production costs in fifteenth-century printing

Production Costs in Fifteenth-Century PrintingAuthor(s): Michael PollakSource: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Oct., 1969), pp. 318-330Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4306023 .

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PRODUCTION COSTS IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PRINTING

MICHAEL POLLAK

During the year 1486, Octavianus Scotus, an important figure in the book trade at Venice, decided to publish the works of Flavius Josephus. He discussed the project with the printer Joannes Rubeus Vercellensis, and we may safely assume without undue fear of contradiction that at some point in their talks Scotus turned to Joannes and said: "How much?"

To answer this crucial question, Joannes would have had to calculate the amount of paper, ink, and other materials the job would require, make an estimate of his direct labor costs (including composition, press time, and bindery work), allow a certain sum for indirect labor charges, add enough to cover his overhead expense, and then superimpose a markup. Joannes, in other words, would have had to prepare a bid for his prospective customer in very much the same way as all other printers have had to do from the time of Gutenberg to the present day.

In any case, an agreement as to price and terms of payment must have been reached, for Joannes printed the book for Scotus, duly noting this achieve- ment in a colophon bearing the date 23 October 1486 [ 1, p. 360, item J-486].

This folio edition by Joannes contains 274 printed leaves and four blank leaves (548 printed pages and eight blank pages), each leaf measuring in excess of 310 X 212 mm. The type is set in one column of fifty-six lines per page, and its area on the average page is about 54 picas high by 34 picas wide. The bound book actually consists of three separate works of Josephus: De Antiquitate Judaica, De Bello Judaico, and Contra Appionem.

Nearly 500 years later, two surviving copies of the Joannes-Josephus had found their way to Dallas, Texas, where both were readily accessible to the author of this study, one being his per- sonal property and the other belonging to the Bridwell Library of Southern Methodist University. Since he is him- self in the printing and publishing business and is frequently called upon to prepare estimates of costs for printing jobs, it occurred to him that it would be interesting to try to reconstruct the cost analysis made in 1486 by Joannes Rubeus Vercellensis for the production of the Josephus volume.

Upon reflection, it appeared that such a project would be pointless if the figures had to be expressed in terms of money-lira, ducats, florins, guilders, and the like-since the purchasing power of the various currencies of the fifteenth century cannot be translated meaningfully into present-day dollars. For that matter, it is extremely difficult, and often impossible, to establish the relative values at any specific time in the fifteenth century of the numerous coinages then being used in Europe, for the Continent was divided into hundreds of political entities, and the rates of exchange lacked stability.

If, however, the Joannes estimate could be reconstructed in terms of its labor components-that is, if the number of man-hours of work required to perform each phase of the job could be calculated-it would be possible, at the very least, to isolate and determine the cost of this very important factor in book production and relate it to the earning and buying power of fifteenth- century labor. If, in addition, a rela-

318



COSTS IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PRINTING 319

tionship could then be established between labor costs, material costs, and the other costs inherent in the business of printing and marketing books, we would be able to make a reasonable estimate of the number of hours the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, or, indeed, the printing craftsman would have had to work in order to earn the price of a book. We would then know how much, in terms of hours of labor, those people who actually bought books would have had to pay for them.

METHOD

The primary problem, then, was to determine the number of man-hours needed to produce a given number of copies of the Josephus volume.

Two procedures were considered: (1) To search through the literature dealing with incunabula for information pertinent to the labor aspects of book production, and (2) to simulate, insofar as possible, the conditions which prevailed in fifteenth-century printing shops, and to make time stud- ies of the various operations which were carried on in such shops.

It was decided to conduct this study along the lines indicated in the second alternative and, once this had been done, to utilize details from the literature, where applicable, to validate (or challenge) the conclusions which had been drawn.

As a means of achieving these ends, the author showed the Josephus volume to several associates in the printing in- dustry who are specialists in the fields of composition, press operation, and bindery work. These men were asked to furnish estimates of the number of man-hours it would take to produce in their own shops (where possible) the various phases of the work required to manufacture the Josephus book. It was

stipulated that they were not to count on using any power-driven machinery whatever but were to calculate their man-hour figures on the basis of hand labor only.

Naturally, the imposition of this re- striction upon the specialists could not guarantee that their estimates would necessarily be correct for fifteenth- century print-shop conditions, but it was felt that they would be of considerable value, at least as approximations. Should these results then correspond (within reason) to the figures derived from the literature of incunable production, a two-way check of accuracy would thus have been established between the estimates made in the twentieth century and those available to us from the writings of the fifteenth century.

