Catholicon (book)

The Summa grammaticalis quae vocatur Catholicon, or Catholicon (from the Greek Καθολικόν, universal), is a 13th-century Latin dictionary which found wide use throughout Latin Christendom. Some of the entries contain encyclopedic information, and a Latin grammar is also included. The work was created by John Balbi (Johannes Januensis de Balbis), of Genoa, a Dominican, who finished it on March 7, 1286. The work served in the late Middle Ages to interpret the Bible. The Catholicon was one of the first books to be printed, using the new printing technology of Johannes Gutenberg in 1460.

It should be distinguished from Lagadeuc's Catholicon, a Latin-Breton-French dictionary compiled in 1464 by a priest of Tréguier called Jehan Lagadeuc which was published 5 November 1499 (the first printed French dictionary and the first ever trilingual dictionary).

The Catholicon was one of the first books to be printed, using the new printing technology of Johannes Gutenberg in 1460; it is unclear who did the printing though Gutenberg himself was once regarded as the printer responsible. It was printed with a newly cut Gothic Antiqua, a small but easily readable, still gothically influenced, printing type, using sixty-six lines of forty letters in each column.

The Catholicon was printed in three editions or impressions, which, on the basis of the types of paper, can be assigned to the years 1460, 1469 and 1472. The typesetting of these three editions is similar. For the explanation of this phenomenon the historian of printing Lotte Hellinga puts forward the thesis that the Catholicon was printed in the same year, but on three different presses by three different printers, who cooperated in a joint venture. Mosley suggests that the book may have been printed using metal types wired together in two-line units.Paul Needham has presented the revolutionary opinion that the Catholicon was printed by means of two-line stereotypes or "slugs", a technology not documented in any form until after 1700.

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