The year 1450 ushered in, as is supposed, the great art which was destined to revolutionise the world; and although the pen was employed for many years after that, it gradually gave place to its more convenient if less nimble rival, taking at last a position more congenial to it. "The pen for the brain, the press for reproduction," became henceforth a motto which had for its basis a new division of labour as convenient as it was efficacious. In the same year,[7] at Sermonetta, a little Italian town, Aldus Manutius, the great printer and editor, first saw the light. The earlier portion of his life was devoted entirely to scholastic duties and in preparing himself, by hard and assiduous study of the Greek and Latin classics, for the more important work of revising and printing the text. It was not until 1490 that the preliminaries were complete, and he found himself, with a little money and an immense stock of knowledge, a comparative stranger at Venice, where already 160 printers and publishers had been engaged for some time in glutting the market with almost worthless books. The old Greek manuscripts especially were a source of inconceivable trouble and continual annoyance. They were written for the most part in bastard characters, and crowded with mistakes and omissions, the result of some hundreds of years of repeated transcriptions. They were, moreover, almost as difficult to procure as they were corrupt in text. Nor was this the only difficulty that faced the intrepid pioneer editor. Greek was a language but rarely used, having given place to Latin in all but the most cultivated circles; the demand for books in that character was accordingly limited, while even at that early period competition was ruinous. To say nothing of the army of printers at Venice, there was a large number at Rome who more than supplied the Italian and foreign markets, turning out books in such profusion that the important and oldest printing house, that of Sweinheym & Pannartz, was compelled to petition the Pope to save themselves from bankruptcy. In their petition they state that they had printed no less than 12,475 separate volumes, a statement most likely exaggerated, but none the less cogent evidence of the fierce struggle which was being carried on when Aldus determined to swell the ranks of the already crowded profession. He was disgusted with the slipshod efforts of the ignorant proprietors of these numerous printing shops, who were so eager to forestall one another that they could not pay any attention to the quality of their work, even assuming they had the aptitude for doing so. He took his stand upon his accomplishments alone, apparently not doubting for an instant that conscientious work, coupled with a superior education, would in the long run repay him for the years of anxious toil which he well knew would be his lot.