Fine Books

t doubt the tradition that journeymen trained by Gutenberg and Fust and Schoeffer, finding no work for them at Mainz, carried such experience as they had

ble about 1457, certainly by Albrecht Pfister, who is found in possession of the type of this Bible, and may himself have had copies for sale. The books he himself printed at Bambe

his death (1477) by his son-in-law, Adolf Rusch, who never put his name to a book, and most of whose impressions pass under the name of "the R-printer," from the peculiar form of that letter found in one of his types. Mentelin himself did not place his name at the end of a book till he had been at work more than a dozen years; Heinrich Eggestein, who began work about 1464, was equally reticent, and throughout the

There is no dated book from a Basel press until as late as 1474, but the date of purchase, 1468, in a book (S. Gregory's Moralia in Job), printed by Berthold Ruppel, of Hanau, takes us back six years, and it is possible that Ruppel was at work even before t

, ULRICH ZE

DE OFFIC

spicuous, Wenssler for the next ten years poured out edition after edition of all the heaviest legal and theological works, until he must have overstocked the market. Then he devoted himself almost exclusively to liturgical printing, but his affairs became hopelessly involved, and in 1491 he fled from his creditors

(Psalm li., according to our English reckoning), was issued in 1466, but before this appeared he had almost certainly produced an edition of the De Officiis (see the frontispiece to this chapter, Plate VI), the most popular of Cicero's works in Germany, which Fust and Schoeffer had printed in 1465 and reprinted the next year. Avoiding the great folios on which the early printers of Mainz, Strassburg, and Basel staked their capital, Zell's main work was the multi

f history, which found much favour all over Europe. Ther Hoernen used to be credited with the honour of having printed the first book with a titlepage, the Sermo ad populum predicabilis In festo presentacionis Beatissime Marie semper virginis of 1470. Schoeffer, however, had preceded him by some seven years by devoting a separate page to the title of each of his editions of a Bull of Pius II (see p. 93), and as neither printer continued the practice these isolated instances must be taken as accide

men who cut and printed the woodcuts of saints, for which there seems to have been a large sale in Germany, and also the pictures used for playing-cards. The cutters were at first inclined to regard the idea of book-illustrations with suspicion, as likely to interfere with their existing business. It was decided, however, by the local Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, an ecclesiast