In the general Preface to this work, printed in the first volume, I pointed out that an account of the production and distribution of books for the two centuries immediately succeeding the invention of printing, must, of necessity, be chiefly devoted to the operations of the printer-publishers of the period. During these centuries were produced a number of the great books of the world’s literature, but it was not possible, under the existing conditions, for the authors of these books to influence materially the relations of literature to the State or to the Church. Freedom of speech and even freedom of thought depended very largely upon an untrammelled printing-press, but the authors were able to give but little aid in the arduous task of securing from the political and ecclesiastical authorities the right to multiply books. It is true that the writers of the Reformation period were in a position to render very important coöperation in the work of developing a reading public and in the further work of creating machinery by means of which such public could be reached. But notwithstanding the noteworthy exception presented by the writings from Wittenberg and Geneva, it remains the fact that for the centuries in question, the works of contemporary authors constituted but an inconsiderable proportion of the books published. The lists of these earlier publishers were devoted to editions of the complete Bible, and of the different groups of the Biblical books, editions of the Greek and Roman classics and of the works of the Church Fathers, and issues of certain philosophical treatises which also were largely the work of writers of an earlier generation. To these were added certain treatises on jurisprudence which came to be accepted as authorities in the universities, together with the various series of text-books adopted for college and for school work. With the above were occasionally associated books by contemporary writers, many of which became of continued importance. These formed, however, as said, but a very small group as compared with the long series of reissues of accepted classics, and it was by the latter that what might be called the literary conditions of the time were in the main determined. With the Reformation came an enormous increase in the production of works by living writers. The controversies of the period kept the printing-offices busy with the preparation of books and pamphlets devoted to present issues, and the great output of current controversial literature affected in several ways the conditions and the methods of publishing. Up to this time the books that had been published were nearly exclusively in the form of folios, quartos, or large octavos. With an occasional exception, such as that of the Aldine classics, the publishers and their scholarly customers appear to have taken the ground that if a work was entitled to the honour of being put into print, it was worthy of the most dignified form that the presses