Can you collect all of human history, past and future, and enfold it into a book? At the end of the 15th century, only fifty years after the invention of printing using movable metal type, in what may have been the most ambitious publishing project to date, a printer in Nuremberg by the name of Anton Koberger attempted this very task.

It’s this book that comes to mind when I think about an object epitomizing the human impulse to collect. It embodies both the acquisitive ambition of compiling sources and knowledge and also—maybe more significantly—the desperate will toward survival that often accompanies the collecting impulse: contrasting, say, the motivations of a contemporary art collector with those of a man pushing a grocery cart full of aluminum cans and plastic bottles. Just as I might see both of these figures walking the same Chelsea block today, I see their 15th-century equivalents in the pages of this book.

, now commonly referred to in the English-speaking world as 

, was published in 1493 and remains an iconic work (even something of a cliché) of the so-called incunable period—the term for the early, somewhat experimental phase of book printing from Gutenberg’s invention before 1450 to the year 1500. For a 500-year-old book, it isn’t especially rare, with more than 800 copies of the first Latin edition now held in research libraries, museums, and academic collections, more than half of the estimated original print run still extant, documented, and largely accessible.

A second edition was published soon after, translated into German. So popular and prized, the book was also soon pirated by a printer in Augsburg, less than 150 kilometers from Nuremberg.

The book’s author or, perhaps more accurately, editor, Hartmann Schedel, was a medical doctor and himself one of Nuremberg’s greatest book collectors. Most of the text was simply collaged from a mix of Christian and classical sources in his personal library, with his original contributions binding this material together within the structure of the book. It’s divided into the “seven ages of the world,” spanning from the Biblical story of God creating the orders of angels and heavens (a scene that borders a geocentric model of the universe, rimmed with astrological signs), followed by the creation of birds and animals, and ultimately to the genesis of humankind, with Eve shown emerging from Adam’s rib. To modern readers, the woodblock printed cells illustrating these scenes might recall a graphic novel, with God alternating in form between a disembodied hand emerging from a cloud (a representation of the power of creation) and a bearded fatherly figure. The book ends in the Biblical tale of revelation and apocalypse: a promised end of the world (and last judgment), with various Biblical and classical accounts interspersed within.

As an intellectual and technological achievement, it is one of the first works to synthesize a design that incorporated both text and image, helping to establish the visual character of the printed book as its own form, freed from and no longer seeking to mimic the tradition of handwritten medieval manuscripts, which could also take on highly synthetic text-image formats, as in the Books of Hours, popular prayer books from the same century designed and marketed for the laity, which were both written and painted or illuminated with the inclusion of gold leaf. Gutenberg’s Bible had to look like and essentially pass as a manuscript. Koberger’s 

 helped codify how a printed book could look, presenting information both textually and graphically as its own proven technological form.

was also one of the most incidental: The young son of a Hungarian goldsmith by the name of Albrecht Dürer, who likely had a hand in the design of the more than 600 woodcut illustrations featured in the book, many of them used more than once. The design was commissioned from and executed by the workshops of the artists Michael Wohlgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff. Dürer apprenticed with Wolgemut from 1486 to 1489, so it was likely that he worked on the project in its earliest days. Wolgemut ran an atelier where he oversaw and sometimes partly subcontracted work to churn out paintings, sculptures, altarpieces, and woodcut illustrations for the then-nascent technology of the printed book. The great printer Koberger, who himself had first trained as a goldsmith before turning to developing what was likely the largest printing and publishing operation in the world at that time, also happened to be Dürer’s godfather.

As a work of learning or scholarship, the 

 gathers a hodge-podge view of retrospective late-Medieval thinking. Despite Columbus’s voyage in the year before the book’s publication, the world map reflects a classical worldview, centering Europe, bordered by Africa and Asia, recording a rather primitive Ptolemaic geography presented beside a series of monstrous portraits of characters sourced mainly from Herodotus: a six-armed man, a woman whose body is covered in hair, a centaur, an androgyne, a cyclops, and a Blemmyes, a headless figure thought to be found in Libya, with facial features inset in his chest. As if a mix of fear and fantasy populated the regions beyond the familiar order.

 is taken up by city views of major European capitals and centers of trade, of cities and towns. Some woodcuts are repeated, thus representing two different cities with the same image—the logic being that this city is also on a river and so on. The most elaborate image is of Nuremberg itself, which was, at the time of publication, enjoying its waning days as a wealthy cosmopolitan center. It takes up the entirety of the opening pages of the book, from verso to facing recto.

Here is where I find the most interesting detail related to collecting, which in some way has transformed how I see every early-printed book: in the bottom right of the frame, outside of the walled city limits of Nuremberg and set apart, sits Ulman Stromer’s paper mill. This was the first European paper mill established north of the Alps; it began production a century earlier, converted from a flour mill in 1390, breaking what was essentially an Italian monopoly.

When looking at this city view of Nuremberg, the print comes alive to me. Not with the workings of the mill itself but with the ragpickers the mill required to source the raw material needed for its work. They are like the canners with their overstuffed bags and shopping carts, recycling for cash. Each can is equal to a coin. So, too, were the spent rags redeemed by the ragpickers—a sort of currency collected from trash heaps or door-to-door inquiries, the ragpickers visible, even conspicuous, yet in the margins of society. A scavenger underclass. In my imagination, this woodcut in 

 teems with these ragpickers. Each of the dozens of copies I have looked at in various university and research libraries and museums still consists of their labor, as do many of the great works of literature from the last 500 years, all produced and printed upon the labor of the ragpickers.

Incunabula (plural), incunabulum (singular) in Latin, or Anglicized as incunable, means precisely, in the rare book librarian or bibliophile’s jargon, “a book print in or before the year 1500.” In Latin, the term means “from the cradle,” suggesting swaddling cloth, the simple textile used to wrap a child, one of the first human sensory experiences after the skin of the mother. Swaddling clothes, after their use was complete, were precisely the kind of quality rags sought after by the ragpickers to be turned into fine, handmade laid paper.

The rags would be collected, then sorted by quality, then cleaned, then retted—a process of fermentation that broke down the fibers chemically before they were beaten mechanically into a fibrous slurry. Into this slurry, a rectangular screen made of woven wires would be placed and given a methodical shake, evenly spreading the fibers onto its surface and producing a single large sheet of paper, which would then be pressed and dried between two sheets of felt. The completed sheet wouldn’t be much larger than the full folio spread showing that map of Nuremberg, with its mill. This page, too, was made from the scavenged wares of the ragpickers.

John Vincler

The ragpickers were visible, even conspicuous, yet in the margins of society. A scavenger underclass.

The Ragpickers

John Vincler is the newly appointed Co-Chief Art Critic of 

 magazine (along with Johanna Fateman). He serves as Library Director at Poets House. He is at work on a book-length project about cloth as subject and medium in art.

John Vincler

The RagpickersThe Ragpickers

John Vincler