Objections presented themselves im- mediately. In the matter of composition, for example, we know that modern hand, or foundry, type is unquestion- ably superior to and easier to handle than incunable type metal.' A typesetter in our times uses a composing stick, made of a light alloy, which can easily be adjusted to the length of line he may want, and in which he can set several lines of type. The incunable era compositor used an awkward tool, made of wood, in which he could set only one line of type, and that of predetermined length. Since the modern composing stick is by far a handier device than its prototype of five centuries ago, and since today's compositor has better

' Incunable type characters were not normally notched, so that the compositor handling such type could not depend on his sense of touch to in- sure the proper placement of the characters in the composing stick. Visual inspection was essential in order to avoid frequent reversal of characters. The notched type of our times is easier to handle, for the compositor is able to rely on the tactile sense as he places type in the composing stick [2, p. 82].



320 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

type with which to work, it stands to reason that in any comparison of typesetting speeds between the fifteenth- and twentieth-century craftsman, the advantage lies distinctly with the latter.

There are numerous other differences which could be discussed. Two are noted here:

1. Modern working conditions are vastly superior to those which prevailed in the fifteenth century. A printer spending eight hours in a properly ven- tilated and well-lit plant should be able to work more efficiently and more speedily than a man whose working day of fourteen hours or so2 was endured in a shop which had no indoor plumb- ing, depended upon the poor illumina- tion provided by candles in the hours of darkness,3 and had very inadequate heating devices (if any at all) for use in cold weather.4

2. The modern printer uses materials with reasonably uniform physical characteristics. The dimensions of his paper do not vary from sheet to sheet. His ink, mixed by machine, has been stirred to a smooth, gritless, consist- ency and will not cause type to adhere to it during the printing process and so be pulled out of the form, as happened so often with the tacky ink which the early printer used. His ink and paper are so made today that the type does not become dirty enough to require the stopping of the press for cleaning pur-

poses after only a limited number of impressions. The printer of the Josephus volume undoubtedly had to interrupt his press work from time to time in order to wash out the grime which had accumulated in his type. Regrettably, he did not do this as frequently as he should have, and on certain pages his indifference and carelessness are still apparent after the passage of five centuries.

It follows that the man-hour estimates of the specialists who were consulted for this study could be expected to be lower than those which might have been elicited had the same ques- tions been asked of printers working in the fifteenth century, and that adjustments would have to be made to compensate for the differences in working conditions, materials, and tools.

PRODUCTION PROCESSES

The production processes involved in the manufacture of the Josephus book were broken down into three broad classifications so that the opin- ions of technically qualified men in each of the areas could be obtained and analyzed:

1. Composition, including the setting of type, the pulling of proofs," proofreading, the correction of errors in the type, the process of lockup, and the distribution of the used type back into the cases.

2. Press work. 3. Bindery work.

COMPOSITION

One page from the Josephus volume, typographically representative of the rest of the book, was reproduced in exact size by the photo-offset method.

'Febvre and Martin have listed four examples of daily working hours in print shops during the first two centuries following Gutenburg. The average working day appears to have been about fourteen hours [2, p. 198].

'References exist to the use of candles in Eng- lish printing shops in Moxon's time. Candles were allotted to workers at the Oxford University Press. French printers worked by candlelight from Sep- tember 8 to May 6 [3, pp. 324, 328].

'Moxon mentions that printers were often "froze out" in wintertime so that they could not carry on their work. He also mentions paper freezing when it was wetted down for the press [3, p. 3411.

5 Books printed with any care had to undergo a process of correction. Febvre and Martin repro- duce a page proof with the corrector's marks [2, facng p. 224].




The page selected was folio p recto, of De Antiquitate Judaica (fig. 1). Copies of this page were then submitted for independent analysis to four profes- sional and highly experienced compositors in the Dallas area: Messrs. Jack R. Berry, Joseph Cangolese, William Herring, and Otis D. Pettigrew. The question posed to these gentlemen was: "Assume that text matter has been furnished to you in English rather than in the Latin used in the Josephus book, and that you are called upon to set the type for this material by hand, utilizing the same type size and spacings as are shown in the sample page. How many man-hours of labor should it take in your plant to set one page in type, to pull a proof, to read that proof for errors, to correct the type, to lock it up, and then (after the pressman has fin- ished using the type) to clean the type metal and distribute it back into the case? In making this estimate you are to assume that your employees are working at a normal pace."

The replies were six, six and one- half, seven, and seven and one-half man-hours per page, yielding an average of six and three-quarters man- hours. Each of the specialists had allotted one and one-half man-hours of his estimate to the cleaning and distributing of the type.

Since there are 548 pages of printed matter in the Josephus book, the overall composition time is thus computed at 3,699 man-hours.

If the reader will take the trouble to ascertain the hourly wage rate (including fringe benefits) of compositors in his area and will multiply this rate by 3,699, he will quickly learn that in this year 1969 the wages outlay for this job will by itself run well into five figures. If the reader will then multiply this sum by a factor of between two and three, he will have on hand a figure

representing approximately what he would have to pay to a typesetting concern to set the Josephus book by hand-if, indeed, he could find a com- pany daring enough to attempt it.

