years immediately preceding it the carelessness with which one “editor” used the text of his predecessor to print from was often extraordinary, one reprint even including a number of duly initialled and copyright notes from another which had appeared only a year or two earlier. If this could be done in our own day, despite the existence of reviewers and the law courts, we may easily imagine that the smaller printers and publishers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who could not afford to keep their own scholarly “corrector,” simply handed over existing texts to their workmen and printed them as they stood. In most cases, of course, they had the sense to stop when they came to the colophon; but they did not always do so, and, more especially, when the colophon was in verse an unlearned compositor might easily imagine that it formed an essential part of the book. Thus twelve Latin couplets from the Milan edition of the “Confessionale,” of Bartholomaeus de Chaimis, though they end with the clear statement that Christopher Valdarfer of Ratisbon came to the help of the Milanese and printed this book (October, 1474), were reprinted as they stood in several anonymous Strasburg editions, while Creusner at Nuremberg and Schoeffer at Mainz compromised by leaving out the last six lines, which contain Valdarfer’s name. Occasionally this careless reprinting leads to a book possessing a double colophon, as in the 1478 Naples edition of the “De Officiis” and other works of Cicero, which uses for his “Letters to Atticus” Jenson’s text of 1470. The colophon begins exactly (save for differences in contractions, punctuation, etc.) as in the Jenson edition already quoted (Chapter III): M. T. C. epistolae ad Atticum Brutum et Q. Fratrem cum ipsius Attici uita foeliciter expliciunt. M.cccc.lxx Attice, nunc totus Veneta diffunderis urbe, Cum quondam fuerit copia rara tui. Gallicus hoc Ienson Nicolaus muneris orbi Attulit ingenio Daedalicaque manu. Christophorus Mauro plenus bonitate fideque Dux erat. Auctorem, lector, opusque tenes. and then proceeds: Principis Latine eloquentie M. T. C. liber quinque operum intitulatus finit foeliciter. Impressus Neapoli sub pacifico Ferdinando Sicilie rege anno salutis M.cccc.lxxviii. sedente Xisto quarto Pontifice maximo. The book of the five works of the prince of Latin eloquence, Marcus Tullius Cicero, comes happily to an end. Printed at Naples under Ferdinand the Peaceful, King of Sicily, in the year of salvation 1478, Sixtus IV being Pope.