and 33. They demonstrate the effect of the
writing of books upon the development of printing.]

[Illustration: Fig. 32. Type of the Mazarin Bible (exact size).]

But the first books printed from type were all of religious character,
and the type itself was designed to imitate the black, condensed "text"
letter forms which had been developed by the scribes. The elaborate
initial letters which marked the sundry divisions of thought were
repeated by the early printers, sometimes to be illumined by hand and
later as engravings on wood or metal. There was no distinct departure
from the ecclesiastical style of the monks save as was necessitated by
the mechanical limitations of the new process of printing. Hence came a
style which marked the first years of printing with the influence of the
church. And that style today can be embodied in modern work by means
of typographic material, black text types, missal initials, and liberal
use of color. But it will always be associated by the power of tradition
with church literature and ecclesiastical printing.

[Illustration: Fig. 33. Reproduction of a page from Gutenberg's 42-line
Bible, of which it has been said that no later book has been more
beautifully designed. In completing this book and for some years after,
the illuminating and decoration were done by hand, only the type being
set and printed on the press.]

Perhaps it was fortunate for the future of the printing art that the
upheaval in Mainz drove printers out of the restricted atmosphere in
which their craft was growing. For with the spread of printing into
Italy, where printers sought freer fields, there straightway came a
marked change in its use. The first Roman type was cut and the printers
grew under the influence of the most splendid period in the history of
art, the Italian Renaissance, the revival and further development of the
arts which had well-nigh perished through the dark centuries. The purity
of line and form, the severe dignity, and the almost too perfect
proportion which had been developed by the Greeks over a thousand years
before were revived and interpreted with more human feeling by the
Italians of the fifteenth century.

Just as Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer set a standard in ecclesiastical
printing with their first efforts, so Nicholas Jenson in cutting his
first Roman type established a precedent which has lived to the present
day.

Designers of today find inspiration in the classic expr