A reassuring bit of evidence supporting this estimate of six and three- quarters man-hours per page is furnished by Hirsch [4, p. 38] on the au- thority of A. Sartori [5]. Hirsch states that in fifteenth-century Padua "A good worker composed daily four col- umns in folio (= two leaves, or four pages) or eight smaller sizes." Hirsch then adds that "Figures provided by K. Haebler from contracts as late as 1493-4 basically agree."

The Paduan craftsman probably worked about fourteen hours a day, so that he composed one page in approximately three and one-half hours. There are between 5,000 and 5,500 separate pieces of type in the average folio page of the Josephus volume, which is substantially more than the number of characters found in most incunable pages. It is therefore reasonable to in- fer that the crowded Josephus page would have taken considerably more of our Paduan typesetter's time than the usual three and one-half hours to prepare. One hour is therefore being added to this figure, but this is probably a very conservative augmentation. Typesetting is thus computed at four and one-half man-hours (probably more) per page of the Josephus text for the Paduan worker.

To this figure there should now be added an absolute minimum of one hour for pulling a proof, reading the proofed page, and then correcting and locking up the type; and still another hour and one-half should be added for washing and distributing the type after the completion of the press work.

By the most conservative computa- tion, the time required by the Paduan



propterammonii irarcebitur:ut prxdixirnus.Qui puWrus ab antiochia:in ciliciuni tif puienit. Prolonicus ergo ad itiochenos ueni6s:rcx ab illis & militibus ordinatur:coaduig: dL o Ilbi diao denata fruperpofuiM:unii afyx: alterum egypriff3enignus atir & iufus exifkns:ucc conctpiWcnS alicna:fed & futura prouidens:recufare regni decreuim:ne romanos offcndeict: idoq .ant iochc- nos in contlon& congregans:fledir cos ut dcnertrit fufcipcrent: dicens etntin nieqlu.iq pro p-irre dolorem ferLuatul: bene merereturab eis:dodorc air i bonis & duct l i e(flte:nec cle.fllact., bus negociis imniiFccre:fibi aiirdiccbaregypti regnu fufficere. Qud d:flirens fc(alt antiohl)c, nos demiierriuni ufucipere.Alexandro uero cii magna militia ucl apparatu adi fj'i a .1 cii pf eto:rcrraniq,, ftiochenop.pdite ptolomeus cUi geiero corra eCi duxit exeicitumn.ni iaiim fill.;i liii nuarrimoniali iure demetrio contradiderat:& uinceins alcxandruml:ad .rali.i fi'gautr cii .C6tigir auteni in plio:ut equus ptolomnei uoce cleph&tisaudiens:prolouwti'i ia.iOsilct.Qjod ci iLiil'd t'llt hoaes:iniperum fup eu feccriit: nmultifi, uulneribus caput ('ills pfortaics:ad piculi 11101 tI ii adduxerunt.Sed cuttodes corporis cius rapientes eu liberaucrunr:& itr p qu-itiuor dics dtcfrdustis iacuir ut nec loqui nec inrelligere potlifl'cr. Alexandri ucro cap;ut ir.irii p)rcniiiflimiii }z5biltis abfcidcns prtolomeo tranfmifit.Qui dic quinto relcuatus a uuIiie do0t)it :ii iau ilib im 1cii ift-

