Early Printed Books

A meticulous survey of the printing revolution that transformed fifteenth-century Europe. Duff, one of the great bibliographers, traces the spread of press technology from Mainz across Germany, Italy, France, the Low Countries, and England, revealing how regional traditions emerged in type design, illustration, and binding. He treats the book not as text alone but as physical artifact: the paper, the ink, the folding, the stitching. Rather than speculation, Duff builds from documentary evidence and surviving copies, offering a granular portrait of how early printers actually worked and what their workshops looked like. The chapter on incunabula remains essential reading for understanding that brief, magical period when each printed book still carried the hand-press sensibility of its manuscript ancestors. This is a book for bibliophiles, collectors, and anyone who has ever held a fifteenth-century leaf and wondered about the hands that made it.