[Footnote IV-23: In 1793, a learned doctor of divinity of Cambridge is said in a like manner to have broken Priscian’s head with “_paginibus_.” An epigram on this “blunder_bus_” is to be found in the “Gradus ad Cantabrigiam.”] [Footnote IV-24: Lichtenberger, Initia Typographica, p. 51.] Of Pfister nothing more is positively known than what the tracts printed by him afford; namely, that he dwelt at Bamberg, and exercised the business of a printer there in 1461 and 1462. He might indeed print there both before and after those years, but of this we have no direct evidence. From 1462 to 1481 no book is known to have been printed at Bamberg. In the latter year, a press was established there by John Sensenschmidt of Egra, who had previously, that is from 1470, printed several works at Nuremberg. Panzer, alluding to Pfister as the printer only of the Fables and of the tracts contained in the volume described by Camus, says that he can scarcely believe that he had a fixed residence at Bamberg; and that those tracts most likely proceeded from the press of a travelling printer.[IV-25] Several of the early printers, who commenced on their own account, on the dispersion of Faust and Scheffer’s workmen in 1462, were accustomed to travel with their small stock of materials from one place to another; sometimes finding employment in a monastery, and sometimes taking up their temporary abode in a small town; removing to another as soon as public curiosity was satisfied, and the demand for the productions of their press began to decline. As they seldom put their names, or that of the place, to the works which they printed, it is extremely difficult to decide on the locality or the date of many old books printed in Germany. It is very likely that they were their own letter-founders, and that they themselves engraved such wood-cuts as they might require. As their object was to gain money, it is not unlikely that they might occasionally sell a portion of their types to each other;[IV-26] or to a novice who wished to begin the business, or to a learned abbot who might be desirous of establishing an amateur press within the precinct of his monastery, where copies of the Facetiæ of Poggius might be multiplied as well as the works of St. Augustine. Although it has been asserted the monks regarded with jealousy the progress of printing, as if it were likely to make knowledge too cheap, and to interfere with a part of their business as transcribers of books, such does not appear to have been the fact. In every country in Europe we find them to have been the first to encourage and promote the new art; and the annals of typography most clearly show that the greater part of the books printed within the first thirty years from the time of Gutemberg and Faust’s partnership were chiefly for the use of the monks and the secular clergy.