Noble Fragments - Kinney Center,  Opens: 27 September 2023

“Noble Fragments: Early Printing from Gutenberg to Shakespeare”

Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Fall 2023

This exhibit tells the story of the print revolution in Renaissance Europe and the emergence of the book in its modern form. The exhibit’s title derives from publications in the 1920s that marketed leaves from damaged and disbound copies of the Gutenberg Bible (1454-1455) and Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623), iconic artifacts in the history of printing, under the title A Noble Fragment.  The “noble fragments” exhibited here remind us that books are unmade as well as made: they come apart over time, but they are also often reassembled and repurposed in ways that leave traces of that history on their pages. The exhibition concludes with a copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio (1632), an important version of the most iconic gathering of “noble fragments” in English literature. Books  are lively objects that connect us: to the books themselves, to ourselves, and to one another. Each of the books, leaves, and printed pages on display in this exhibit —scattered, fragmented, torn, eaten by mice, even scorched by a candle’s flame—invite us to reimagine the resilience of the printed word, never more fully in force than when it has been unbound. 

Throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, additional books from this collection will be on display at the Kinney Center as part of the Shakespeare Unbound campuswide exhibit. Future exhibitions at the Kinney Center will feature other books from this collection focusing on a wide variety of themes, including: Shakespeare and the Renaissance of the Earth (Winter 2024) and Shakespeare in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Spring 2024). 

Exhibition Catalogue

1. The Gutenberg Bible (Mainz: J. Gutenberg, 1454-1455) is not only the earliest substantial book printed in Europe, it is also a masterpiece of typesetting and printing. Johannes Gutenberg’s print shop set standards in quality of type, paper, ink, page design, and sheer professional skill that printers of any later generation have found difficult to match. That Gutenberg was able to produce a book of this quality while solving a multitude of technical problems is astonishing. 

2. Gutenberg’s innovative solutions created a long-lived technology: workmen from his shop would be familiar with every element of the type making and printing processes depicted in the mid-eighteenth-century illustrations.

3. The Gutenberg Bible launched a “print revolution,” but as far as book design was concerned, the revolution was slow moving. Early printed books looked identical to the manuscripts they would eventually supplant. Notice the double columns of tightly set black letter type with numerous abbreviations on a leaf from a Latin Bible copied in Paris, c. 1220. 

Up Close: How different do you think the manuscript Bible page looks from the Gutenberg Bible page, printed over 200 years later? Imagine 200 years from now: how different might our books look from the way they do today? It took decades for printers to introduce the reader-friendly features we now take for granted: title-pages, page numbers, cross-references, line-numbering in poetry, for example. 

By 1500, printers had introduced our familiar Roman and Italic type fonts, and successfully integrated illustrations, maps, charts, and tables into their texts. 

4. A leaf from Petrarch, Opera (Basle: J. Amerbach, 1496) displays the Roman type developed and perfected in the later decades of the fifteenth century. Many fonts in computer menus today are based on or named after type designers working in the first century after Gutenberg.

5. A leaf from a commentary on the Roman poet Martial (Venice: Aldine Press, 1513). The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius introduced italic type in 1500. Its elegance and efficiency of space soon made it very popular and defined the look of the best-selling humanist editions of classical writers Aldus produced. 

6. The Aldine press developed a similarly elegant font for printing in Greek, exemplified here in a leaf from an edition of Lucian (Basle, 1545).

7. A leaf from an early sixteenth-century antiphonal featuring two-color music printing. The large format was designed to enable use by several members of the choir at once.

8. Up Close: Notice the ways in which a leaf of Augustine (Strasbourg: J. Mentelin, 1470) resembles the Gutenberg leaf but with generous margins and spacing that allow the text to breathe. Do you see the wormholes throughout this leaf? This is where we get the phrase “bookworms.” They are one of the many perils that faced early books. 

9. The “print revolution” also played a major role in standardizing vernacular languages. William Caxton was England’s first printer, as well as a translator and author himself. By adopting the London dialect in his widely marketed books, Caxton is credited with regularizing and homogenizing the English language. This leaf is from the first printed edition of Chaucer (Canterbury Tales, 1476).

10. Martin Luther did for the German language what Caxton did for English, through his enormously influential translation of the Bible (leaf from a German Bible, c.1520s).

11. This leaf from a rare breviary (Strasbourg, 1478) is printed on vellum, a material more expensive than paper and difficult to print on. Only a few copies of this book would have been printed on vellum, either for presentation or for elite buyers willing to pay a premium price. This copy was taken apart and its durable vellum used to make bindings of other books, probably in the sixteenth century.

12. The Parisian bookseller and printer Antoine Verard (leaf from a printed Book of Hours, c.1495) was the first in France to popularize both illustrated books and, like William Caxton, the use of the vernacular. In addition, Verard published printed Books of Hours like this one. A book of prayers designed for personal use, Books of Hours were one of the most popular forms of medieval books, and over the centuries they played a major role in the history of women’s reading. Manuscript Books of Hours were also often elaborately decorated and embellished. Working only a few decades after Gutenberg, Verard showed that printed books could reproduce the look of even the most beautifully decorated medieval manuscripts.

13. An illustrated world history, the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) is one of the earliest printed books to successfully combine illustrations and text, thereby opening up the early modern visual imagination. Publications like the Nuremberg Chronicle proved that print could be as successful as manuscript in producing lavishly illustrated books such as the histories, chronicles, atlases, and books of travel that followed in its wake.

14. These pages from an octavo edition of The Whole Booke of Psalms (London, c.1610) represent one half of the printed sheet as it would have left the press. This sheet was cut in half then used as scrap paper in a book binding. Unfolded fragments like this remind us of the technical complexity of handprinting: the amount of type on every page had to be planned out word-by-word, then arranged on the press to create a properly ordered gathering once the completed sheet was folded. There was much room for error, and understanding the errors in the texts we read often requires understanding the processes involved in making early modern books.

