Procopius Waldvogel

Procopius Waldvogel (alternate spellings: Prokop Waldvogel or Procopius Waldfogel) was a medieval printer from Avignon. It is believed that he might have invented printing before Johannes Gutenberg. He flourished in the fifteenth century.

Life
He was a German living in Avignon. He was a silversmith by trade. He fled from Prague during the Hussite troubles and stayed in Lucerne, Switzerland. He arrived in Avignon in 1444. At Avignon he had two students: Manaud Vitalis and Arnaud de Coselhac. His name appears in several contracts of that time, most notably the one in which he agrees to provide Davin de Caderousse with movable metal type of Hebrew letters. He disappeared from the historical record after 1446.

Career
It has been claimed that he owned molds for printing before Johannes Gutenberg in 1444. However, unlike Gutenberg, he did not print any books.

He had two alphabets and various metal forms and he offered to teach the art of artificial writing to a schoolteacher.

In 1890, the French historian M. Requin claimed that Waldvogel had invented the art of moveable-type printing before Johannes Gutenberg. Unfortunately, Requin never showed any evidence that Waldvogel printed anything, and his allegations are long forgotten.

He was a contemporary of other printers of the time, which included Laurens Janszoon Coster, Jean Brito and Panfilo Castaldi.

Controversial printed quires possibly assigned to Procopius Waldvogel
In 2015 two Hebrew-letter quires with a total of 32 pages were found to be reused in the cover of a book from the 16th century. They were sent by their owner to the Institute of Hebrew Manuscript Research at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. The study of their watermarks, paper, ink, typeset typography, made upon request of their owner, concluded that it may be possible that they could have been printed in the area of Avignon around 1444, suggesting that they might be Waldfogel and Davin de Caderousse's work. This finding has received some media coverage, although in the absence of a counter-expertise by independent scholars, the putative link between these printed quires and Waldfogel's entreprise remains purely speculative.

Since 2019, the Institute for Computerized Bibliography of the Hebrew Book published three comprehensive studies on the sheets, which were brought in 2015 before Yitzhak Yudlov, who was the Head of the Institute for Hebrew Bibliography in Jerusalem for many years, and Dr. Benjamin Richler, former Director of the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the National Library in Jerusalem.

Regarding the identification of those sheets, they wrote: "In our opinion, these are the sheets from the printing experiments of Prokop Waldvogel and Davin from Caderousse ".

The publications of the Institute for Computerized Bibliography of the Hebrew Book dealt with three components of the sheets, namely paper, watermark and typography.

The first publication, co-authored with the Historical City Archive of Fabriano, Italy, where the paper and the watermark were created, is titled “Watermark identification of early Hebrew printed paper from Avignon in 1446”.

A second publication is a comprehensive research lecture given at the 2022 conference of the International Association of Paper Historians in Krems, Austria.

The published version appeared as a chapter in the book “Artists’ paper – a case in paper history”, Verlag Berger 2023.

In this chapter, for the first time, the Institute for Computerized Bibliography of the Hebrew Book presents an innovative study method on the typography of Hebrew books in the 15th century.

The third publication was a lecture given at the 2023 conference of the Technical Association of the Graphic Arts, TAGA, in Oklahoma City.

There a comprehensive and in-depth study on the beginning of print in the 15th century was presented.