Wherever typography originated, it was from Mentz that it was taught to the world. The disturbances in that city in 1462 drove many of its citizens from their homes, and the German printers were thus dispersed over Europe. Within a little more than twenty years from the time of the first issue from the Mentz printing-press, other presses were established at Strasburg, Bamberg, Cologne, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Spires, Ulm, Lubeck, and Breslau; Basle, Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples, and many other Italian cities; Paris and Lyons; Bruges; and, in 1477, at Westminster.

Before the end of the fifteenth century eighteen European countries were printing books. Italy heads the list with seventy-one cities in which presses were at work, Germany follows with fifty, France with thirty-six, Spain with twenty-six, Holland with fourteen; and after these England's four printing-places—Westminster, London, Oxford, and St Albans—make a somewhat small show. Some other countries, however, had but one printing-town. With the possible exception of Holland, England and Scotland are the only countries which are indebted to a native and not (as in every case save that of Ireland) to a German for the introduction of printing.

The early printers were more than mere workmen. They were usually editors and publishers as well. Some of them were associated with scholars who did the editorial work: Sweynheim and Pannartz, for instance, the first to set up a press in Italy, had the benefit of the services of the Bishop of Aleria, and their rival, Ulric Hahn, enjoyed for a while the assistance of the celebrated Campanus. Aldus Manutius, too, the founder of the Aldine press at Venice, though himself a literary man and a learned editor, availed himself of the help of several Greek scholars in the revising and correcting of classical texts. The exact relations of these editors to the printers, however, is not known. The English printer, Caxton, who also was a scholar, usually, though not invariably, edited his publications himself.

The first printers were also booksellers, and sold other people's books as well as their own. Several of their catalogues or advertisements still exist. The earliest known book advertisements are some issued by Peter Schoeffer, one, dating from about 1469, giving a list of twenty-one books for sale by himself or his agents in the several towns where he had established branches of his business, and another advertising an edition of St Jerome's Epistles published by Schoeffer at Mentz in 1470. An advertisement by Caxton is also extant, and being short, as well as interesting, may be quoted here. It is as follows:—

If it plese ony man spirituel or temporel to bye ony pyes,[3] of two and thre comemoracios of salisburi vse enpryntid after the forme of this preset lettre whiche ben wel and truly correct, late hym come to westmonester in to the almonesrye at the reed pale and he shal haue them good chepe.

Supplico stet cedula.

The date of this notice is about 1477 or 1478. Other extant examples of early advertisements are those of John Mentelin, a Strasburg printer, issued about 1470, and of Antony Koburger, of Nuremberg, issued about ten years later. In 1495 Koburger advertised the Nuremberg Chronicle.

Early printed books exhibit a very limited range of subject, and were hardly ever used to introduce a new contemporary writer. Theology and jurisprudence in Germany, and the classics in Italy, inaugurated the new invention, and lighter fare was not served to the patrons of printed literature until a later date. Italy made the first departure, and took up history, romance, and poetry. France began with the classics, and then neglected them for romances and more popular works, but at the same time became noted for the beautifully illuminated service-books produced at Paris and Rouen, and which supplied the clergy of both France and England. England, who received printing twelve years after Italy and seven years after France, made more variety in her books than any. Caxton's productions consist of works dealing with subjects of wider interest, even if less learned and improving—romances, chess, good manners, Æsop's Fables, the Canterbury Tales, and the Adventures of Reynard the Fox.

From what sort of type the Bible usually considered to be the first printed book was produced is not known. Some competent authorities think that wooden types were used. Others are in favour of metal, and like the late Mr Winter Jones, scout the notion of wooden types and consider them “impossible things.” But Skeen, in his Early Typography, declares that hard wood would print better than soft lead, such as Blades hints that Caxton's types were made of, and to illustrate the possibility of wooden types prints a word in Gothic characters from letters cut in boxwood. The objections made to types of this nature are that they would be too weak to bear the press, could never stand washing and cleaning, and would swell when wet and shrink when dried. Some have thought that the early types were made by stamping half-molten metal with wooden punches, and so forming matrices from which the types were subsequently cast.

