This printed edition of all Homer’s poetry has now come to its end by the help of God in Florence, by the outlay of the well-born and excellent gentlemen, enthusiasts for Greek learning, Bernardo and Nerio, sons of Tanais Nerli, two Florentines, and by the labor and skill of Demetrio of Milan, a Cretan, for the benefit of men of letters and professors of Greek, in the year from Christ’s birth the one thousand four hundred and eighty-eighth, on the ninth day of the month of December. Here Demetrio Damilas, the Cretan of Milanese descent, is anxious enough to advertise himself: perhaps all the more anxious because his name seems to have been suppressed in the case of some previous Greek books in which he may have had a share. He compliments also, as in duty bound, the brothers Nerli, without whose munificence the book could not have been produced. But the craftsman at whose press the Homer was printed was too insignificant a person for a scholar of the very self-regarding type of the first professors of Greek to trouble to mention him, and thus Libri is ignored by Damilas as completely as the later printers were ignored by the publishers. In some of his larger works of a less learned kind,—books by Boccaccio, the Florentine Histories of Bruni and Poggio, and the Logic of Savonarola,—Libri, when left to himself, was at the pains to print his name. But in the mass of “Rappresentazioni,” Savonarola pamphlets, and other seemingly ephemeral books which he made attractive by procuring for them delightful woodcuts, he did not take sufficient pride to claim the credit which Mr. Proctor after four centuries recovered for him. The scribes who preceded the printers were by no means forward in naming themselves. Though not to the same extent as Libri, the early printers largely imitated their reticence. More especially with vernacular books they were careless of connecting themselves, because vernacular books were as yet despised. Hence, though we shall have to quote some in the chief languages of Western Europe, the comparative rarity of vernacular colophons. Hence, on the other hand, the comparative frequency of the Latin ones, which can be culled from all kinds of learned books, more especially from the laborious legal commentaries which now possess so few attractions beyond their beautiful, though crabbedly contracted, typography. It is a pity, because the Latin found in colophons is often far from classical, and occasionally so difficult that our renderings will be offered in fear and trembling. But it was in Latin that literary distinction was mainly to be won in the fifteenth century, and it was therefore with Latin books that the printers desired their names to be associated. Colophons, in fact, are the sign and evidence of the printer’s pride in his work, and this is the main clue we have in seeking for them. [Illustration] [Illustration: Breslau Missal. Mainz: P. Schoeffer, 1483.] [Illustration] II