be found on every page, and there are many very large and profusely ornamented initials in red and blue inks. To the young reader who is accustomed to the severe and colorless style of modern printing, the boldness and blackness of the stately text types of this Psalterm the brightness of its rubrics, and the graceful forms of its two-colored initials, are really bewildering. They lead him to the belief that the workmanship of the book is of the highest order. This has been the opinion of many eminent authors;[1] the Psalter of 1457 has been called the perfection of printing.
The initial letter B, the largest in the book, which is at the beginning of. the first Psalm, Beatus vir, has been often reproduced, and commended as an example of skillful engraving, brilliant color and faultless register. The design is beautiful, and admirably fitted for relief printing, but it is not in the Gothic or German style: the palm-leaf fillet-work is oriental, and was probably copied from some Spanish manuscript, the illuminator of which had been taught in the Moorish schools. In a few copies, the letter is red and the ornament is blue; in other copies, the colors are reversed. In all copies the thin white line which separates the red from the blue is always of uniform thickness: there is no overlapping or meeting of the adjacent colors. The register is without fault in all the copies. The quality of the ink has been greatly praised: we are told
- ↑ Savage said, before he had critically examined the ink of the book:
It is a curious fact that, under Fust and, Gutenberg, the process [of printing in colors} should be carried nearly to perfection; for some of the works they printed, both in the quality of the ink and in the workmanship, are so excellent that it would require all the skill of our best printers, even at the present day, to surpass them in all respects: and I do not hesitate to say, that, in a few years after, the printers were actually superior to us in the use of red ink, both as to color and as to the inserting of a great number of single capital letters in their proper places in a sheet, with a degree of accuracy and sharpness of impression that I have never seen equaled in modern workmanship. Decorative Printing, London, 1822, pp. 6 and 7.
After a closer inspection, Savage discovered that the red was painted.
Papillon declared that the red ink was of the most perfect beauty. Chatto said that this earliest known production [of the press of Fust and Schœffer] remains to the present day unimpaired as a specimen of skill in ornamental printing. The art of printing was perfected by Fust and Schoeffer. Jackson and Chatto, Wood Engraving, p. 168.
