Of Leviathans and Copy Cats

        I’ve previously mentioned the fact that printing was invented before the concept of copyright, so early printers of books stole from each other with blithe abandon.  When you remember that before the printing press, the only way to get any book at all (short of composing one yourself from scratch) was to copy it, then you can understand that it took a while for the mindset to change.  So today I have for you a little demonstration of how this played out.

        In 1491 Jacob Meydenbach published Ortus (or Hortus) Sanitatis, the expansion of a 1485 herbal to include animals, birds, fish, and stones as well as plants.  You can note a few things from this page from that edition.  For one thing, it’s in Latin, as were most scholarly works.  Secondly, although the author (possibly Johann Wonnecke von Caub) was moving toward a scientific attitude and attempting to give accurate information about the uses of

plants and animals for medicine, the fact that this red and yellow monster is a leviathan shows that the author was still working with the bestiary tradition of finding information in religious works.  (To be fair, it’s hard to blame the Bible for this leviathan, which seems to live on land as much as water.)  Thirdly, note the hand coloring of the wood block illustrations.  Although crude, it was highly unusual for the time, making this a deluxe edition.  As for the blue and red ink in the text, I can’t tell whether that was printed or hand-painted.  At any rate, the book proved wildly successful…

        So successful, in fact, that in 1499 Johann Prüss of Strassburg thought he wouldn’t mind getting in on a little of the action, and he printed his own edition which, obviously, he simply copied from the earlier version.  Look at this leviathan entry and you notice right away that the layout  is different.  You can also see if you look a little more closely that the wood block illustration is different, as well, even though it was clearly copied from Meydenbach’s picture.  This leviathan has rolling hills in the background and very attractive decorative patterns on his spine plates, as well as an outline around the block.  Despite these minor differences, this would clearly be a flagrant copyright violation if such a thing as copyright violation had existed.

        In addition to straight-up copies, there were also translations, and in 1521 Laurence Andrew produced an abridged version in English entitled The Noble lyfe & natures of man, of bestes, serpentys, fowles & fisshes.  Once again, he copied the previous illustrations.  Comparing his leviathan with the others you can see that it has a little more space above its tail, a medium amount of embellishment on its plates, and a little nick out of its tongue where the thin wood outline got carved away too much.  You can see that Andrew has also copied the illustrations of the next creature, called “lanificus,” which seems from the description to be something along the lines of a silkworm.

        So that’s all pretty straightforward, but this particular wood block print illustrates another habit of early printers, because… what’s this? 
That’s right, it’s the same block yet again - this time the exact same block - used again in the same 1521 edition by Andrew as the illustration for the dragon.  After all, having gone through all the work of copying and carving a block, it seems such a waste to use it for only one animal!

[Pictures: Leviathan, wood block print from Ortus sanitatis, Meydenbach edition, 1491 (Image from University of Cambridge);

Leviathan, wood block print from Ortus sanitatis, Prüss edition, 1499 (Image from Boston Public Library);

Leviathan, wood block print from The noble lyfe & natures of man, by Laurence Andrew, 1521;

Dragon, wood block print from The noble lyfe & natures of man, by Andrew, 1521 (Images from The Wellcome Trust).]