When the public no longer took pleasure in mental culture, and the whole world was overrun with hordes of barbarians intent upon destruction, learning of every kind was banished to the monasteries, and the monks became the only book lovers, making it their business to transcribe, generation after generation, the volumes which had been saved from the general conflagration. It is entirely through their efforts that the old classics have been preserved to our day; we have to thank them, and them alone, for the preservation of the Bible itself. Even in the monasteries, however, the same spirit of emulation which had prompted Greek to compete with Greek, and Roman with Roman, became apparent in course of time. Ordinary transcripts, though never numerous, began to be looked upon as hardly pretentious enough, and the larger houses established _scriptoria_, where trained monks sat the livelong day, painfully tracing letter after letter on the purest vellum, while Bibliolatrists added illuminated borders and miniatures in a style that would task the skill of our best artists of to-day. This competition led to the exchange of manuscripts, or to their loan for a brief period, so that by degrees monastic libraries assumed large proportions, numbering many hundreds of neatly bound volumes, which, on being opened, looked as though printed, so accurately and carefully had the copying been done. This explains how Fust, the inventor, or one of the inventors, of printing, was enabled to deceive the people of Paris, for he flooded the market there with printed copies of the Bible which he sold for 50 crowns each, instead of for 400 or 500 crowns, which would have been a fair price had they been in manuscript. The book buyers of Paris _thought they were in manuscript_, until the recurrence of one or two defective types cast from the same matrix caused an inquiry. Fust was arrested, not for the fraud but for witchcraft, and to save his life he explained his process. Thus did the old order give place to the new.
In a very few years after the discovery of Fust's secret the whole of the western portion of Europe was dotted with printing presses. Before 1499 there were 236 in operation; and six years after Gutenberg had completed his Bible of 42 lines there were no less than 50 German cities and towns in which presses had been established. Considering that this only brings us down to about the year 1462, it is evident with what rapidity the art of printing was seized upon through the length and breadth of the country of its probable origin.