8b. REPRINTING GUTENBERG?

BALBUS, Johannes (d. 1298). Catholicon. Fragment from the second issue. Mainz: [Peter Schoeffer?], “1460” [c. 1469].

The printer of the two later issues of the Catholicon in Mainz is widely assumed to be Peter Schoeffer, who offered to sell copies of this book in a broadside advertisement of 1469-70. No other printer is known to have been working in Mainz during the years when the Galliziani and Tower and Crown papers supplies would have been readily available for the reprinting project, and it seems likely that Schoeffer obtained the Catholicon slugs from Dr. Konrad Humery, who at the time of Gutenberg’s death in 1468 came into possession of Gutenberg’s “forms, letters, instruments, and other things pertaining to printing.”

This fragment of binder’s waste is from the second issue of the Mainz Catholicon, datable c. 1469. The paper bears no watermark, but its chain-line structure is identical to that of the Galliziani paper that identifies the second issue of the Catholicon.      Comparison of 1460 and 1469 issues

Enlargement 

Introduction 7. Aquinas 1467 8. Catholicon

9. Marchesinus 1470 10. Aquinas 1471 11. Augustine 1473

12. Turrecremata 1474 13. Bernard of Clairvaux 1475 14. Paulus de Sancta Maria 1478