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quin(p:ficut i aliis demn6trari ef.Sufcipieis uero pricipant dednetiius qti niicaior appcll.Ia.l(: hraudibus corn-ipe ccrpir proloniei militirioblitus:& qc fixer eius &auxilaror mimer .:& allinis per connu bii cloparrx. Quapropter nilits prolonici ad alex5idril c,i5hgieruinrtcleph.iros; iut denetTriUs comnphendir.Ionaras interea princeps ficerdorti ex omni iudca I ibi ililites c6grcg.is: arceni hierofolyniov oblidebar:ubi cuftodia rnacedonti:& rranfjrefflu mulritrldo loc.Ita Uit. dcbar.13r.E hi quid& conrcnebant ionathan facientE mnachinamenra:confidentes loci munitio- nibus,Nodu uero quidc nialiuoll iudci exeuntes:ncnertinr ad dcmnerrii:arcis obfidionc nCicii- tcs.Qui nu'cio inciratus:excrcird contra ion.athan ab antiochia eduxit.Cunii ad prolomia;idlem peruenifert:fcrip(ir ionathx:p-cipiens ad prolomaidEci cirius occurre .Ion.1thas.aiit obfidione quidem minime foluere decreuit:ficniorcs uero populi& facerdotes congrcgans:8& atjyo & arge rum & uctE:cii muiritudine donoF deportrans:ad denctrirui ufq punir*OQzx cu obtulifldet: in Cites noliuir:& honoratus fimii ab co principatu facerdotii fufcepit: quc a rcgihus anlte ipfum donatumn poffidebar:accufantiburqi cii tranffugis:denietrius cis non credadit: fed & pctfti qua, trenus pro onini iudca:ucl tribus prouinciis:failaria:uel ioppe:uel gallea:trecenrt tarituni darer ralenta pro omnibus his epiftoliei plftint:qux uerba huiufcenmodi c6rincbat,Rex demniewius io nafth framri:gcntiq;iudeop falurt. xempluni epiftolx qui lafteni cognaro noftro fcriplimus: tranfiiinifimus uobis:u1t earm noueritis.Rex demnetrius lafreni patri falutc . IudeoN geCIti nobis amice:noftraq; iufTh fertianti:pro fide decreui dona Pbere:8& tres pofliffiones affereni:beWfceli- da:uel ramnathe: quxa dditx funt iudeis de Fjniaria:& his atrinenria:& quanraciq; ab immolio ribus hicrofolymou reges accipiebir ante nie:uel quxcuai de fru6tu terrx:ucl pliratis: oniiaq alia qux noftro coniperunt iuri:ucl paludes falis:uel pro coronis qux nobis otferebantur cis co cedo:& nihil extorquearurab his amniodo & ipoftep.Cura igirur ut huius cpiflolx fiat excplar & dewur ionathx:cuatenus in nobili loco r6pli reponatur.Hxc fcripta fuerant. Videns ergo de. metrius pac&:nulluq; fupe{12 peniculi:ncc belli tiniorc:foluit exercitui ftipendi39 Cox ininuit: & folis illis fumptus pbebat:qui cUi co a creta uel aliis infulis uenerat. Vnde odiu uel inimicicix nilitum c5tra ceI c flarX funt:quibus ipfc quidE nihil fbcbar:reges ucro ante ipfuim eis inonas erii in pace fubminiflrabanr:ur cos in cerran-liibus fi oporteret pro fe fideles & pronios hicnt: a t paratiflimos in re blellica & pacis ca omnii haberent confidentia expetere.

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iudeos tranffugas:uel ipios oefq quip toti ,puincii cufodes rranr:tranfirri. ad dcneriui le satos cii donis:rogabar ur de atellis iudex cuftodes ciiceret.Cui rex no hxc t;itri C pbcrc: kltd ctii his maiora pnitrebat:poft finc belli qd prx niibus habbatr:peebat ucro cii & atuxilia tr.df mitrrc:mmid-is 9 cxercitus fuus ab co receifiklet.Tacionathas tria miIia mJitriecgcs dcihlnauit.

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FiG. 1.-Folio p recto of the De Antiquitate Judaica of Josephus printed by Vercenensis in 1486. (Reduced one-fifth.)




craftsman for composition and distribution of type in one page of the Josephus book would have been more than seven hours.

The estimate of the Dallas compositors of six and three-quarters man- hours per page thus appears to be ac- ceptable as a valid approximation of the minimum amount of time it would have taken to prepare a Josephus page in 1486.

PRESS WORK

The second question asked of the specialists who were consulted was to estimate the number of man-hours which would be required per hundred impressions of the press. The gentlemen who were approached concerning this matter have had such experience, but on handpresses constructed of metal and using far more effective me- chanical means of transmitting manual energy than the screw arrangement. The screw-type press which was used from the time of Gutenberg until the early part of the nineteenth century was a much slower and more cumber- some apparatus than the relatively ad- vanced Stanhope and Clymer machines which appeared on the scene 150-175 years ago. Most American printers who are old enough to have operated handpresses in their youth worked on the Washington press or its equivalent, equipment far more sophisticated than the machines of Joannes's era. They also had available inks with which they could print more easily than Joannes, and brayers with which they could apply the ink to the form before each impression much more quickly than any fifteenth-century printer. It must also be understood that one impression on a metal press built during the nineteenth century would print an entire folio side, whereas it took two impressions on an early press to print the two

pages of the same folio side. For these reasons the estimates of printing speeds furnished by these men would have to be considerably higher than any rate which could have been attained during incunable days, so that their figures would have to be adjusted accordingly.

The time required for makeready of the form is being ignored here. Make- ready is, of course, the process of level- ing out the printing face of the type in a form or, more practically, of ad- justing the packing behind the paper so that type and paper strike each other uniformly all over the contacting sur- faces. This makes it possible for all characters to print evenly. There are instances when the amount of time so consumed is insignificant. Normally, however, at least a few adjustments have to be made, and the effort spent doing this can be meaningful. It would be very difficult to estimate the time requirements for makeready since incunable type must have varied in height from character to character within a font to a degree never encountered in modern precision-made hand type. A further complication is introduced by the fact that the paper which the early printer fed to his press was not uniform in thickness. Not only could one sheet be two to three times as thick as another, but the thickness at different points on the same sheet could vary greatly too. Random measurements of a dozen leaves in the two Josephus volumes under study yielded thickness- es ranging from 0.003 to 0.007 inches. Within an individual leaf, a range of 0.004-0.006 inches was found. The early pressman's paper was also run wet, so that it was softer and more yielding than dry paper; and the force of each blow of the platen on the soggy paper varied with the amount of energy expended in each pull of the lever. Makeready time, moreover, depends




upon the pressman's interest in the quality of his work. Let it suffice to say at this point that although the early printer did not normally pay too much attention to makeready, the process did take time over and above the actual running time of the press.

