ON THIS DAY AUGUST 14 2023

This Day in History: August 14

Featured Event

1457


The first book printed in Europe with a colophon bearing the name of the printer was completed in Mainz, Germany.



colophon, an inscription placed at the end of a book or manuscript and giving details of its publication—e.g., the name of the printer and the date of printing. Colophons are sometimes found in manuscripts and books made from the 6th century ce on. In medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, a colophon was occasionally added by the scribe and provided facts such as his name and the date and place of his completion of the work, sometimes accompanied by an expression of pious thanks for the end of his task.
With the invention of printing in the 15th century, printers gradually added a blank piece of paper at the front of a book to protect the first page from soiling, and they also added an identifying monogram, emblem, or a brief sentence at the rear of the book. At first, the latter inscription simply recorded that the printer had printed the work at hand in a given place. The first such printed colophon occurs in the Mainz Psalter produced by Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer in 1457, and is translated as follows:

The present copy of the Psalms, adorned with beauty of capital letters and sufficiently picked out with rubrics, has thus been fashioned by an ingenious method of printing and stamping without any driving of the pen, and to the worship of God has been diligently completed by Johannes Fust, citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheym, in the year of the Lord 1457 on the Vigil of the Assumption [i.e., August 14].

Such colophons are important sources of information for the origin of early printed books. In some printed books the scribe’s colophon was carried over and printed instead of, or with, the printer’s colophon. When they stood alone, they were distinguished from colophons and called explicits. When the two were combined, the term colophon was retained.


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Featured Biography

Halle Berry
American actress





Halle Berry, (born August 14, 1966, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.), American film actress, the first African American to win the Academy Award for best actress. She received the honour for her nuanced portrayal of Leticia Musgrove, a down-on-her-luck character in Monster’s Ball (2001).
Berry was a teenage finalist in national beauty pageants, worked in modeling, and began acting on television in 1989. Film roles in Jungle Fever (1991), directed by Spike Lee, and in Boomerang (1992), starring Eddie Murphy, first brought her notice. She starred with Jessica Lange in Losing Isaiah (1995), a drama about adoption, before earning acclaim for her portrayal of film star Dorothy Dandridge, the first African American to be nominated for a best-actress Oscar, in the television film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999). That performance earned her Emmy and Golden Globe awards.


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