What is "incunable"

n. A very early printed book, specifically one printed before 1501; an incunabulum.

An incunable, or sometimes incunabulum (plural incunables or incunabula, respectively), is a book, pamphlet, or broadside (such as the Almanach cracoviense ad annum 1474) that was printed—not handwritten—before the year 1501 in Europe. "Incunable" is the anglicised singular form of "incunabula", Latin for " swaddling clothes" or " cradle", which can refer to "the earliest stages or first traces in the development of anything." A former term for "incunable" is "fifteener", referring to the 15th century.

The first recorded use of incunabula as a printing term is in the Latin pamphlet De ortu et progressu artis typographicae ("Of the rise and progress of the typographic art", Cologne, 1639) by Bernhard von Mallinckrodt, which includes the phrase prima typographicae incunabula, "the first infancy of printing", a term to which he arbitrarily set an end of 1500 which still stands as a convention. The term came to denote the printed books themselves in the late 17th century. John Evelyn, in moving the Arundel Manuscripts to the Royal Society in August 1678, remarked of the printed books among the manuscripts: "The printed books, being of the oldest impressions, are not the less valuable; I esteem them almost equal to MSS."

The convenient but arbitrarily chosen end date for identifying a printed book as an incunable does not reflect any notable developments in the printing process, and many books printed for a number of years after 1500 continued to be visually indistinguishable from incunables. "Post-incunable" typically refers to books printed after 1500 up to another arbitrary end date such as 1520 or 1540.

As of 2014, there are about 30,000 distinct incunable editions known to be extant, while the number of surviving copies in Germany alone is estimated at around 125,000.