Mr. Ernest Lindner of Los Angeles, the owner of a magnificently preserved Clymer press designed in 1813, demon- strated the operation of his machine at an exposition of printing equipment which was held in Chicago during June 1968.

The author of this paper witnessed the demonstration. Two young men, working at a steady rate, produced one impression every forty-five seconds or so, a rate of eighty impressions per hour. They could not, however, have averaged this many impressions per hour, if only for the simple reason that they could not have continued to oper- ate the machine indefinitely without occasional pauses for rest.

In this demonstration, the workers were provided with a much better press than Joannes had and with excellent modern ink which they could spread over the form between impressions by means of an up-to-date roller. Had they been compelled to use the old ink balls, their printing speed would have gone down markedly. Moreover, their sheets could be run dry, and they were able to print one side of a sheet completely with only one pull of the lever. They did not have to do what Joannes's pressmen did-print half of one side of a sheet, release the lever, move the carriage into position to print the other half of the sheet, and then pull and release the lever a second time.

If Mr. Lindner's men had been re- stricted to the use of incunable ink and ink balls, and if they had been compelled to handle and print wet paper, and if they had agreed to work an ex-

hausting fourteen-hour day, it seems likely that even with their relatively sophisticated Clymer press they could not have averaged more than thirty to forty impressions per hour.

Mr. W. E. Jarvis of Dallas and Mr. Norman Forgue of Chicago, both of whom have had experience with handpresses, were consulted concerning handpress speeds for the production of work of moderately good quality. Mr. Forgue provided a figure of sixty impressions per hour. Mr. Jarvis was somewhat more liberal in his estimate, and suggested about seventy-five per hour. Here, too, we must remember that the figures are being based on the operation of one-pull metal presses, the availability of modern inks and rollers for the application of these inks, and the use of dry paper. And, of course, neither Mr. Forgue nor Mr. Jarvis meant to imply that his hourly rate figure could be maintained throughout a day consisting of some fourteen working hours. The estimates presented by Messrs. Forgue and Jarvis could reasonably be divided by two, or more, to compensate for the amenities included in the working conditions, equipment, and materials which are implicit in their estimates but which were not available to the incunable printer.

An hourly rate of about thirty impressions (more accurately, of thirty double impressions) for the incunable printer is therefore being projected for the purposes of this study, although it is doubtful that so high a rate was actually attained in practice.

Here, as in the case of composition time, we have some evidence available to us from the literature to substanti- ate our conclusion.

"Mentelin, the first printer at Strass- burg," we are informed, "is said by a contemporary chronicler to have print-




ed at the rate of 300 sheets a day as early as 1458" [6, p. 13, item 10].

Let us accept this figure at face value and ignore the possibility that the chronicler, Riccobaldus Ferrariensis, was exaggerating a little. If Mentelin actually produced 300 sheets in the fourteen hours of a working day, he averaged about twenty-one per hour. We take it for granted that Mentelin's production of 300 impressions per day was accomplished on one press, but if it took two machines to print this many sheets, his rate per press would have been closer to eleven per hour.

It is, of course, possible that the chronicler was claiming that Mentelin printed 300 sheets on both sides. This would then yield a figure of 600 impressions (double impressions, to be more precise) per day as the maximum output of Mentelin. However, since broadsides, indulgences, papal bulls, and other printing jobs were being produced in those days, often with type on only one side of the paper, the chronicler would surely have stated that Mentelin could print 300 sheets a day on both sides, were that the case. The chronicler was, after all, express- ing wonder at how much Mentelin could accomplish. He would not fail to draw our attention to the fact that by 300 sheets he really meant 600 impressions, if that was the amount of work that was actually being done.

Clair [7, p. 210] asks: "How could production be other than limited when it took nine separate operations to print a sheet on the old hand press?" He then lists these steps for a one-pull operation (since he is referring to presses of a much later vintage than those used by Joannes and his contemporaries). A two-pull press would call for eleven, rather than nine, steps. The reader is asked to visualize in his mind's eye the

work being done in each of the steps enumerated by Clair, to reconstruct mentally the motions of the pressmen at the pace they could have maintained, to note the time elapsed from beginning to end, and then to compute the number of impressions per hour which these men could have achieved. Clair says:

First, the dabber of pelt balls had to be evenly covered with printing ink placed on the "slab" attached to the side of the press. Then the forme had to be inked by the balls- always used in pairs-and considerable skill was required to apply the ink uniformly over the surface of the type. During this operation the ink balls had to be constantly rubbed to- gether to keep the ink evenly distributed over their surface. The third step was to place the dampened sheet of paper upon the tympan. Next, the frisket had to be folded down to keep the paper in position, and with the same movement, tympan, frisket and paper were folded down on to the type surface. The fifth step was to run the carriage under the platen, and the sixth was to pull the impression. The three final operations were to slide the carriage back again, to raise the tympan and frisket and, finally, to deliver the printed sheet.

