690 



PRINTING. 



multiplication of copies, and their still more astonish- 

 ing uniformity, they ascribed the whole work to 

 aatan. When, therefore, Faustus went to Paris 

 with his Bibles (the first copies of which, bearing 

 date, were printed in 1462), for the purpose of sell- 

 ing them there, such an outcry was raised against 

 him by the monks, that he was obliged to leave the 

 city in haste ; and this circumstance probably gave 

 rise to the well-known tradition that the devil had 

 carried him off. Other authorities, however, say, 

 that the legend of the Devil and Doctor Faustus is 

 of older date than the imention of printing. In 

 1466, Faustus made a second journey to Paris, and 

 died there of the plague, upon which Peter Schoef- 

 fer continued the printing business alone, at Mentz. 

 After the separation of Guttenburg and Faustus, 

 tde former had found means to procure a new print- 

 ing-press, and had struck off many works, of which 

 the most remarkable is the Astrological and Medi- 

 cal Calendar (in folio, 1457), considered the first 

 known work printed with the date annexed. 



In 1462, the city of Mentz was taken and sacked 

 by Adolphus, Count of Nassau, and this circumstance 

 is said to have so deranged the establishment of 

 Faustus and Schoeffer, that many of their workmen 

 were obliged to seek employment elsewhere. They 

 accordingly were dispersed into different countries, 

 and carried with them the knowledge they had ac- 

 quired under their former employers. From this 

 period, printing made rapid progress throughout 

 Europe. In 1465, we find works printed at Naples; 

 and in 1467, Sweynheim and Pannartz, two of the 

 most celebrated and extensive old printers, estab- 

 lished themselves at Rome. In 1469, we find 

 printing at Venice and Milan ; in 1470, at Paris, 

 Nuremberg, and Verona ; and by 1472, the art had 

 become known in all the important cities of the 

 continent. In 1490, it had reached Constantinople, 

 and by the middle of next century, had extended to 

 Russia and America. Of its rise and progress in 

 England and Scotland, we shall come to speak im- 

 mediately. 



At the invention of printing, the character of type 

 employed was the old Gothic or German. The 

 Roman type was first introduced by Sweynheim and 

 Piiiinartz, at Rome, and the Italic by Aldus. Schoe- 

 fier, in his edition of Cicero de ojficiis, produces, 

 for the first time, some Greek character, rudely 

 executed, but the earliest complete Greek work 

 was a grammar of that language, printed at Milan, 

 in 147C. The Pentateuch, which appeared in 1482, 

 was the first work printed in the Hebrew character, 

 and the earliest known Polyglot Bible Hebrew, 

 Arabic, Chaldaic, Greek, Latin issued from the 

 press of Genoa, in 1516. In the early history of 

 the art of printing, the most learned men were 

 proud to act as correctors of the press, and not un- 

 frequently their name was attached to the title-page, 

 along with that of the printer ! 



The reader, who has not studied Bibliography, 

 may here not be unwilling to learn a few of the 

 marks which distinguished our earliest printed 

 books. With regard to their forms, they were 

 generally either large or small folios, or at least 

 quartos : the lesser sizes were not in use. The 

 leaves were without running title, direction-word, 

 number of pages, or divisions into paragraphs. The 

 character itself was a rude old Gothic mixed with 

 Secretary, designed on purpose to imitate the hand- 

 writing of those times ; the words were printed so 

 close to one another, that they were difficult and 

 tedious to be read, even by those who were used to 

 manuscripts, and to this method ; and often led the 

 inattentive reader into mistakes. The orthography 

 was various and often arbitrary, disregarding 



method. Words were subjected to frequent abbre- 

 viations, which in time grew so numerous and dif- 

 ficult to be understood, that there was a necessity 

 of writing a book to teach the manner of reading 

 them. Periods were distinguished by no other 

 points than the double or single one, that is, the 

 colon and full-point ; but a little after there was an 

 oblique stroke introduced, thus /, which answered 

 the purpose of our comma. No capital letters were 

 used to begin a sentence, or for proper names of 

 men or places. Blanks were left for the places of 

 titles, initial letters, and other ornaments, in order 

 to have them supplied by the illuminators, whose 

 ingenious art, though in vogue before, and at that 

 time, did not long survive the masterly improve- 

 ments made by the printers in this branch of their 

 art. These ornaments were exquisitely fine, and 

 curiously variegated with the most beautiful colours, 

 and even with gold and silver ; the margins, like- 

 wise, were frequently charged with variety of 

 figures of saints, birds, beasts, monsters, flowers, 

 &c., which had sometimes relation to the contents 

 of the page, though often none at all : such embel- 

 lishments were very costly; but for those who could 

 not afford a great price, there were inferior orna- 

 ments, which could be done at a much easier rate. 

 The name of the printer, place of his residence, &c. 

 were either wholly neglected, or put at the end 

 of the book, not without some pious ejaculation or 

 doxology. The date was likewise omitted, or in- 

 volved in some crampt circumstantial period, or 

 else printed either at full length, or by numerical 

 letters, and sometimes partly one and partly the 

 other ; thus, one thousand CCCC and Ixxiiii, &c. 

 but all of them at the end of the book. There were 

 no variety of characters, no intermixture of Roman 

 and Italic; these are of later invention; pages 

 were continued in a Gothic letter of the same size 

 throughout. 200 or 300 were at first esteemed a 

 large impression; though, upon the encouragements 

 received from the learned, their numbers increased 

 in proportion. About 1469 70, alphabetical tables 

 of the first words of each chapter were introduced, 

 as a guide to the binder. Catch-words (now gene- 

 rally abolished) were first used at Venice, by Vin- 

 deline de Spire. The name and place of the inven- 

 tor of signatures is doubtful ; it appears they were 

 inserted into an edition of Terence, printed at Milan, 

 in 1470, by Anthony Zorat. In an edition of Baldi 

 Lectura super Codie., fyc. printed at Venice, by 

 John de Colonia and Jo. de Manthen de Gherretzem, 

 anno 1474, in folio, the signatures are not 

 introduced till the middle of the book, and then 

 continued throughout. Abbe Reve ascribes the 

 first use of signatures to John Koelhof, at Cologne, 

 in 1472. They were used at Paris, in 1476; and by 

 Caxton, in 1480. 



The art of printing was first introduced into Eng- 

 land by William Caxton, who established a press in 

 Westminster Abbey, sometime between 1471 and 

 1474. Caxton's claim to be considered the earliest 

 printer in England has been satisfactorily proved, 

 notwithstanding the discovery, about 1660, of a book 

 purporting to have been printed at Oxford in the 

 year 1468. This book is a small thin quarto, a 

 copy of which is in the public library at Cambridge, 

 bearing the following title : '' Exposicio Sancti 

 Jeronimi in Simbolum Apostolorum ad Papam 

 Laurentium. Ipipressa Oxonii, et finita Anno 

 Domini M. CCCC. LXVIII. XVII die Decembris." 

 The printer of this book is said to have been Fre- 

 derick Corsellis, a foreigner, who brought his types 

 from Haerlem ; and those writers who have advo- 

 cated the cause of Laurence Coster as the inventor 

 of printing, have generally pronounced Corsellis to 



