e are a few
very late examples in which printing appears on both sides. The pictures
were commonly roughly colored by hand.

Playing cards were at one time supposed to have been the first products
of this method of printing. It was naturally supposed that the small and
comparatively simple design on the face of the playing card might be
regarded as the original from which the more elaborate picture and book
might be developed. This opinion has now, however, been abandoned, as it
is known that the earliest playing cards were hand drawn and painted and
that the block printed playing cards which we have date from the 15th
century when block printing was very common.

It has already been said that these blocks contained not only pictures
but text, one very important block book consisting of text alone. What
determined the form of the letters composing this text?

There were four types of handwriting recognized in the manuscripts of
the period which we are considering. The first was the book hand. This
was the recognized type of script used in the production of books and it
existed in two forms, the set or upright in which the letters were
carefully formed, held upright, and without ligatures or connecting
strokes between letters, and the cursive in which the letters were
sloped and ligatured. The second type was the church hand, used for
ecclesiastical manuscripts and familiar to us as the Gothic or black
letter. This also appears in two forms. Manifestly the Gothic does not
lend itself to a cursive form so that the two types which appear are the
set or upright, similar in its characteristics to the corresponding book
hand, and the ornamental or calligraphic which, as its name implies, was
an ornamental type of the set hand. The third type was the letter hand,
used by persons who were not professional penmen in correspondence and
the ordinary uses to which handwriting is applied. The fourth was the
court or charter hand. This hand was used for court records, deeds,
charters, and all sorts of legal documents. The first two types were
highly conventionalized and left very little to the "hand" as we now say
of the individual writer. The third, as might be supposed, while
following certain general models offers all the peculiarities of
individual handwriting at any age. The fourth is intermediate in regard
to its conventionality between the first and second types and the third.

These recognized conventional types of handwri