' Gutenberg, the printer of this Bible, never mentions his
own name, and the only personal note we have of his, in the colophon of
the _Catholicon_, printed in 1460, is a hymn in praise of his city:
'With the aid of the Most High, who unlooses the tongues of infants and
oft-times reveals to babes that which is hidden from learned men, this
admirable book, the _Catholicon_, was finished in the year of the
incarnation of our Saviour MCCCCLX, in the foster town of Mainz, a town
of the famous German nation, which God in his clemency, by granting to
it this high illumination of the mind, has preferred before the other
nations of the world.'
There is something not quite unlike modern Germany in that; and yet
these older activities of the Germans make a strange contrast with their
work to-day. It was in the city of Cologne that Caxton first made
acquaintance with his craft. Everywhere the Germans spread printing like
a new religion, adapting it to existing conditions. In Bavaria they used
the skill of the wood-engravers, and at Augsburg, Ulm, and Nuremberg
produced the first illustrated printed books.
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