Incunabula
Incunabula (singular: incunabulum) are books printed in Europe before January 1, 1501 — the products of the first fifty years of the printing press. They sit at the boundary between manuscript culture and the print era, sharing characteristics of both, and they are among the most studied and most carefully preserved objects in the history of Western civilization.
What They Are
Johannes Gutenberg’s introduction of movable type printing to Europe around 1450 did not immediately produce books that looked like modern printed books. Early printers worked within a manuscript tradition, and their products reflect it. Incunabula often use typefaces designed to mimic the handwriting of scribes. They leave blank spaces where illuminated initials were to be added by hand. They lack title pages — a convention not yet established — and their colophons (the end-matter identifying printer, place, and date) vary widely in completeness and accuracy.
The word “incunabula” is used both for individual books printed in this period and collectively for the entire body of fifteenth-century printed material. Major research libraries — the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Library of Congress, the Bavarian State Library — hold significant incunabula collections and contribute records to the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC), the international database maintained by the British Library.
Approximately 30,000 editions are known to survive from the incunabular period, representing perhaps 28,000 distinct works. The total number of surviving copies across all editions runs into the hundreds of thousands, though many are fragmentary. Given that fifteenth-century printing runs were small by modern standards — typically a few hundred copies — the survival rate is remarkable and reflects centuries of institutional collecting.
Etymology
The word comes directly from Latin incunabula — cradle, birthplace, or the earliest stages of anything. The root cunae means cradle. Applied to early printed books, the metaphor captures the infancy of the printing trade: these are books from the cradle of print. The term gained scholarly currency in the seventeenth century and is now universal in bibliography and book history.
A Concrete Example
The Gutenberg Bible (c. 1455), of which approximately 49 substantial copies survive, is the most famous incunabulum. Each copy was printed on Gutenberg’s press but then completed by hand — rubricators added red and blue initial letters, illuminators decorated borders, and binders produced distinctive bindings for individual patrons. No two surviving copies are identical as physical objects, even though they share the same printed text. This combination of mechanical reproduction and artisanal completion is characteristic of incunabula as a class.
Common Misconception
Incunabula are sometimes described as “the first printed books” without qualification. The printing press was not invented in a single moment, and the 1501 cutoff date is a scholarly convention, not a technological threshold. Books printed in 1501 are not fundamentally different from books printed in 1500 — the same presses, the same type, the same printers were at work on both sides of the date. The cutoff exists because bibliographers needed a workable boundary for a distinct collecting and cataloguing tradition. Books from 1501 onward are called “post-incunabula” or “sixteenth-century books” but are not of lesser interest or importance.