entury was little used save for Bibles
and proclamations. The modern practice in the use of i and j, u and v
dates from about 1580, though not firmly established till the reign of
Charles I.

In the second quarter of the 16th century the French printers at Paris
and Lyons halved the size of the Aldine octavos in their small
sextodecimos, which found a ready market, though not a lasting one, the
printers of Antwerp and Leiden ousting them with still smaller books in
24mo or small twelves. These little books were printed on paper much
thinner than had previously been used. The size and weight of books was
also reduced by the substitution of pasteboards for wooden sides. Gold
tooling came into use on bindings, and in the second half of the century
very elaborate decoration was in vogue in France until checked by a
sumptuary law. On the other hand a steady decline in the quality of
paper combined with the abandonment of the old simple outline woodcuts
for much more ambitious designs made it increasingly difficult for
printers to do justice to the artists' work, and woodcuts, at first in
the Low Countries and afterwards in England and elsewhere, were
gradually superseded by copper-plates printed separately from the text.
At the beginning of this century in England a ballad or Christmas carol
sold for a halfpenny and thin quarto chapbooks for 4d. (a price which
lasted through the century), the Great Bible of 1541 was priced at 10s.
in sheets and 12s. bound, Edward VI.'s prayer-book (1549) at 2s. 2d.
unbound, and 3s. 8d. in paste or boards; Sidney's _Arcadia_ and other
works in 1598 sold for 9s.

_17th Century._--Although the miniature editions issued by the Elzevirs
at Leiden, especially those published about 1635, have attracted
collectors, printing in the 17th century was at its worst, reaching its
lowest depths in England in the second quarter. After this there was a
steady improvement, partly due to slight modifications of the old
printing presses, adopted first in Holland and copied by the English
printers. In the first half of the century many English books, although
poorly printed, were ornamented with attractive frontispieces, or
portraits, engraved on copper. During the same period, English
prayer-books and small Bibles and New Testaments were frequently covered
with gay embroideries in coloured silks and gold or silver thread. In
the second half of the century the leather bindings of Samuel Mearne, to
some extent