The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

This same copy made its appearance again, half a century later, at the Duke of Roxburghe's sale in 1812, a time when bibliomania was at its height. Loud notes of preparation foretold that it would sell for a considerable sum; five hundred and even one thousand guineas were guessed, as it was known that Lord Spencer, the Duke of Devonshire, and the Marquis of Blandford were all bent on its possession, but nobody anticipated the extravagant sum it was to realize. After a very spirited competition, it was knocked down to the Marquis of Blandford for two thousand sixty pounds. This book was resold at the Marquis of Blandford's sale, in 1819, for eight hundred seventy-five guineas, and passed to Lord Spencer, in whose extraordinary library it now reposes.

Before the commencement of the sixteenth century, that is, within forty or fifty years of the invention of printing with movable type, upward of twenty thousand volumes had issued from at least a thousand different presses. All the principal Latin classics, many of the Greek, and upward of two hundred fifty editions of the Bible, or parts of the Bible, had appeared.

One of the most active and enterprising of the early printers was Anthony Koburger of Nuremberg, an accomplished scholar, who began there in 1472, and before the year 1500 had printed thirteen large editions of the Bible in folio, and a prodigious number of other books. He kept twenty-four presses at work, employing one hundred workmen, and had sixteen shops for the sale of books in the principal cities of Germany, besides factors and agents all over Europe. He printed, in 1493, that grand volume, the Nuremberg Chronicle, which is illustrated with upward of one thousand woodcuts by Michael Wohlgemuth, the master of Albert Dürer, and is curious as being one of the first books in which cross-hatchings occur in wood-engraving.

The sixteenth century opened with another invention in type, the Italic, which was beautifully exemplified in a pocket edition of Vergil, the first of a portable series of classical works commenced in 1501 at Venice by the celebrated Aldus Manutius, who, after some years of preparation, had entered actively on his career as a printer in 1494, and deservedly ranks as one of the best scholars of any age.

Then came the Giunti, the learned family of the Stephenses, of whom Robert is accredited as the author of the present divisions of our New Testament into chapters, and Henry, author of the great Greek Thesaurus, the most valuable Greek lexicon ever published. To the opprobrium of the age, he died in an almshouse.

Among many others immortalized by their successful contributions to the great cause we must not forget the Plantins, whose memories are still so cherished at Antwerp that their printing establishment remains to this day untouched, just as it was left two centuries ago, with all the freshness of a chamber in Pompeii, the type and chases of their famous Polyglot lying about, as if the workmen had but just left the office.

The accordance of the art of printing with the spirit of the times which gave it birth must be regarded as singularly providential. The Protestant Reformation in Germany was brought about by Luther's accidentally meeting, in a monastic library, with one of Gutenberg's printed Latin Bibles, when at the age of twenty. "A mighty change," says Luther, "then came over me," and all his subsequent efforts are to be attributed to that event. His recognition of the importance of printing is given in these words: "Printing is the best and highest gift, the summum et postremum donum by which God advanceth the Gospel. Thanks be to God that it hath come at last. Holy fathers now at rest would rejoice to see this day of the revealed Gospel."

William Caxton, by common consent, is the introducer of the art of printing into England. He was born about 1422, in Kent, and received what was then thought a liberal education. His father must have been in respectable circumstances, as there was at that time a law in full force prohibiting any youth from being apprenticed to trade whose parent was not possessed of a certain rental in land. In his eighteenth year Caxton was apprenticed to Robert Large, an eminent London mercer, who in 1430 was sheriff and in 1439 Lord Mayor of London. At his death, in 1441, he bequeathed Caxton a legacy of twenty marks—a large sum in those days—and an honorable testimony to his fidelity and integrity. Soon after this the Mercers' Company appointed him their agent in the Low Countries, in which employment he spent twenty-three years.