s whatever they were, the forms of
printed letters should be beautiful, and that their arrangement on the
page should be reasonable and a help to the shapeliness of the letters
themselves. The Middle Ages brought caligraphy to perfection, and it was
natural therefore that the forms of printed letters should follow more
or less closely those of the written character, and they followed them
very closely. The first books were printed in black letter, i. e., the
letter which was a Gothic development of the ancient Roman character,
and which developed more completely and satisfactorily on the side of
the "lower-case" than the capital letters; the "lower-case" being in
fact invented in the early Middle Ages. The earliest book printed with
movable type, the aforesaid Gutenberg Bible, is printed in letters
which are an exact imitation of the more formal ecclesiastical writing
which obtained at that time; this has since been called "missal type,"
and was in fact the kind of letter used in the many splendid missals,
psalters, etc., produced by printing in the fifteenth century. But the
first Bible actually dated (which also was printed at Mainz by Peter
Schoeffer in the year 1462) imitates a much freer hand, simpler,
rounder, and less spiky, and therefore far pleasanter and easier to
read. On the whole the type of this book may be considered the
ne-plus-ultra of Gothic type, especially as regards the lower-case
letters; and type very similar was used during the next fifteen or
twenty years not only by Schoeffer, but by printers in Strasburg,
Basle, Paris, Lubeck, and other cities. But though on the whole, except
in Italy, Gothic letter was most often used, a very few years saw the
birth of Roman character not only in Italy, but in Germany and France.
In 1465 Sweynheim and Pannartz began printing in the monastery of
Subiaco near Rome, and used an exceedingly beautiful type, which is
indeed to look at a transition between Gothic and Roman, but which must
certainly have come from the study of the twelfth or even the eleventh
century MSS. They printed very few books in this type, three only; but
in their very first books in Rome, beginning with the year 1468, they
discarded this for a more completely Roman and far less beautiful
letter. But about the same year Mentelin at Strasburg began to print in
a type which is distinctly Roman; and the next year Gunther Zeiner at
Augsburg followed suit; while in 1470 at Paris Udalric Gering and hi