Case 9
- Venice: Incunabula
Bible. Latin Vulgate. Venice: Johannes Herbort de Seligenstadt, 1483.
Johannes Herbort de Seligenstadt (d. Oct. 1484) was a German printer who began his printing career in Padua in 1475. In 1481, he relocated to Venice, where he found financial backing by the two most powerful Venetian printers Johannes de Colonia and Nicolaus Jenson.
Herbort ultimately issued three editions of the Bible, and the Reed Collection copy is of his second version, dating to 1483. His printing enterprise must have been a large establishment, since it is estimated his press produced over 5,300 leaves in double-column and large format, within thirteen months to the end of 1481.
Bible. Latin Vulgate. Venice: Simon Bevilaqua, 1498.
As a hugely important centre of trade and commerce, Venice naturally attracted the businessmen of the printing trade, and approximately 150 presses were active there by 1500.
Simon Bevilaqua (fl. 1485–1518) began his printing career in Vicenza where he worked from 1487 to 1491. His first book was a 1487 edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogiae deorum libri XV. Bevilaqua produced five other titles before moving to Venice sometime in 1491 or early 1492. The first fully authenticated book to come from his Venetian press is an edition of the Doctrinale by Alexander de Villa Dei published in 1492. Bevilaqua was employed by numerous publishers and patrons but appears to have become an itinerant printer in the early sixteenth century. His name is linked to four different towns before he settled in Lyons in 1515.
The 1498 Vulgate Bible displayed here contains the woodcuts taken from the Italian Bibles translated by Nicolo Malermi and first printed in Venice in 1490.
