1499: Mathias Huss

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Source:

Title: ‘La grant danse macabre des hommes et des femmes’.
Author: -
Publisher: -
Printer: Mathias Huss
Illustrator: -
Engraver: -
Location: Lyon
Year: 1499 (le .xviii. iour de feurier)
Links: [Scan 1: Scheide Library, Princeton University], [Scan 2: British Library: I.B.41735], [USTC: id00020500].

Comments:

James Moran (1973) p. 25: ‘The first illustration of a printing press was certainly not drawn to enlighten future generations as to its characteristics. It appears in an edition of the Danse Macabre, published in Lyons by Mathias Huss in 1499. Death is depicted carrying off a printer and a bookseller, and, such as it is, we may take it that the cut illustrates a French fifteenth-century printing office.’

Technique:

Woodcut.

Descriptions in publications:

Falconer Madan (1895) ‘Early representations of the printing-Press with especial reference to that by Stradanus.’, Bibliographica. Volume 1, page 225-226. (Illustration #1).

James Moran (1973) Printing presses. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, figure 3, page 22.

Nigel Roche (2000) The iconography of the printing office to 1700. Unpublished MA thesis. Library and Information Studies, University College London. (Illustration #A).

H. Noel Humphreys (1870) Masterpieces of the early printers and engravers, London, plate 20.

A.W. Pollard (1893) Early illustrated books, London, page 164.