Printing materials and technologies in the 15th–17th century book production: An undervalued research field

Highlights

• Study of the early printing technologies and of their evolution

• Systematic non-invasive investigation of sixty European volumes printed in the 15th–17th centuries

• Clear differences between Venetian and German (and most of the Swiss) volumes

• The combination of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Logistic Regression identified a potential chemical fingerprint of the difference between Venetian and German papers.

Abstract

We present a systematic non-invasive investigation of a large corpus of early printed books, exploiting multiple techniques. This work is part of a broader project – Argeia – aiming to study early printing technologies, their evolution and, potentially, the identification of physical/chemical fingerprints of different manufactures and/or printing dates. We analyzed sixty volumes, part of the important collection of the Ateneo Veneto in Venice (Italy), printed between the 15th and the 17th centuries in the main European manufacturing centers.

We present here the results of the imaging analysis of the entire corpus and the X-ray fluorescence (XRF) investigation performed, focusing on the XRF data and their statistical treatment using a combination of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Logistic Regression. Thanks to the broad XRF investigation – more than 200 data points – and to the multidisciplinary approach, we were able to discriminate the provenances of the paper – in particular for the German and Venetian volumes – and we potentially identified a chemical fingerprint of Venetian papers.

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.