Aldis, M.A.
Cambridge: at the University Press 1916
printing all books were in manuscript and that the laborious
process of writing out each separate copy was the only
means of reproducing a work. This business of making
manuscript copies of books was carried on not only in the
monastic scriptorium and other homes of scholarship, but
was also followed as a regular profession, and in a great
centre of learning, such as Paris, a vast number of
calligraphers, rubricators, illuminators, binders, and others of
kindred calling gained their daily living by this industry.
To make twenty manuscript copies of a book was just twenty
times the work of making one copy; but in the printing of a
book, when once the type is set up, any number of copies
can be produced with comparatively little additional labor. It
was this tedious business of writing out every separate
advantages of printing. For, having, as he relates
in his Recuyell of the H istoryes of Troye,
promised copies of the book to dyverce
gentlemen and to my friends,' 'in the writing of the
same my penne is worn, my hand weary and not
steadfast, my eyen dimmed with overmuch
looking on the whit paper.... Therefore I have
practiced and lemed at my grete charge and
dispense to ordeyne this said book in prynte after
the maner and forme as ye may here see.'
The primary effect of the invention of printing was
to render multiplication of copies of a book
cheaper and more expeditious. It was, of course,
a manuscript that the early printer had in his
mind's eye when he set to work to produce a
book. The result was not so much something
entirely new in the shape of a printed book, as
the production of a number of copies which
closely resembled a manuscript in appearance.
Indeed, an early printed book often looks so like
a manuscript of the same work written in the
formal book-hand, that, if the two were placed
side by side, an unpracticed eye would find some
difficulty in distinguishing between them.
In designing his types, as the letters used in
printing are called, the pioneer printer naturally
followed the formal book-hand used in the district
in which he was working, or the special hand
customarily employed in the particular class of
book which he proposed to print. Latin Bibles and
liturgical works were generally printed in the black-
letter which, under the unifying influence of the
Church, it had become the habit to employ in
writing books for use in her services. In Germany
varying forms of gothic text were adopted; while
the round minuscule writing affected by Italian
scribes formed the model for the roman type so
widely favored in Italy. Caxton's first types were
based on the ordinary Flemish book-hand which
he was accustomed to see in manuscripts during
his residence in the Low Countries.
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