At this critical period, when the art was reaching its zenith, the operations of the Mainz printers were suddenly brought to a standstill by the siege and capture of the city in 1462.  The occasion of this was a fierce dispute between the Pope and the people as to who had the right of appointment to the archbishopric, lately become vacant.  The original hive of workmen dispersed to other states, and by degrees the mysteries of the art became spread over the civilized world.  Such, indeed, was the fame printing had acquired, and its manifest importance, that every crowned head sought to introduce it into his kingdom, and welcomed the fugitives.  Within a few years of this period the art had been carried by the scattered German workmen into Italy, France, Spain, and Switzerland; and before the close of the fifteenth century it was practised in more than two hundred twenty different places.

Before entering upon the history of printing in England, I will take leave to call your attention to a few prominent facts connected with its progress abroad, as well as to some points of its early condition which could not be conveniently introduced in chronological order.  All the books printed previously to 1465 are in the Gothic, or black letter, which still remained the favorite in Germany and the Low Countries long after the Italians introduced their beautiful Roman letter.  The first books in which any Greek type occurs are Cicero’s Offices, printed by Faust and Schoeffer in 1465, directly after the resumption of their establishment; and Lactantius, printed the same year by Sweynheim and Pannartz, in the monastery of Soubiaco at Rome.  The first book printed entirely in Greek was Constantine Lascar’s Greek Grammar, Milan, 1476.

One of the earliest of the Italian books, and, to use the words of Dr. Dibdin, perhaps the most notorious volume in existence, was the celebrated Boccaccio, printed at Venice by Valdarfer in 1471.  This book deserves particular mention, because of an extraordinary contest which once took place for its possession between two wealthy bibliomaniacs.  It was a small black-letter folio, in faded yellow morocco, and supposed to be unique.  Its history is this:  In the early part of the eighteenth century it had come accidentally into the possession of a London bookseller, who successively offered it to Harley, Earl of Oxford, and to Lord Sunderland; then the two principal collectors, for one hundred guineas; but both were staggered at the price and higgled about the purchase.  An ancestor of the late Duke of Roxburghe, whom nobody dreamed of as a collector, hearing of the book, secured it, and then invited the two noblemen to dinner, with the view of parading his trophy.  In due course he led the conversation to the book, and, after letting them expatiate on its rarity, told them he thought he had a copy in his bookcase, which they emphatically declared to be impossible, and challenged him to produce it.  On producing the book, about the purchase of which they had only been temporizing, they were not a little chagrined.