printed page as nearly as
possible the appearance of a fine manuscript. It was not at first the
ambition of the printers and type-founders to make their books more
legible or less taxing on the eyes than manuscript; their readers were
accustomed to manuscript and felt no need of such improvements. The
mechanical advance in the art of writing brought about by printing was
at first regarded as consisting in the greater rapidity and lower cost
at which printed books could be produced.

But the new invention was at first looked upon by some famous scholars
and patrons of learning as a detriment rather than a help. The great
Trithemius, abbot of Sponheim, wrote as late as 1494 in the following
terms:

"A work written on parchment could be preserved
for a thousand years, while it is probable that no
volume printed on paper will last for more than
two centuries. Many important works have not been
printed, and the copies of these must be prepared
by scribes. The scribe who ceases his work because
of the invention of the printing-press can be no
true lover of books, in that, regarding only the
present, he gives no due thought to the
intellectual cultivation of his successors. The
printer has no care for the beauty and the
artistic form of books, while with the scribe this
is a labor of love."

Contrasted with this low estimate of the importance of the new art by
some scholars, we note the promptness with which the great churchmen of
Italy and of France took measures to import German printers and set up
presses of their own. In 1464 the abbot of Subiaco, a monastery near
Rome, brought to Italy two German printers, Conrad Schweinheim and
Arnold Pannartz, and set them at work printing liturgical books for the
use of the monks. Soon afterward, under ecclesiastical patronage, they
began to issue, first at Subiaco and then at Rome, a series of Latin
classics. During five years this first printing establishment in Italy
published the complete works of Cicero, Apuleius, Caesar, Virgil, Livy,
Strabo, Lucan, Pliny, Suetonius, Quintilian, Ovid, as well as of such
fathers of the Latin Church as Augustine, Jerome and Cyprian, and a
complete Latin Bible. This printing establishment came to an end in 1472
for lack of adequate capital, but was soon followed by others both in
Rome and especially in Venice.

Ear