agnificently
printed volume, exhibiting at the very foundation of the art a skill in
presswork scarcely surpassed by any of Gutenberg's immediate successors.
He was a great printer, but not a financially successful one. Fust sued
his partner in 1455 for repayment of the loans advanced, and upon
Gutenberg's failure to meet these obligations Fust foreclosed the
mortgage and took over the printing plant. Although Gutenberg started
another publishing house at Mainz, and continued it until his death in
1468, the main development of printing after 1455 was in the original
plant as carried on by Fust and his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer. They
printed in 1457 an edition of the Psalms in which for the first time
two-color printing was employed, the large initial letters being printed
in red and black. This innovation, designed to imitate the rubricated
initials of the manuscripts, involved great technical difficulties in
the presswork, and was not generally adopted. Most of the early printed
books, even down to the end of the fifteenth century, left blanks for
the large capitals at the beginnings of the chapters, to be filled in by
hand by professional illuminators.

From the establishments of Gutenberg and of Fust and Schoeffer in Mainz
knowledge of the new art spread rapidly into many German cities. In 1462
Mainz was captured and sacked by Adolph of Nassau in one of the local
wars of the period, and printers from the Mainz shops made their way to
other cities throughout the empire. Before 1470 there were printing
establishments in almost every German city, and hundreds of works,
mostly theological, had been issued from their presses.

In all these early German books, printed of course in Latin, the type
used was the black-letter. Gutenberg, in designing his first font,
evidently tried to imitate as closely as possible the angular gothic
alphabet employed by the scribes in the best manuscripts. Not only were
the letters identical in form with the engrossing hand of the monks, but
the innumerable abbreviated forms used in the Latin manuscripts were
retained. Thus a stroke over a vowel indicated an omitted =m= or =n=, a
=p= with a stroke across it indicated the Latin prefix =per=, a circle
above the line stood for the termination =us=, an =r= with a cross
meant--=rum=, and so forth. These abbreviations, which make printed
books of the earliest period rather hard reading today, were retained
not only to save space but to give the