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
Fig. 402.—Mark of Colard Mansion, Printer at Bruges. (1477.)
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.
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.
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
