Windelin of Spire was a very prolific printer, and continued to issue books without intermission from the time of his brother’s death, in 1470, to his own in 1478. But among the early Venetian printers the most important was certainly Nicholas Jenson. A Frenchman by birth, he passed his apprenticeship in the Paris Mint, and became afterwards the head of the Mint at Tours. In 1458, in consequence of the stories of the invention of printing, he was sent by Charles VII. to Mainz to learn the art, and introduce it into France. Jenson returned in 1461, when Louis XI. had just been crowned; but he does not seem to have settled in France, and we first hear of him again in 1470 as a printer at Venice. From 1470 to 1480 he printed continuously, issuing, according to Sardini, at least one hundred and fifty-five editions, though this number must be considerably under the mark. His will was drawn up on the 7th September 1480, and he died in the same month. The fame of Jenson rests on the extraordinary beauty of his Roman type, of which he had but one fount, and which, though frequently copied, was never equalled. In 1474 he began to use Gothic type, owing to its great saving of space; and in 1471, in the _Epistolæ familiares_, he used Greek type in the quotations, the first instance of its employment in Venice. It is curious that, with its devotion to the new learning, Venice should not have been the first to issue a Greek book. Jenson had frequently to use Greek type in his books, but he never printed a complete work in that language. Milan led the way, printing the _Greek Grammar_ of Lascaris in 1476; and it was not till 1485 that Venice issued its first Greek book, the _Erotemata_ of Chrysoloras. In 1470, another German, Christopher Valdarfer of Ratisbon, began to print. He left Venice in 1473, and settled at Milan, and the books which he printed at the former-place are very rare and few in number. The best known is the _Decameron_ of 1471, the first edition of the book, familiar to all readers of Dibdin. In 1471 was issued the _De medicinis universalibus_, printed by Clemens Sacerdos (Clement of Padua), the first Italian printer in Venice; and in the year following, Philippus Petri,[19] the first native Venetian printer, began to print. [19] This printer’s name seems to have led to a certain amount of confusion. He was Filippo the son of Piero, in Latin, Philippus Petri; but after his father’s death, about the end of 1477, he calls himself Philippus quondam Petri, Filippo son of the late Piero.