As we have already noticed in connection with the Mazarin Bible, the forms of the types were copied from the Gothic or black letter characters in which Bibles, psalters, and missals were then written. When Roman type was first cut is uncertain. The “R” printer of Strasburg, whose name is unknown, and whose works are dated only by conjecture, may have been the first to use it. It was employed by Sweynheim and Pannartz in 1467, and by the first printers in Paris and Venice. It was brought to the greatest perfection by Nicolas Jenson, a Frenchman working in Venice. Caxton never employed it, and it was not introduced into England until 1509. In that year Richard Pynson, a London printer and a naturalised Englishman, though Norman by birth, used some Roman type in portions of the Sermo Fratris Hieronymi de Ferrara, and in 1518 he produced Oratio Ricardi Pacaei, which was entirely printed in these characters.

Had the idea of the title-page, in the modern sense of the term, a very obvious idea, as it seems to us, occurred to the first printers, we should not have to sharpen our wits on the hundred and one doubtful points with which the subject of early bibliography bristles. To-day, the title-page not only introduces the book itself, but declares the name of the writer and the publisher, and the time and place of publication. But during the first sixty years of printing title-pages were rare, and the old methods followed by the scribes in writing their manuscript books still obtained. The subject matter began with “Incipit” or “Here beginneth,” etc., according to the language in which the work was written, and such information as the printer considered it desirable to impart was contained in the colophon, or note affixed to the end of the book.

More often than not these colophons are irritatingly reticent, and withhold the very thing we want to know. At other times they are informing, and in some cases amusing. Dr Garnett has suggested that as a literary pastime some one might do worse than collect fifteenth-century colophons into a volume, for the sake of their biographical and personal interest, but I am not aware that his idea has been carried out. Two colophons have already been quoted here, the first printed colophon (see p.103) and one which is possibly from the pen of Gutenberg (see p.101). A quaint specimen found in a volume of Cicero's Orationes PhilippicÆ, printed at Rome by Ulrich Hahn, about 1470, descends to puns. It is in Latin verse, and supposed by some to have been written by Cardinal Campanus, who edited several of Hahn's publications. It informs the descendants of the Geese who saved the Capitol, that they need have no more fear for their feathers, for the art of Ulrich the Cock (German Hahn = Latin Gallus = English Cock) will provide a potent substitute for quills. A colophon to Cicero's EpistolÆ Familiares, printed at Venice in 1469 by Joannes de Spira, declares with pardonable pride that he had printed two editions of three hundred copies in four months.

The first book with any attempt at a title-page is the Sermo ad Populum Predicabilis, printed at Cologne in 1470 by Arnold Therhoernen, but a full title-page was not generally adopted till fifty years later. The first English title-page is very brief, and reads as follows:—

A passing gode lityll boke necessarye & behouefull agenst the Pestilence.

This gode lityll boke, written by Canutus, Bishop of Aarhaus, was printed in London about 1482 by Machlinia. A later development of the title-page was a full-page woodcut, headed by the name of the work, as in the Kynge Richarde cuer du lyon, printed in 1528 by Wynkyn de Worde. The same woodcut does duty in another of the same printer's books for Robert the Devil.

Early title-pages in Latin sometimes render the names of familiar places of publication in a very unfamiliar form. London may appear as Augusta Trinobantum, Edinburgh as Aneda, Dublin as Eblana. Some towns are easily recognised by their Latin names, such as Roma or VenetiÆ; others are less obvious, such as Moguntia, or Mentz; Lutetia, or Paris; Argentina, or Strasburg. Several places had more than one Latin form of name. London, for example, was also Londinum, and Edinburgh, Edemburgem.

Pagination, or numbering of the pages, was first introduced by Arnold Therhoernen, in the same book in which he gives us the first title-page, and to which reference has already been made. He did not place the figures at the top corner, however, but in the centre of the right hand margin.

The practice of printing the first word of a leaf at the foot of the leaf preceding, as a guide for the arrangement of the sheets, was first employed by Vindelinus de Spira, of Venice, in the Tacitus which he printed about 1469.