Catholicon Leaf Comparison

BALBUS, Johannes (d. 1298).
Catholicon.
Mainz: [Johannes Gutenberg?], 1460. (06096)

BALBUS, Johannes (d. 1298). 
Catholicon. 
Mainz: [Peter Schoeffer?], “1460” [c. 1469].
Fragment from the second issue. (06095)

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.” Bridwell Library also owns a fragment of binder’s waste from the second issue of the Catholicon, datable c. 1469. Close comparison with the 1460 issue of the Catholicon supports Needham’s theory of reprinting with two-line slugs, for although all of the letters in the later issue are in their original positions relative to each other, several pairs of lines, representing the slugs, are visibly displaced from their original locations. For instance, the slug bearing the entry for the rubricated word “Relativu[s]” in the last two lines of the left column of this leaf has shifted considerably to the right in this reprinting, relative to the same page in the 1460 issue.