The printing of works in the Old Slavic, at the present day, is almost exclusively limited to the Bible and to what is in immediate connection with it.  The first printed Slavonic work was set in Glagolitic letters.  This was a missal of A.D. 1483.[23] The earliest Cyrillic printing office was founded about A.D. 1490, at Kracow, by Svaipold Feol.  Nearly at the same time, 1492, they began in Servia and Herzegovina to print with Cyrillic types.  In A.D. 1518, a Cyrillic-Slavonic printing office was established at Venice; and about the same time, a part of the Old Testament in the White-Russian dialect, printed with Cyrillic letters, was published at Prague in Bohemia.

In Russia, now the principal seat of the eastern Slavic literature, printing was not introduced until after the middle of the sixteenth century.  The first work was published in Moscow A.D. 1564, an edition of the Apostle, executed by the united skill of two printers.  It would seem, however, that they did not succeed in Russia; for a few years after we find one of them in Lemberg, occupied in printing the same book; and the other at Wilna, in printing the Gospels.  In Russia, the Gospels were printed for the first time in A.D. 1606.  The first complete Slavonic Bible was published at Ostrog in Volhynia (Poland) A.D. 1581, fol. printed after the manuscript of 1499, which also was the first that comprehended the whole Bible.[24] The second edition of the whole Slavonic Bible was printed eighty-two years later, at Moscow, A.D. 1663.  An enumeration of all the subsequent editions, is given in the note below.[25]

The philological part of the church Slavonic language was not cultivated so early as would have been desirable.  There exists however a grammar by Zizania, published A.D. 1596 in Warsaw.  Twenty years afterwards another by M. Smotrisky appeared, Wilna 1618.  This work, written like Zizania’s grammar in the White-Russian dialect,[26] was for a long time considered as of good authority; it reappeared in several editions, and served as the basis of most of the grammars written during the 17th and 18th centuries.  M. Stroyeff found in the Paris library the manuscript of an Old Slavic grammar, written in Latin by John Uzewicz, a Student of Theology at the University of Paris in 1643.  In the year 1822, Dobrovsky published his Institutiones Linguae Slavicae dialecti vcteris, a grammatical work which, like all the productions of this distinguished scholar, throws a new light upon the subject, and renders all former works of a similar character useless.

The lexical part of this literature is more defective.  Most of the existing dictionaries are merely short and unsatisfactory vocabularies.  The most ancient is the work of P. Berynda, Lex.  Slaveno-Russicum, Kief 1627.  More in use at present are the Kratkoi Slowar Slavjanskoi, or ‘Short Slavic Dictionary,’ by Eugenius, St. Petersb. 1784; and the larger ‘Church Dictionary’ by Alexejef, 4th ed.  St. Pet. 1817-19.  A dictionary of this dialect for the special use of foreigners, does not yet exist.[27]