A Gutenberg-Era Page Hid in a Scrapbook for 100 Years
A student looked at a scrapbook she called strange and filled with lots of trash. One page inside turned out to be something experts say they never expected to exist.
In fall 2025, Celia Lanza, a Trinity College senior, was inventorying the collection at the college’s Watkinson Library in Connecticut. She called over Eric Johnson-DeBaufre, the rare books and special collections librarian, to look at the scrapbook. He recognized the Gothic type right away.
What the page is
The page is a single printed leaf from Ars minor, a Latin grammar textbook by the Roman grammarian Aelius Donatus. It counts as an incunable, a book printed in Western Europe during the first 50 years of movable-type printing, from 1450 to 1500. The type came from Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, associates of Johannes Gutenberg, and derives from the first state of the type used in the Mainz Psalter, completed in 1457.
The fragment sits on paper, not vellum, and scholars think it may have been a proof sheet. The college describes it as believed to date to the mid 15th century, and researchers hope high-quality scans will narrow that down.
Why experts call it unexpected
Paul Needham and Eric White, both of Princeton’s Scheide Library, confirmed the identification. White said the fragment is a 15th-century printing of a schoolbook that has never been seen before and was never expected to exist. Johnson-DeBaufre noted that unrecorded incunables are rare, and finds like this one in the United States are almost unheard of.
Donatus texts were among the first works Gutenberg and his associates printed. They gave steady income and a way to test type before bigger projects such as the Gutenberg Bible.
A century in a scrapbook
The scrapbook held binding waste that William Cowper Prime collected. He donated it to the Watkinson in 1905 with more than 40 scrapbooks and nearly 1,500 books from the 15th and 16th centuries. The fragment then sat unidentified for more than a century.
Johnson-DeBaufre, Needham and White plan to publish their study in a scholarly journal before the page goes into Trinity’s digital repository. The college’s article says the type derives from Fust and Schoeffer’s but does not name them as the printers, and no edition is identified yet.
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