The present copy of the Psalms, adorned with beauty of capital letters, and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing, and stamping without any driving of the pen. And to the worship of God has been diligently brought to completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schöffer of Gernsheim, in the year of the Lord 1457, on the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption.
Of Peter Schöffer's later allusion to the shields of his device Dr. Pollard writes: "Needless discussions have been raised as to what was the use and import of printers' devices, and it has even been attempted to connect them with literary copyright, with which they had nothing whatever to do, literary copyright in this decade depending solely on the precarious courtesy of rival firms, or possibly on the rules of their trade-guilds. But here, on the authority of the printer who first used one, we have a clear indication of the reason which made him put his mark on a book--the simple reason that he was proud of his craftsmanship and wished it to be recognized as his. 'By signing it with his shields Peter Schöffer has brought the book to a happy completion.'"
[Illustration: _Psalter. Mainz, Fust and Schöffer_, 1457. THE FIRST PRINTED COLOPHON.]
Again he calls attention to the boast of John of Speier at Venice, "primus in Adriaca formis impressit aenis," by which he asserts his individual priority over any other firm in that city. And here is the rhyming colophon used by the same John, in which he boasts with some ambiguity of the number of copies of Cicero which he has printed in his two editions:
From Italy once each German brought a book. A German now will give more than they took. For John, a man whom few in skill surpass, Has shown that books may best be writ with brass. Speier befriends Venice; twice in four months has he Printed this Cicero, in hundreds three.[6]
In wording their colophons, the early printers were only following the constant practice of medieval scribes, of whose many colophons a selection of examples is given in Bradley's _Dictionary of Miniaturists_.
The moving of printers from one town to another, transference of their stocks, their quarrels, their boastings and pleas for favor with those in high places, all are followed, and much information gathered in the _Essay_. There is simple pathos in the colophon of the _Chronicles of the londe of England_ printed at Antwerp in 1493, which records the death of its famous printer, Gerard Leeu,