The Towns That Lost Their Presses

AWithin fifty years of the first printed sheets leaving Mainz in the 1450s, presses had been set up in more than two hundred and thirty European towns, and some twenty-eight thousand separate editions had come off them. The figures are usually offered as evidence of an unstoppable technology. What they conceal is the mortality. Of the workshops founded before 1480, roughly two in three had stopped printing within five years of their first book, and in many towns nothing was printed again for a generation. Printing did not simply spread; it spread, collapsed and spread again. Part of the reason lies in the shape of the trade itself. Rather than growing outwards from a workshop that could begin small, printing obliged a house to lay out almost the whole cost of an edition — paper, wages, type — before a single copy could be sold. Why some towns kept their presses while others lost them has divided historians ever since.

BMargarethe Vollrath, an economic historian with the Book Trade Project at Mainz, has spent fourteen years asking what a press actually consumed. Her team catalogued 1,240 dated imprints from thirty-one towns produced between 1465 and 1520, reconstructing the years each workshop was active from the colophons of surviving books rather than from the guild registers, which exist for a handful of cities only and almost never record a closure. The decisive finding, she insists, lies not in the presses themselves but in what had to reach them: paper alone accounted for about half the cost of a folio edition, and one press working steadily swallowed the yearly output of a small mill. Of the towns lying within sixty kilometres of a paper mill, 71 per cent still had a press at work ten years after the first one opened; beyond two hundred kilometres the figure was 19 per cent. From surviving subscription lists her team also estimated that a single town, even a university town, took up perhaps eighty copies of any one title in a year.

CDemand, on Vollrath's account, was never the binding constraint; the wait for payment was. An edition ran to three or four hundred copies and took some four years to disperse, so a house that had spent everything in the first month met its wages out of stock it could not yet sell. A partnership contract drawn up at Augsburg in 1471, in which a merchant advanced two-thirds of the outlay and took two-thirds of the returns, survives to show how that gap was bridged. The Frankfurt fair worked for the same reason: it dealt in exchange rather than coin, so a printer carried unsold sheets there and came home with other men's books, converting dead stock into stock he could actually move. Where the account books show a house travelling to the fair every spring, printing continued on average thirty years beyond the regional median. That durability was confined to houses which also held a standing order from a university or a cathedral chapter; where the local order lapsed, a fair-going press folded within a decade.

DAurélien Casadei, who works on printing privileges at the Centre for Early Modern Legal History in Bologna, holds that money tells you nothing about law. From the surviving grant registers he has assembled 412 privileges issued between 1469, when Venice granted the first, and 1550, and finds them arriving not at a steady rate but in three short bursts, each following a statute that made a grant enforceable in a neighbouring jurisdiction. Capital raised where reprinting goes unpunished, he argues, says nothing about whether an edition earns its cost back, and a house whose folio has been copied at Basel within four months does not care how near the paper mill stood. He concedes two things. His registers survive in usable form for three states only, all of them Italian, and a grant records permission rather than enforcement, so nothing in his series shows whether a single reprint was ever actually stopped.

EThe dispute left the seminar room some time ago. Since 2018 a European consortium has been choosing which fifteenth-century editions to digitise first, and the criteria it publishes follow whichever account its committee finds persuasive that year. Vollrath points out, awkwardly for her own case, that no amount of credit protects a house whose edition is reprinted at once, so the commercial machinery she treats as decisive could not by itself have kept a press alive in Casadei's least protected markets. Casadei answers that this is precisely why legal explanations keep winning the argument and losing the budget, since a series of grants specifies nothing a funding committee can act upon. Both object to one habit above all: that the field goes on counting editions, a number a catalogue can produce, instead of copies actually read, a number nobody has produced at all.

FWhat is emerging is a division by the kind of work printed rather than a verdict. Most towns that kept a press through the worst decades kept a small one, living on indulgences, school grammars, civic ordinances and calendars — jobbing work paid for on delivery, needing neither a merchant's advance nor a privilege worth defending. The great houses had traded that independence for scale, and a folio edition is only as good as the credit and the law standing behind it. What nobody can yet test is whether the output figures on which the whole argument rests are sound, since an unknown proportion of early editions survives in no copy at all. What both researchers reject is the framing they inherited, in which a technology must succeed or fail for one reason, when the evidence describes a trade with two independent ways of dying and no obligation to die by only one.