The spread of printing in Europe, 1455-1500
The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue. The most intensively catalogued and studied period in the history of printing is the first: the fifteenth century. Some 450,000 individual copies of books from this period survive in about 4,000 different libraries, mainly in Europe and North America. For this period alone, a complete catalogue of European printing is available in the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) at the British Library, which clusters these surviving copies into about 30,000 editions.
The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive website designed for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during these formative years, created by Greg Prickman and coded by Andrew Holland of the University of Iowa Libraries. These screenshots are taken from the second version of the Atlas, released in 2013, which replaced an earlier version launched in 2008. The second version displayed data from the ISTC on a background provided by the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API) version 3. The small red circles indicate places of publication; the larger orange circles show the cumulative number of editions published in each place up the date given. In addition, the second version was capable of plotting the location of universities, paper mills, fairs, conflicts and trade routes of the period, allowing year-by-year study of the expansion of printing with these relevant features of the European landscape. With changes to the underlying Google Maps code, the Atlas is currently not displaying correctly, and a new version is in preparation and will be available shortly at the same address.
The 15th-century Booktrade Project. Meanwhile in Oxford, Cristina Dondi has commenced work on the 15th-c. Booktrade project, which aims to reconstruct the history of the earliest European trade in printed books by collecting together innumerable tiny scraps of scattered evidence of two main kinds: physical evidence (such as ownership inscriptions, decoration, binding, coats of arms, manuscript annotations, stamps, prices, etc., contained in the surviving books themselves) and bibliographical evidence (such as historic library catalogues, bookseller and auction catalogues, acquisition registers, etc., which records the location and ownership of both extant and missing copies previously). The taster video below (1:09) gives an impression of the nature of this work. A more extensive version of the video (8:12) is found here and in External Links.