In a two-pull operation, the fifth and sixth steps would of course have to be repeated, in the sense that the carriage would have to be run in still farther and another pull would then have to follow. This makes eleven steps. A twelfth, placing the hard-to-handle wet sheet on a rack to dry, might well be added.

Clair accordingly observes that "the early wooden press could not be relied upon to produce more than about thirty sheets an hour."

As noted above, the figure of thirty sheets per hour is being accepted for use in this study.

The Josephus volume contains 556 pages. Since it was printed in folio, half that many forms were prepared to produce the book. It was thus necessary to make 278 separate runs of the press.

If, therefore, 100 copies of the edi-




tion were produced, it would have taken three and one-third hours of press time per form, or 927 hours in all. Since the press was operated by two men, an "inker" and a "puller," the printing of 100 copies would have taken 1,854 man-hours. If 200 copies were printed, twice as many man-hours would have been needed, and so forth. The reader should recall that we are excluding from consideration all allowances for makeready of 278 forms, for change- over time from form to form, and for the time of the helper who had to hang up the wet paper to dry after each sheet was printed and, later, take down the dried paper, wet it again, and then hang it up to dry a second time, after the reverse side of the sheet had been printed. (He would also have had to stack the sheets after all the presswork on both sides of each batch of sheets had been completed and they had been thoroughly dried.)

BINDERY WORK

During incunable times, the purchaser of a book often received the printed leaves as such and then had his own binder cover the volume. This paper will not concern itself with the actual edition binding (the covering of the book itself) but will limit its in- quiry to the processes of folding the individual printed sheets of the Jose- phus volume (139 sheets, that is, including blank leaves in each copy of the book), gathering these folded sheets in proper order, bunching them into sections (with three exceptions, four such folded sheets per section, so the sections averaged sixteen pages each), and then assembling the sections in proper sequence." The reader is invited to im- agine the scene: tens of thousands of sheets are to be folded by hand; they

are to be grouped into 139 stacks of folded sheets; the stacks are then to be assembled into thirty-five sections; and, finally, these sections are themselves to be arranged in a given order- a tedious, costly, and seemingly endless operation. The arithmetic involved here is simple: each copy produced required 139 sheets of paper, so for each 100 copies manufactured 13,900 sheets had to be processed-excluding all allowances for waste and error.

No estimates are being made here for the stitching and gluing operations directly connected with the covering of the book. It would be pointless to attempt to arrive at such figures, since edition binding could be fairly simple or quite lavish, depending upon the taste and purse of the individual buyer. Nor is the trimming of the printed sheets considered here, since this hand operation may have been done as part of the edition binding procedure.

Messrs. James W. Wertz and Don Anderson, who are associated in the operation of a trade bindery in Dallas, have determined that it would take about thirty-five man-hours to hand fold the components for each 100 copies of the Josephus volume, to gather the sheets into sections, and then to place the sections in proper order.

No supporting evidence from the literature was sought to confirm the bindery time estimates. In view of the relative insignificance of the bindery element in the overall labor figures, it does not matter very much if the estimate deviates by even a substantial percentage from the time that was actually taken for bindery work by the people who prepared the Josephus volume in the 1480s.

ADDITIONAL COSTS

We have so far considered certain specific aspects of direct production

'The collation is as follows: A-L M6 a"0 b-r f8 s-lx8 y .




labor only, but it is obvious that the labor figures are far from complete. It has been necessary to ignore many time-consuming procedures such as the making of the ink (which was usually done in the printing plant); the dis- tasteful and tedious task of "knocking up" (preparing) the ink balls; the handling and storage of paper, type metal, and other items; the wetting and drying of paper; the cleaning, maintenance, and repair of equipment; the running of errands; the supervision of employees; the preparatory work in the office; and so forth. Moreover, no allowances have been made to compensate for pauses for refreshment, over- runs, underruns, errors, authors' cor- rections and alterations, and the "downtime" resulting from the break- down of equipment or the interruption of the orderly flow of work from one phase of production to the next. And, of course, no mention has been made of the cost of paper and other materials, although we are told by Hirsch that "the permissible generalization . . . is that in the earliest period the cost of material probably equalled or slightly exceeded the cost of labor, that it de- creased at a slow rate, but may have been reduced to a third of the total cost some time during the second half of the XVIth century" [4, p. 40].

