Livre d

’Heures” printed in Paris, in 1512, by Simon Vostre.]

not less active in Venice, where it seems to have been imported by that Nicholas Jenson whom Louis XI. had sent to Gutenberg, and whom for a long time even the Venetians looked on as the inventor of the art with which he had clandestinely become acquainted at Mayence. From the

[Illustration: Fig. 399.--The Mark of Gérard Lecu, Printer at Gouwe (1482).]

[Illustration: Fig. 400.--The Mark of Fust and Schœffer, Printers. (Fifteenth Century.)]

year 1469, however, Jenson had no longer the monopoly of printing in Venice, where John de Spire had arrived, bringing also from Mayence all the improvements Gutenberg and Schœffer had obtained. This art having ceased to be a secret in the city of the Doges, great

[Illustration: Fig. 401.--Mark of Arnold de Keyser, Printer at Ghent.

(1480.)]

competition arose among printers, who flocked to Venice, where they found a market for their volumes which a thousand ships carried to all parts of the world. At this period important and admirable publications issued from the numerous rival printing establishments in Venice. Christopher Waltdorfer, of Ratisbon, published in 1471 the first edition of the “Decameron” of Boccaccio, of which a copy was sold for £2,080 at the Roxburgh sale; John of Cologne published, in the same year, the first dated edition of “Terence;” Adam of Amberg reprinted, from the Roman editions, “Lactantius” and “Virgil,” &c. Finally, Venice already possessed more than two hundred printers, when in 1494 the great Aldo Manuzio made his appearance, the precursor of the Estiennes,[62] who were the glory of French printing. From every part of Europe printing spread itself and flourished (Figs. 399 to 411); the printers, however, often neglected, perhaps intentionally, to date their

[Illustration: Fig. 402.--Mark of Colard Mansion, Printer at Bruges. (1477.)]

[Illustration: Fig. 403.--Mark of Trechsel, Printer at Lyons. (1489.)]

productions. In the course of 1469 there were only two towns, Venice and Milan, that revealed, by their dated editions, the time at which printing was first established within their walls; in 1470, five towns--Nuremberg, Paris, Foligno, Treviso, and Verona; in 1471, eight towns--Strasbourg, Spires, Treviso, Bologna, Ferrara, Naples, Pavia, and Florence; in 1472, eight others--Cremona, Felizzano, Padua, Mantua, Montreuil, Jesi, Munster, and Parma; in 1473, ten--Brescia, Messina, Ulm, Bude, Lauingen, Mersebourg, Alost, Utrecht, Lyons, and St. Ursio, near Vicenza; in 1474, thirteen towns, among which are Valentia (in Spain) and London; in 1475, twelve towns, &c. Each year we find the art gaining ground, and each year an increase in the number of books newly edited, rendering science and literature popular by considerably diminishing the price of books. Thus, for example, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the illustrious Poggio sold his fine manuscript of “Livy,” to raise money enough to buy himself a villa near Florence; Anthony of Palermo mortgaged his estate in order to be able to purchase a manuscript of the same historical writer, valued at a hundred and twenty-five dollars; yet a few years later the “Livy,” printed at Rome by Sweynheim and Pannartz, in one folio volume on vellum, was worth only five golden dollars.

[Illustration: Fig. 404.--Mark of Simon Vostre, Printer at Paris, in 1531, living in the Rue Neuve Nostre-Dame, at the Sign of St. John the Evangelist.]

[Illustration: Fig. 405.--Mark of Galliot du Pré, Bookseller at Paris. (1531.)]

The largest number of the early editions resembled each other, for they were generally printed in Gothic characters, or _lettres de somme_--letters which bristled with points and angular appendices. These characters, when printing was only just invented, had preserved in Holland and in Germany their original form; and the celebrated printer of Bruges, Colard Mansion, only improved on them in his valuable publications, which were almost contemporaneous with Gutenberg’s “Catholicon;” but they had already under-gone in France a semi metamorphosis in getting rid of their angularities and their most extravagant features. These _lettres de somme_ were then adopted under the name of _bâtarde_ (bastard) or _ronde_ (round), in the first books printed in France, and when Nicholas Jenson established himself in Venice

[Illustration: Fig. 406.--Mark of Philippe le Noir, Printer, Bookseller, and Bookbinder, at Paris, 1536, living in the Rue St. Jacques, at the sign of the “Rose Couronnée.”]

[Illustration: Fig. 407.--Mark of Temporal, Printer at Lyons, 1550-1559, with two devices; one in Latin, “And in the meanwhile time flieth, flieth irreparably;” the other in Greek, “Mark, or know, Time.” (Observe the play upon the words _tempus_, καιρὁς and Temporal.)]

he used the _Roman_, which were only an elegant variety of the _lettres de somme_ of France (Gothic characters). Aldo Manuzio, with the sole object of insuring that Venice should not owe its national type to a Frenchman, adopted the _Italic_ character, renewed from the writing called cursive or _de chancellerie_ (of the chancellor’s office), which was never generally used in printing, notwithstanding the fine editions of Aldo. Hereafter the Ciceronean character was to come into use, so called because it had been employed at Rome in the first edition of the “Epistolæ Familiares” (Familiar Letters) of Cicero, in 1467. The character called “St. Augustinian,” which appeared later, likewise owes its name to the large edition of the works of St. Augustine, published at Basle in 1506. Moreover, during this first period in which each printer engraved, or caused to be engraved under his own directions,

[Illustration: Fig. 408.--Mark of Robert Estienne, Printer at Paris, 1536.

“Do not aspire to know high things.”]

[Illustration: Fig. 409.--Mark of Gryphe, Printer at Lyons, 1529.

“Virtue my Leader, Fortune my Companion.”]

the characters he made use of, there was an infinite number of different types. The _register_, a table indicative of the quires which composed the book, was necessary to point out in what order these were to be arranged

[Illustration: Fig. 410.--Mark of Plantin, Printer, at Antwerp, 1557.

“Christ the true Vine.”]

[Illustration: Fig. 411.--Mark of J. Le Noble, Printer at Troyes. (1595.)]

and bound together. After the _register_ came _the catchwords_, which, at the end of each quire or of each leaf, were destined to serve an analogous purpose; and the _signatures_, indicating the place of quires or of leaves by letters or figures; but signatures and catchwords existed already in the manuscripts, and typographers had only to reproduce them in their editions. There was at first a perfect identity between the manuscripts and the books printed from them. The typographic art seems to have considered it imperative to respect the abbreviations with which the manuscripts were so encumbered as often to become unintelligible; but, as it was not easy to transfer them precisely from the manuscripts, they were soon expressed in such a way, and in so complicated a manner, that in 1483 a special explanatory treatise had to be published to render them intelligible. The punctuation was generally very capriciously presented: here, it was nearly _nil_; there, it admitted only of the full stop in various positions; the rests were often indicated by oblique strokes; sometimes the full stop was round, sometimes square, and we find also the star or asterisk employed as a sign of punctuation. The new paragraphs, or breaks, are placed indifferently in the same line with the rest of the text, projecting beyond it or not reaching to it.

[Illustration: Fig. 412.--Border from the “