Up Close: An octavo sheet, like this one, is folded three times to produce a page that in size and rectangular shape is the ancestor of the modern paperback format. Here at the Kinney Center we have a printing press. We welcome you to learn more about early print practices with a short lesson on the press.

15. The First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623) was the first folio-scale book published in England devoted entirely to plays. Gathering the texts and the rights to publish the 36 plays in the folio was a risky venture, and if Shakespeare’s friends had been unsuccessful then 18 plays (not published earlier in quarto format) might have been lost. These include many plays frequently read by University students, including Macbeth, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night. About 235 copies of the First Folio survive in the world today, almost all in institutional collections. 

Centuries after Shakespeare’s friends assembled his plays, dealers and collectors reassembled copies of the book. Every copy of the First Folio is different due to changes made during the printing process, and any given fragment can shed light on those differences. Most copies are themselves a collection of sorts. They combine original leaves with facsimile leaves, and sometimes also include leaves imported from other (less complete) copies. The process of remaking First Folios left many fragments, ranging from single leaves to complete plays to multi-play gatherings. In this way, the history of Shakespeare in print is the history of Shakespeare unbound and rebound, scattered and gathered together in new assemblages for the marketplace.  

The private collection from which these fragments are selected includes 17 complete plays and at least one leaf from each of the remaining 19. Every one of the 36 plays in the First Folio is represented here—a remarkable feat of collecting, potentially impossible to replicate.

Up Close: Every leaf here tells a story, material as well as textual: mice, for example, have enjoyed Romeo and Juliet. What other signs of use and abuse do you spot on the pages of this Folio? If you’re familiar with the play, do you notice anything missing from the play’s beginning?

16. Published less than a decade after the First Folio, the Second Folio (1632) launches the ongoing project to update, repackage, protect, save, and “bind” Shakespeare. It is, by and large, a page-by-page reprint of the First Folio: the main addition is a new poem by the young John Milton, future author of Paradise Lost, praising the “livelong monument” of Shakespeare’s folio works. The Second Folio is the product of a group of investors working in syndicate, and their collective effort tells a story in itself.

Comparison of the two folios reveals about 1700 deliberate textual changes. The Second Folio reflects careful editorial attention, and represents the first systematic edit of Shakespeare’s plays. About half of these changes are still accepted by modern editors, making the Second Folio a key source for all modern versions.

Up Close: Take a look at the First Folio and Second Folio. What differences do you notice upon first glance? 

The subsequent history of these plays is one of constant dialogue between binding and unbinding: binding the plays together, binding their meaning through emendation, binding the rights to publish and market the plays.

17. The idea of gathering scattered fragments into a collected whole exerted a powerful pull on the Renaissance imagination. “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume,” writes John Donne in his Devotions (London, 1624), in the same meditation on human connectedness in which he proclaimed that “No man is an island, entire of itself.” 

Up Close: This copy of Donne’s Devotions raises an immediate question: what has happened to this book? Do you notice the blackened, uneven edges? Reading Donne by candlelight, one reader held the book too close to the flame and set the book on fire. The scorched pages signal the perils to which early books were subject. 

To Donne, Paradise is a library in which the divine gathers and rebinds the noble fragments of the scattered self: “when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; … God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.” 

Books are lively objects that connect us: to the books themselves, to ourselves, and to one another. Each of the books, leaves, and printed pages on display in this exhibit —scattered, fragmented, torn, eaten by mice, even scorched by a candle’s flame—invite us to reimagine the resilience of the printed word, never more fully in force than when it has been unbound. 

Glossary

antiphonal book of liturgical chants used in the Catholic service.

binding outer covers of a book, in early books usually leather, vellum, or boards made of wood or coarse paper pasted together but potentially a variety of other materials.

breviary book containing psalms, hymns, lessons, prayers, etc. used in the Catholic service.

black letter English term for “gothic” script and type fonts.

facsimile reproduction. Incomplete copies of early books often contain replacement leaves made by processes such as photocopying, photography, or typesetting. Some contain reproduction leaves drawn by hand that are surprisingly difficult to distinguish from the printed originals.

folio book with pages created by folding a printed sheet once, to produce a large-format book usually reserved for works of reference or other substantial or serious works.

gathering group of leaves (pages) all printed on one sheet of printing paper before it is folded and cut: 2 leaves (4 pages) in a folio gathering, 4 leaves (8 pages) in a quarto gathering, etc.

leaf single piece of paper: one leaf comprises two pages, front (“recto”) and back (“verso”).

manuscript book or text written by hand, as opposed to printed mechanically.

octavo book with pages created by folding a printed sheet three times, to produce a smallish rectangular format which, in shape and size, is the ancestor of the modern paperback.

quarto book with pages created by folding a printed sheet twice, to produce a medium-format book which, in shape and size, is the ancestor of modern hardcovers.

Roman type the familiar font in which this brochure is printed. Derived from the capital letters used in ancient Roman inscriptions, hence the name.

stationer umbrella term for members of the early modern book trade, including printers, publishers, and booksellers.

typesetting  or “composition”: the art of setting individual pieces of molded metal type (print characters) by hand in preparation for inking then printing on the press. Type is set upsidedown and in mirror image to the printed sheet, and it takes enormous skill to set type well, elegantly spaced and with no errors. One reason why spelling in early modern books is so variable is that typesetters (compositors) often had to alter word length to fit type into a predetermined space.

vellum calfskin, treated and scraped but not tanned: a flexible yet durable material often used in book bindings and for legal documents but occasionally also as a surface to print on.

vernacular native languages people spoke, such as English or French, rather than Latin.