26 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS, 
by movable types, is to stultify and make meaningless the whole . 
account given by Zell of the invention of printing. It is further 
urged, the art of printing with movable types could not have been 
practised in Holland without eliciting comment from artists and 
cultivated men of that time. Among other notables, Caxton and 
Erasmus both lived in the Low Countries during a good part of the 
latter half of the fifteenth century ; and both credit Mainz with 
being the birth-place of printing. Yet Erasmus was a Hollander by 
birth ; Caxton lived in Bruges a quarter of a century, and both were 
on such terms of personal intimacy with the printers of the time and 
were such admirers of the printing arts, that the invention, in 
Holland, of movable types could hardly have escaped their 
knowledge. It is admitted that no Block-book Donatus is known ; 
perhaps school books of that day were more perishable than they 
generally have been, and now are. More diligent search than ever 
before will be made, and fifteenth century bindings and all likely 
lurking places will be ransacked for them, the types of the forty- 
seven Costeriana will also be subjected to systematic examination 
by experts, and by these and kindred means the enlarged evidence, 
considered by Mr. Blades necessary before passing final judgment, 
may yet be found. 
By the year 1500 printing presses were at work throughout 
Europe in two hundred cities and towns, Jenson, Aldus Manutius, 
Koburger, Colard Mansion and Caxton are but a few of the more 
enthusiastic men whose names are on the bead roll of fifteenth 
century printers. Koburger, at Nuremburg, kept at work twenty- 
four presses and a hundred men. He printed twelve editions of 
the Latin Bible ; and an illustrated German Bible said to be his 
masterpiece. Aldus Manutius followed close on the heels of, 
Jenson at Venice, and made it a work of his life to spread a 
knowledge of the Greek classics. So well did he succeed in his 
task, that he sold a pocket edition of Greek authors at a price 
equivalent to fifty cents a volume ; whereas, only thirty years before, 
the King of France, Louis XI., according to old bibliographers, 
had to pledge plate in security for a borrowed volume, and an 
Italian nobleman sold an estate to buy a Latin copy of Livy. What 
the Aldine printers did for Greek, the Elzevirs, at a later day, did 
for Latin literature. In Holland, chiefly at Leyden and Amsterdam, 