It should be noted that this state- ment of Hirsch, based in great degree on the conclusions of Febvre and Mar- tin [2, p. 168], is meant to be no more than a rule of thumb. Insofar as labor costs are concerned, for example, the composition component remains about the same whether a press run is long or short. This means that the labor outlay per unit printed is smaller in a long run than in a short run. The amount of paper needed will, on the other hand, vary directly with the length of the press run, with the result that the paper

cost per unit will be the same regardless of the size of the run-unless, of course, a quantity discount factor en- ters the picture.

Utilizing these incomplete estimates of labor time for the production of the Josephus volume, a preliminary sum- mation may now be attempted.

To begin with, the composition estimate of 3,699 man-hours will, as noted previously, remain constant regardless of the number of books printed. This is not precisely true in the sense that the longer the press run was, the greater would have been the possibility of type breakdowns, calling for the reset- ting of all or part of the type in individual pages; but this aspect of the composition requirements must be ignored in this study since we do not know exactly how durable incunable type was.

Edition sizes have been postulated for the Josephus work of 200, 300, 500, and 1,000 copies, and the man-hour requirements for the production of editions in these sizes have been summa- rized in table 1.

Naturally, the labor per copy in a large edition turns out to be smaller than in a printing of fewer copies.

As has been noted above, a substantial number of very important time- consuming processes have not been included in these computations. In order to compensate to some degree for these omissions, an increment of one-third is being added to the figures shown on the bottom two lines of table 1. This adjustment factor is, admittedly, an arbitrary one, and it may be more ac- curate in one edition size than another, but it appears to be quite modest in view of the number of steps in the production of the Josephus book that have had to be overlooked. It may very well be that a correction factor of twice the




333 percent figure would better express the realities of the situation.

The effects of such an upward re- vision of one-third are shown in table 2.

A press run of 300 copies was quite common in the incunable era. If the Josephus edition was of this size, it would thus have required about forty- two man-hours of production labor per

TABLE 1

ESTIMATED HOURS OF LABOR PER COPrY FOR

EDITIONS OF VARIOUS SIZES

NUMBER OF MAN-HouRS BY SIZE o0 EDITION

PROCESSES _ __

200 300 500 1,000

Composition .................... 3,699 3,699 3,699 3,699 Press work ...................... 3, 708 5,562 9,270 18,540 Bindery work ................... 70 105 175 350

Total number of man-hours..... 7,477 9,366 13,144 22,589 Man-hours per copy (to nearest

full hour) .....3.7 ....... 31 26 23

TABLE 2

CORRECTED ESTIMATE OF HouRS OF LABOR

NUMBER OF MAN-HOURS BY SIZE OF EDITION

ADJUSTMENT FACTORS

200 300 500 1,000

Total man-hours from table 1 71477 9,366 13,144 22,589 33j percent correction increment.. . 2,492 3,122 4,381 7,530

Total number of man-hours (adjusted) .................. 9,969 12,488 17,525 30,119

Adjusted man-hours per copy (to nearest full hour) ........ 50 42 35 30

copy-and many other labor factors have not yet been considered. There is, of course, no way of ascertaining how many hours of apprentice labor (less costly, presumably, to the master printer than the labor of the craftsmen, but also not as productive per hour) are included in the estimates, but we can be sure that the overwhelming portion of the forty-two hours involved highly skilled labor.

However, the cost estimates which

have been made up to this point are still far from complete. The matter of paper, mentioned previously, is by itself of critical importance, and there are other costly items which should at least be listed: shipping expenses; rent (or its equivalent in the form of a fair return on investment, if the printer owned the premises he occupied); ad-

ministrative costs; interest; fees to authors, to translators, and to editors; taxes; bad debts; commissions and other expenses relating to sales; and the markups of both the printer and the bookseller (or of the man who com- bined both functions and served as printer-bookseller).

The application of Hirsch's generalization that paper costs were about the same as labor costs adds the value of forty-two more hours of labor to the




forty-two already indicated for the production of each of the 300 copies of the Josephus book. We have therefore reached a cost of eighty-four man-hours of earning power for each copy of the book.

If we assume that (1) 300 copies of the book were printed, (2) no patron subsidized the project and bore part of the costs, (3) the book was sold at a retail price which included those costs we have merely mentioned but have not calculated as well as those costs we have computed, and (4) a profit was realized from this venture then the selling price of each copy of the Jose- phus book must necessarily have been substantially greater than the value of eighty-four man-hours of labor.

