Midoux, E., and Matton, A.—Etudes sur les Filigranes des Papiers employés en France au XIVe et XVe siécles. Paris, 1868.
Piot, G. J. C., and Pinchart, A.—Specimens des Papiers recueillis dans les diverses coll. des documents qui composent les archives générales du Royaume de Belgique. Bruxelles, 1872.
Serma Santander, C. A. de.—Supplément au Catalogue des livres de la Bibliothèque de M. C. de Serma Santander. Bruxelles, 1803.
Sotheby, S. L.—Principia Typographica (with examples of foreign watermarks). London, 1858.
Sotheby, S. L.—Typography of the fifteenth century (with examples of watermarks). London, 1845.
CHAPTER IV.
PRINTING.
Assyrian bricks, with printed inscriptions—Oiron ware—Chinese types—Block books—Costeriana—Types and stereotypes—Printing presses.
There are numbers of instances of impressions from small devices, cyphers and letterings cut on blocks of wood or soft metal and made on pieces of pottery. These stamps are the forerunners of the types with which our modern books are printed. Among these impressions those which are made on the tablets or cylinders of baked clay, many of which have been found among the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh, are by far the earliest. They are covered with inscriptions printed in cuneiform characters, and contain records of sales of slaves, loans of money, sales of land and the like, and on the larger bricks and cylinders are longer inscriptions of greater interest, among them stories of the Flood. Many of these records are contained within an outer shell of the same shape, in which is either a short title with seal or even a duplicate inscription. These outer cases are the earliest examples of anything in the shape of a cover or binding over written or printed matter. Some of the cuneiform bricks are said to date from the third thousand years B.C., and many of the later examples belonged to the libraries of Sennacherib and Ashurhani-Pal, Kings of Assyria.