Note 141 — XIV

The Dutch folio of Jan de Mandeville, placed by Holtrop about 1470, as a work of printing, is so bad that the earliest editions of the Speculum are masterpieces by the side of it. The work of an unknown Schiedam printer of the latter part of the fifteenth century is equally bad. The Brussels incunabula of the Brotherhood of the Life-in-Common are bad; those of Arnold ter Hoorne at Cologne (1471–83) are sometimes barbarous. Heineken mentions a book printed in Augsburg in 1557, and says: “If the name of the engraver on wood and the date had not been found, one might think that this was the oldest book in the world.” In the series of the different Dutch incunabula of this kind, the Speculum presents itself very favorably; it is not badly, but well printed; it is not a first experiment, but the fruit of practice. Dr. Van der Linde, Haarlem Legend of the Invention of Printing, p. 37.