Hirsch [4, pp. 37] states that the "actual compensation in money was, in the XVth century, about two ducats per month for the lowest paid employees [in print shops]." In Padua, Hirsch continues, the printer Maufer paid between one and one-half and two ducats a month to inkers and between two and two and one-half ducats to typesetters and pressmen. These wages were over and above the subsistence which Mau- fer furnished to his men. Apparently, Maufer's employees were unhappy with the lodgings assigned to them and quit work. In due time, having reconsidered their action, they came back to their jobs, but Maufer discharged them. They thereupon found work with a higher-paying competitor of Maufer's at three ducats for typesetters and two and one-half ducats for pressmen. Hirsch asserts, however, that "comparison with other figures seems to indi- cate that foremen generally could ex- pect between five and nine ducats per month, while the compensation of the average of Italian famulus of the XVth

century, whether typesetter or pressman, was close to four ducats."

If we accept this figure of four ducats per month (plus subsistence) as valid, then the labor cost of the Jose- phus book, in a 300-copy edition, was by itself approximately equal to the cash earnings of a printing craftsman for half of one week's time. If we accept, moreover, the labor-cum-paper valua- tion of eighty-four hours computed previously, then we are speaking of the equivalent of the earnings of the worker for one week. In reality, of course, the additional items included in the selling price would have raised the price to the worker well beyond his one week's cash income. By contrast, a book of the physical size and typo- graphic characteristics of the Josephus volume will retail today for a sum which a skilled worker can earn in two, three, or four hours of his time.

In any society, even in one in which labor is pitifully underpaid, any prod- uct costing the equivalent of as many man-hours of labor as the Joannes edition of Josephus is prohibitively expensive for the bulk of the population. This would be true even in a slave econ- omy and must surely have been true in fifteenth-century Europe.

The estimates of labor which have been presented here are by no means immune to criticism. It would, in fact, be astonishing if it could somehow be proved that we had come within only a few percent, one way or the other, of the true average figures. Neverthe- less, they are so high that even if it could be shown that they are badly overstated, the resulting costs would still be impressive. It is, however, my opinion that the contrary is more likely to be the case, and that if the labor figures presented in this paper are to be questioned it is because they have




been understated, not overstated. The fact is that the printing and paper- making techniques of the fifteenth century were simply too primitive to make it possible to produce books of any substantial size except at very considerable cost. Quite naturally, this was re- flected in the selling prices. The printed book, it is true, could be bought for much less than the manuscript book, although Curt Biihler has suggested that the earliest printed books may not have been cheaper than manuscripts [8, p. 150].

REFLECTIONS ON COMPARATIVE COSTS

It should be noted that the Josephus volume on which this cost analysis has been based is, typographically speaking, not a complex job, and does not represent as expensive a publishing investment as many other books of simi- lar size did. It contains only one style of type, and this in only one size. Col- umn width is uniform on every page, except that indentations are made at the left margin of the first few lines of each chapter for the insertion of iInitial letters by the purchaser or a scribe. The space between lines is also the same throughout the book, and there are no headlines or other time-consuming typographical niceties anyplace in the work. Nor are there any woodcuts.

Every effort was obviously made to keep costs at a minimum in the production of this edition. Any attempt to analyze the labor costs for a more com- plicated book, one which includes numerous styles and sizes of type, mar- ginalia, headlines on each page, varying column widths, interlinear glosses, com- mentaries upon basic text, ornamenta- tion and, to make matters even more difficult, an assortment of woodcuts, would present an intriguing challenge- and would certainly result in much greater labor cost figures than those which have been obtained in this study.

It would appear that no matter how one approaches the study of the production costs involved in fifteenth-century book printing, one conclusion stands out-that the primitive techniques then available for the manufacturing of books, at any rate of books of fair size, placed the selling prices at levels which were far beyond the means of the vast majority of the population. It is, in fact, not at all improbable that the prices being paid now, in 1969, for many of these incunable volumes are, considering the relative earning powers involved, less than people had to pay for them when they were brand new 500 years ago. Compared to what they cost originally, they may indeed be bargains today!

REFERENCES 1. Goff, Frederick R. Incunabula in American

Libraries. New York: The Bibliographical Society of America, 1964.

2. Febvre, L. and Martin, H. J. L'Apparition du livre. Paris: Albin-Michel, 1958.

3. Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, 1683-84. Edited by Herbert Davis and Harry Carter. Lon- don: Oxford University Press, 1962.

4. Hirsch, Rudolf. Printing, Selling, and Read- ing, 1450-1550. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrasso- witz, 1967.

5. Sartori, Antonio. Documenti padovani sul- l'arte della stampa nel sec XV, "Libri e

stampatori in Padova, 1959," doc. XIV, pp. 111-231.

6. Printing and the Mind of Man: An Exhi- bition of Fine Printing in the King's Library of the British Museum, July-September, 1963. London: Trustees of the British Mu- seum, 1963.

7. Clair, Colin. A History of Printing in Brit- ain. London: Cassell, 1965.

8. Biihler, Curt F. The Fifteenth-Centutry Book: The Scribes, the Printers, the Deco- rators. Philadelphia: University of Penn- sylvania Press, 1960.



production costs in fifteenth-century printing

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