"The present book of Psalms, adorned with beauty of capitals, and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and stamping, and to the worship of God diligently brought to completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mentz, and Peter Schoffer of Gernsheim, in the year of our Lord, 1457, on the Vigil of the Feast of the Assumption."
[2] The first printed musical notes appear in de Gerson's _Collectorium super Magnificat_, printed at Esslingen in 1473 by Conrad Fyner.
These two printers also produced, in 1465, an edition of the _De Officiis_ of Cicero, which shares with the _Lactantius_, printed in the same year at Subiaco, near Rome, by Sweynheim and Pannartz, the honour of exhibiting to the world the first Greek types, and with the same printers' Cicero _De Oratore_, that of being the first printed Latin classic, unless an undated _De Officiis_, printed at Cologne by Ulrich Zel about this time, is the real "first."
Wherever typography originated, it was from Mentz that it was taught to the world. The disturbances in that city in 1462 drove many of its citizens from their homes, and the German printers were thus dispersed over Europe. Within a little more than twenty years from the time of the first issue from the Mentz printing-press, other presses were established at Strasburg, Bamberg, Cologne, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Spires, Ulm, Lubeck, and Breslau; Basle, Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples, and many other Italian cities; Paris and Lyons; Bruges; and, in 1477, at Westminster.
Before the end of the fifteenth century eighteen European countries were printing books. Italy heads the list with seventy-one cities in which presses were at work, Germany follows with fifty, France with thirty-six, Spain with twenty-six, Holland with fourteen; and after these England's four printing-places--Westminster, London, Oxford, and St Albans--make a somewhat small show. Some other countries, however, had but one printing-town. With the possible exception of Holland, England and Scotland are the only countries which are indebted to a native and not (as in every case save that of Ireland) to a German for the introduction of printing.
The early printers were more than mere workmen. They were usually editors and publishers as well. Some of them were associated with scholars who did the editorial work: Sweynheim and Pannartz, for instance, the first to set up a press in Italy, had the benefit of the services of the Bishop of Aleria, and their rival, Ulric Hahn, enjoyed for a while the assistance of the celebrated Campanus. Aldus Manutius, too, the founder of the Aldine press at Venice, though himself a literary man and a learned editor, availed himself of the help of several Greek scholars in the revising and correcting of classical texts. The exact relations of these editors to the printers, however, is not known. The English printer, Caxton, who also was a scholar, usually, though not invariably, edited his publications himself.