Gart der Gesundheidt (Garden of Health) | Hortus sanitatis

Gart der Gesundheidt (Garden of Health) | Hortus sanitates

German (Lubeck), 1492

woodcut illustrations
height 25 cm

University of Oregon Library    Special Collections and University Archives
Edward Burgess Early Printed Book Collection, Ms 108

Diebold, William. The Illustrated Book in the Age of Printing: Books and Manuscripts from Oregon Collections. Portland, OR: Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, 1993, cat. no. 23, pp. 24-25 - Quoted with permission

These two books [reference applies to exhibit from which this text was originally a catalog entry] illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of entrepreneurial innovation in the printing of early illustrated books. Guides to the medicinal uses of herbs were common and popular in the Middle Ages, so it was not surprising that printers would consider printing them. To be useful, however, the herbal needed to depict a large number of plants, a major undertaking. For the hundreds of illustrations in this book Peter Schoffer commissioned the design and cutting of wood blocks. Many of the designs established a new level of accuracy in their naturalism, in part because their designer, not content with hearsay knowledge, journeyed to the Middle East to examine unfamiliar plants. According to Ivins, “The Gart der Gesundheit is thus the first printed illustrated account of the results of a journey undertaken with scientific purposes in mind.”

Given the herbal's importance as a text, Schoffer, Gutenberg's former assistant, one of the most successful printers of his day and a smart and conservative businessman who rarely ventured into illustrated printing, had every expectation of reaping significant rewards for his outlay of capital. The fifteenth century, however, had neither modern copyright laws nor scruples about plagiarism. And precisely the widespread distribution of books brought about by printing made it difficult to keep pictorial or textual innovation private for long. Schoffer's herbal was pirated in the very year it was printed. The next year, this pirate edition was in its turn copied by a rival printer. Apparently, Schoffer did not care to compete in such a vicious market, for he sold the blocks for the herbal illustrations to a Basel printer.

On the right [U of Oregon, Burgess 108] is one of the many pirate editions of the 1485 Schoffer edition, printed in northern Germany. The woodcut of the gladiolus is clearly copied from the Schoffer original. Steffen Arndes, the printer, did add to Schoffer's text (which he also had translated into low German to appeal to his local audience), for neither the Malabathrum nor the Fungi appear in the Schoffer edition.