With the favor and privilege of the Imperial Majesty and at the command and expense of the worthy John Haselperg of Reichenau of the diocese of Constance. It would be too much to call this colophon untruthful, inasmuch as the term “primarius auctor,” like “protocaragmaticus,” does not necessarily claim primacy in point of time; nevertheless, it certainly suggests this primacy and generally assigns to Fust a more decisive part than we can easily believe that he played. We need not censure too hardly John Schoeffer’s family feeling, even though it led him to ignore Gutenberg in a way which earlier testimony forbids us to believe to be just; but it seems evident that family feeling was so much to the fore as to place this long historical colophon on quite a different footing from that of the earlier ones written by Schoeffer himself. [Illustration] III COLOPHONS AT VENICE While to Mainz belongs the supreme credit of having brought printing to the position of a practical art, the city in which it attained its highest perfection and popularity in the fifteenth century was undoubtedly Venice. The output from the Venetian presses represented some forty per cent. of the entire book production of Italy, and its quality was at least as remarkable as its quantity. It is natural, therefore, to turn from Mainz to Venice in our quest for interesting colophons, as wherever printers did good work and took pride in it we may expect to find correspondingly good colophons. Certainly at Venice we have no ground for disappointment in this respect. The Venetian colophons are plentiful and full of information, though chiefly about the publisher’s side of printing. What makes them a little alarming to the pedestrian editor is that so many of the earliest and most interesting specimens are in verse. The books most favored by the first Venetian printers were editions of the Latin classics and Latin translations of the Greek ones. To see these through the press each printer had to retain the services of a corrector, who filled a position half-way between the modern proof-reader’s and editor’s. The printers, not being able to write Latin themselves with any fluency, naturally left their colophons in the hands of their correctors, and these gentlemen preferred to express themselves in verse. The verse, even allowing for the fact that it is generally intended to be scanned by accent rather than quantity, is often of a kind which would get an English school-boy into considerable trouble; and it would be a nice question as to whether Omnibonus Leonicenus and Raphael Zovenzonius, who wrote it for John and Wendelin of Speier; Antonius Cornazanus, who was in the pay of Jenson; or Valdarfer’s corrector, Lodovicus Carbo, should be held the most successful. Just, however, because its poetic ornaments are commonplace, to render this verse into prose seems more than usually unsportsmanlike. Good poetry can stand