Bernhard von Mallinckrodt was born in Ahlen, south-east of Münster in 1591, and died in Ottenstein Castle in 1664. Having first studied theology and philosophy, he completed his doctorate in jurisprudence at Marburg University in 1615. Although a member of a noble Protestant family, he was received into the Catholic Church at Cologne in 1616, and subsequently became Dean of Münster Cathedral in 1625. Mallinckrodt was a candidate for vacant see of Münster in 1650, but the Bishopric eventually went to the Cathedral Treasurer, Christoph Bernhard von Galen.

Mallinckrodt was a noted book collector: indeed, by the time of his death he possessed a library of nearly five and a half thousand works, including some two hundred incunables. However, he is probably best known today for his own book entitled De ortu et progressu artis typographicae (On the Rise and Spread of the Art of Typography). Mallinckrodt had completed the manuscript for this work by 1635, and the book was published in Cologne in 1640 (although the frontispiece is actually dated 1639), to coincide with celebrations to mark what was considered in Germany to have been the 200th anniversary of the invention of printing by Gutenberg. In this work, Mallinckrodt became the first person to use the word ‘incunabula’ to mean the earliest period of printing with moveable type, when he described the era from Gutenberg till the end of the century as ‘prima typographiae incunabula’, the time when typography was in its swaddling-clothes. And, indeed, it was Mallinckrodt who termed 1500 as the boundary between ‘antique’ typography, and typography of the modern era.

This treatise focused specifically on the invention of printing, and was the first comprehensive study of incunabula. Mallinckrodt states in his preface that his reason for reason for writing this work was to take up the controversy of whether printing was invented by the Dutch or the Germans, and, over the next decade, a debate ensued between Mallinckrodt and Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn, a classicist and theologian from Leiden, over the origins of printing, with Boxhorn championing the proposition that printing had been invented by the Dutch in Haarlem in 1440s, whilst Mallinckrodt (correctly) asserted that it was actually the invention of Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer in Mainz.

It is, nevertheless, interesting to note that Mallinckrodt’s work on incunabula has not always received appropriate attention from later writers on the subject. Konrad Haebler, in his The Study of Incunabula, begins his second chapter with the words ‘The year 1640 should be considered the birth year of the study of incunabula …’, but then omits any mention of Mallinckrodt, referring instead to Johannes Saubert’s Historia bibliothecae reipublicae Noribergensis, which was published in 1643, and which lists incunabula in an appendix (although not, apparently, referring to them by that name). Haebler continues by saying that ‘the word “incunabula” first was associated with printing, even though not yet as a name for early printed books themselves’ in Philippe Labbé’s Nova bibliotheca MSS librorum, published in Paris in 1653. However, S. H. Steinberg, writing in the first chapter of his Five Hundred Years of Printing, gives Mallinckrodt the credit he is due: ‘the word incunabula was first used in connection with printing by Bernard von Mallinckrodt …’