scientific printed books, from the preliminary imaging analysis to a series of point measurements. Due to the high historical value of the objects, we used only non-invasive and non-destructive techniques such as imaging analysis and X-ray fluorescence(XRF) investigations.
The sixty books, part of the Ateneo Veneto collection [1] were printed between the 15th and the 17th centuries in some of the main early European manufacturing centers: Basel (now Switzerland); Amsterdam, Leiden and Rotterdam (now the Netherlands); Paris, Lion and Strasburg (now France); Cologne, Herbert and Frankfurt (now Germany); and Florence and Venice (now Italy).
The books cover a variety of topics, and they include important documents such as the astronomy text “De reuolutionibus orbium coelestium” of Nicolaus Copernicus, printed in Basel in 1566; medical manuals such as the "Exercitationes anatomicae, de motu cordis & sanguinis circulatione" by William Harvey, printed in Rotterdam in 1660; physics and mathematics textbooks like "Meditationes de natura plantarum, et Tractatus physicomathematicus de aequilibrio praesertim fluidorumthe" by Giovanni Maria Ciassi, printed in 1677 in Venice.
An important fact is that all the books in the corpus were stored together for more than two centuries in Venetian convents and afterwards in the Ateneo Veneto. This unique and uniform conservation history allowed the evaluation of results without the interference of different degradation processes.
Until the early 15th century, all documents were written by hand using a variety of materials — supports, inks and binders. The invention of the “industrial” printing by Johannes Gutenberg in 1455 [2], [3] radically changed the world of texts in Europe.
The re-adaptation of the existing screw press and the use of movable metal types made the production of books extremely rapid, more abundant in numbers and increasingly less expensive compared to the traditional one [4]. In few decades, an almost total conversion from handwritten to printed books occurred [5].
Moreover, the traditional variety of writing supports were replaced by mass-produced papers, more homogeneous and standardized. Likewise, the inks radically changed: from the widespread use of the Iron-Gall inks for handwritten documents [6], [7], [8], [9], [10] to the use of carbon-based inks [11].
Our work follows previous investigations of the origins of printing with advanced analytical techniques.
We would like to mention, in particular, the important investigations of the Gutenberg Bible inks [12], [13], [14], [15], the work of Manso et al. on elemental analysis of ancient papers [16], [17], [18] and the investigation of paper degradation by Stephens et al. [19] and Dupont [20].
Moreover, important background is the pioneering and broad study of ancient papers performed by the Barrow's Lab published in the 1974 [21] and significantly expanded by Barrett et al. in 2016 [22]. However, even these extensive efforts provide a limited picture of the very large collection of early printed specimens. More work is needed, and our present program is a contribution in this direction. Specifically, we consider here the historical evolution from handwriting to printing technologies, a very interesting and multi-faceted issue.
Section snippets
Materials and methods
The large size of the corpus and the need for significant comparisons of the results imposed the a priori definition of the methodology for the analysis. In particular:
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We performed imaging analysis of all the bindings (when present), the first pages, the title pages and at least of three internal pages (chosen as explained below);
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We performed imaging and point investigations on three pages of each book: a page in the first half, one in the center and one in the last half. For each page, we
Conclusions
The preliminary visual inspection and the imaging analysis revealed the general good condition of the corpus. Moreover, they highlighted two exceptions: the white paper and perfect readability of the Venetian volumes and the strong paper yellowing of the German and – partially – the Swiss examples.
Despite the general homogeneity of the materials, a PCA analysis allowed to clearly differentiate between the paper and other materials — type and xylography inks.
Moreover, the combination of Logistic
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Ateneo Veneto for its essential help, for the invaluable assistance of the staff of the “Chemistry Laboratory for Conservation and Restoration”, to Ferruccio Petrucci and Anna Impallaria for their assistance for the XRF chemical analysis and for several stimulating discussions. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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