The work of Aldus (continued with scholarly enterprise later by such men as Froben of Basel and Estienne of Paris) in the printing of Greek texts, although begun as early as 1495, and although exercising a very wide influence upon the distribution of Greek literature, was insufficient to supply the eager demand of the scholars, while not many other printers were, in the early years of the exercise of the art, prepared to incur the very considerable risk and expense required for the production of Greek fonts of type. The risk was, of course, by no means limited to the cost of the type; the printers of the earlier Greek books had themselves but slight familiarity with the literature of Greece, and they were obliged in many cases to confide the selection and the editing of their texts to editors to whom this literature was very largely still a novelty. The printers hardly knew what books to select and they had no adequate data upon which to base business calculations as to the extent of the demand that could be looked for for any particular book. The feeling that they were working in the dark was, therefore, a very natural one. It was on this ground that, while printing-presses were, during the century after 1450, multiplying rapidly through Europe, the printing of Greek books continued to be for a large portion of the period an exceptional class of undertakings, and work was still found for scribes who could be trusted to make accurate transcripts of Greek codices. Kirchhoff gives the names of the following Italian manuscript-dealers and scribes whose scholarly activity during the latter half of the fifteenth century was especially important: Antonius Dazilas, Cæsar Strategus, Constantius Librarius, Andreas Vergetius, and Antonius Eparchus. The latter made various journeys to the East in search of manuscripts. The fact that the dealers in manuscripts very rarely placed their own names on the copies of the texts sent out from their work-shops has, in a large number of cases, prevented these names from being preserved for future record. The names that have come into record are in the main such as have been referred to in the correspondence of their scholarly friends and clients. I quote a few of these references from the lists given by Kirchhoff: In Bologna the oldest _librarius_ whose work is referred to is Viliaric, who was called an _antiquarius_, and whose shop was open in the beginning of the thirteenth century. In a manuscript, previously referred to, containing a treatise of Paul Orosius, originally written in the seventh century, and from which this copy was transcribed early in the thirteenth, there is at the end an inscription, as follows: _Confectus codex in statione magistri Viliaric antiquarii, Ora pro me scriptore, sic dominum habeas protectorem._[346] (This codex was completed in the stall of Master Viliaric, bookseller; pray for (the soul of) me, the scribe, and you shall have the Lord for your protector.)