Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SPREAD OF PRINTING IN GERMANY. BEFORE 1462, when the sacking of Mainz by Adolf von Nassau is popularly supposed to have disseminated the art of printing, presses were at work in at least two other German towns, Strasburg and Bamberg. The first of these places is mentioned by Trithemius, who records that after the secret of printing was discovered, it spread first to Strasburg. Judging merely from authentic dates, this is evidently correct, for we have the date 1460 for Strasburg, and 1461-62 for Bamberg. There are, however, strong reasons for supposing that this order is hardly the correct one, and that Bamberg should come first. Since, however, the statement and the dates exist, it will be safer for us provisionally to consider Strasburg as the first, and state later on the arguments in favour of Bamberg. Though no dated book is known printed at Strasburg before 1471, in which year Eggestein printed the Decretum Gratiani, and though Mentelin's first dated book is of the year 1473, yet we know from the rubrications of a copy of the Latin Bible in the library at Freiburg, that that book was finished, thefirst volume before 1460, and the second before 1461. Concerning the printer, John Mentelin, a good deal is known. Born at Schelestadt, he became a scribe and illuminator; but, like many others, abandoned the original business to become a printer. P. de Ligna- mine in his Chronicle says that by 1458, Mentelin had a press at Strasburg, and was printing, like Gutenberg, three hundred sheets a day. By 1461 he had finished printing the forty-nine line edition of the Latin Bible. He died on the I2th December 1478, leaving two daughters, one married to Adolf Rusch d'Ingwiller, his successor; the other, to Martin Schott, another Strasburg printer. Very few of his ...