Papal letters of indulgence and
a version of the Bible, both printed in 1454, are the earliest
monuments of the new art.
Slowly evolved, the marvelous art, once thoroughly developed, spread
with almost lightning rapidity from Mainz throughout the Germanics, the
Italian states, France, and England,--in fact, throughout all Christian
Europe. It was welcomed by scholars and applauded by popes. Printing
presses were erected at Rome in 1466, and book-publishing speedily
became an honorable and lucrative business in every large city. Thus,
at the opening of the sixteenth century, the scholarly Aldus Manutius
was operating in Venice the famous Aldine press, whose beautiful
editions of the Greek and Latin classics are still esteemed as
masterpieces of the printer's art.
The early printers fashioned the characters of their type after the
letters that the scribes had used in long-hand writing. Different kinds
of common hand-writing gave rise, therefore, to such varieties of type
as the heavy black-faced Gothic that prevailed in the Germanics or the
several adaptations of the clear, neat Roman characters which
predominated in southern Europe and in England.
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