Incunabula- the world's rarest books
Books printed before 1501. The term is derived from the Latin word cunae, meaning "cradle".
The gradual spread of printing ensured that there was great variety in the texts chosen for printing and the styles in which they appeared. Many early typefaces were modelled on local forms of writing or derived from the various European forms of Gothic script, but there were also some derived from documentary scripts (such as most of Caxton's types), and, particularly in Italy, types modelled on handwritten scripts and pen based calligraphy. These typefaces, derived from manual lettering styles, are often used today, barely modified, in digital form.
Printers tended to congregate in urban centres where there were scholars, ecclesiastics, lawyers, nobles and professionals who formed their major customer-base. Standard works in Latin inherited from the medieval tradition formed the bulk of the earliest printing, but as books became cheaper, works in the various vernaculars (or translations of standard works) began to appear.
An incunabulum is a book, single sheet, or image that was printed — not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe. These are very rare and valuable items. The origin of the word is the Latin incunabula for "swaddling clothes", used by extension for the infancy or early stages of something. The first recorded use of incunabula as a printing term is in a pamphlet by Bernhard von Mallinckrodt, De ortu et progressu artis typographicae ("Of the rise and progress of the typographic art"), (Cologne, 1639), which includes the phrase prima typographicae incunabula, "the first infancy of printing", a term to which he arbitrarily set an end, 1500, which still stands as a convention. The term came to denote the printed books themselves from the late seventeenth century. The plural is incunabula and the word is sometimes Anglicized to incunable. A former term is fifteener, referring to the fifteenth century.
There are two types of incunabula: the block-book printed from a single carved or sculpted wooden block for each page, thus xylographic, and the typographic, made with individual pieces of cast metal movable type on a printing press, in the technology made famous by Johann Gutenberg. Many authors reserve the term incunabula for the typographic ones only.
The end date for identifying a book as an incunabulum is convenient, but was chosen arbitrarily. It does not reflect any notable developments in the printing process around the year 1500. Incunabula usually refers to the earliest printed books, completed at a time when some books were still being hand-copied. Some fastidious book-collectors of the fifteenth century eschewed printed books in their personal libraries.
