Reproducing a 15th century incunable
What better thing to use a Printing Press for, then to print an actual book? That was the Graal for the first printers, the Gutenberg Bible being the most famous and well-known incunable, and definitely one of the most beautiful printed books in the 15th century, from a technical point of view.
We are not as ambitious, or magnanimous, and the first book that came out from the press was an edition of the popular Aesop Fables, in medieval German language, with a selection of the fables composed with moveable type and woodcut illustrations.
A note on nomenclature: an incunable (English), from the Latin incunabula, is the name for books, broadsides, and other materials printed before the year 1501. The Latin term means ‘swaddling clothes, cradle’, so referring to the birth of printing in Europe.
The Aesop Fables had more than 150 separate editions in the second half of the 15th century, in different European languages. Our first edition is based on the Vita et Fabulae from 1479, translated from Latin into German by Heinrich Steinhöwel.
The text is set in Nürnberger Schwabacher with woodcut initials and illustrations, printed on archival paper. This limited edition book has 48 pages, bound by Chris Wenzel from Kopert.de.
