Early Printing

Within about 15 years of the invention of printing, printers began advertising their publications by issuing lists of available books. Printed in the form of small posters (on one side of a single sheet of paper), these lists were widely distributed, handed out or posted on buildings. Few of them survived; only about thirty different advertisements are known, most of them from single copies accidentally preserved, often as reinforcement sheets in bindings.

In the late summer of 1939, just as he was leaving Hitler's Germany, a student named Sam Anderson, who had been studying abroad, bought a packet of minor manuscript fragments from the Munich bookseller, Hugendubel. It was not until he reached home that he found a printed broadside among the leaves of manuscript.

This broadside proved to be a single-sheet advertisement of the "good German books" for sale by the Augsburg printer and publisher Anton Sorg. Like most publishers' advertisements from that day to this, it was undated, but it is obvious from the known dates of the books listed for sale that it was published about 1483. It is known in two versions, the later version (known in five fragmentary copies existing in German libraries) including one more book than this first version. It is remarkable for the relatively large number of books listed and for its content—entirely books in the German vernacular and most of those heavily illustrated; it appears to be aimed at the general public rather than the learned classes. The Anderson copy, printed on a piece of waste paper ruled for handwriting, is almost certainly a printer's proof and as such is unique. The only other known copy of this version, in the Lilly Library at Indiana University, is on good paper and must be one of those issued to the public.

In July 1993, Sam Follett Anderson, emeritus professor of German and Slavic, donated his Sorg broadside to the Spencer Library. On that occasion, the distinguished antiquarian bookseller Bernard Rosenthal wrote "The rarity and the significance of this broadside for the history of printing and publishing can hardly be overstated—a printer's proof copy of the first advertisement devoted exclusively to German vernacular books. Your decision to assure the future safety and availability of this ephemeral piece of the early history of one of the foundations of modern civilization will benefit generations of students and scholars."

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The Summerfield Collection of Renaissance and Early Modern Books was begun in 1957, supported in its first ten years by a grant from the late Solon E. Summerfield, a KU alumnus, and then by the Kansas University Endowment Association. It has no restriction of subject beyond the common-sense avoidance of duplication with other collections in the neighborhood but only the restrictions of place and time: the books must have been printed on the continent of Europe before 1701. It is the collection to which we assign all European imprints before 1701. Preference is given to those works which have not been competently re-edited within the past hundred and fifty years or so and which must therefore be read in their original editions, such as the French humanist Guillaume Budé, most of whose works remain available only in 16th century editions, and the political theorist Jean Bodin, whose Les Six Livres de la Republique, of which we have the first edition (1576) and eight subsequent 16th century editions, is another essential work not existing in a modern critical edition.

Although we collect primarily for text—for the great varieties of the books used over the centuries by scholars, students, and readers, with particular emphasis on history, literature, law, science, theology, and the arts— the Summerfield books incidentally provide rich sources for the history of printing, bibliographical studies, the knowledge of provenance, and the study of bindings and illustration.

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Most of the purchasing of the Summerfield books is done title by title, thus preserving its intentional variety and breadth of subject, but a few large purchases made in the early years of the grant provided particular strength and influenced the shape the collection was to take. The first of these was the acquisition in 1957 of a thousand volumes from the library of the Archivist of France, Léon Dorez. Dorez' great interest was in the Italian humanists and his library included both the famous and the obscure: Boccaccio, Petrarch, Tasso, Alamanni, Andreini, many editions of the writings of Cardinal Bembo, the most complete edition of Poliziano's Latin writings (Basel, 1553), Palingenius' Zodiacus Vitae, as well as numbers of 16th century Italian plays, the first Italian translation of Alberti's book of architecture (Venice, 1546), the 1619 edition of the works of Serlio, such historians as Sabellicus, Guicciardini, and Sleidanus, and a few Greek and Roman authors.

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Dorez' collection of the Italian humanists had its Spanish equivalent in a somewhat larger purchase of the following year. Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, noted for his The Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles V, was a great 19th century British Hispanist and book collector. His library included a magnificent emblem collection (now at the University of Glasgow, with the exception of a dozen or so volumes which form the basis of the Spencer Library's collection of about 100 emblem books), a collection of books on art and design, and a working library of historical sources of the 16th and 17th centuries. It was this last section of over two thousand volumes which the University acquired from Lathrop C. Harper in 1958. They are Spanish, French, and Italian imprints for the most part, with a small but significant number of Dutch books. The rich accumulation of 16th and 17th century Spanish chronicles, many of which have not been republished in critical editions, is rivalled by the large number of contemporary tracts about Charles V, with the relevant histories and biographies. Beyond these and other smaller collections of Spanish city and town histories, there is a rich conspectus of Spanish literature, including a strong Cervantes collection, early editions of such authors as Juan de Mena and Jorge Manrique and a fine copy of the Cancionero General, Antwerp, 1573. Yet the solid value lies not so much in these high spots as in the hundreds of contemporary editions of the poets, travelers, theologians, historians, and bibliographers of the time. As one would expect, there are extensive materials on the Austrian and Dutch parts of the Spanish empire, including some important legal material.

The third of these early large purchases was nearly a thousand volumes of legal history acquired in 1963, continuing a trend begun earlier with the purchase of the 1475 Schoeffer Codex Justinianus—the collecting of editions of Roman and canon law and their commentators.

Significant additions have been made over the years to most of the subjects begun by the early major purchases, increasing our strength in French and Italian history and literature, history of science (with help from many booksellers—notably Zeitlin & VerBrugge, Wheldon and Wesley, Antiquariat Junk, Björk and Börjessen, and Martayan Lan), Dutch politics, Protestantism, geography and the history of art, and extending our interests to early Polish imprints (acquired mainly from Alexander Janta), Eastern Europe, and the great French Byzantinists.

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The collection has 127 incunabula, a relatively small number, and a study collection of separate leaves from 78 more. Fifteenth-century books especially worthy of mention are a beautifully illuminated Sweynheym and Pannartz Caesar of 1469, three Jensons (the Macrobrius of 1472, the first edition of Landini's translation of Pliny, 1476, and the 1478 Plutarch), the only known Western hemisphere copy of the Pachel and Scinzenzeler Vergil of 1487 (donated by Robert Aitchison of Wichita in 1964 as part of his Vergil collection), Sir Robert Peel's copy of Aldus' Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499, Amerbach's 1494 printing of Trithemius' Liber de scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (the first modern bio-bibliography), the 1477 Legenda aurea of Johannes Baemler, and Marciletti's Doctrinale florum artis notarie (Lyon, circa 1490), one of two known copies.