Printing was introduced into Basle before 1468, having been preceded, as in most other towns of the upper Rhine, by xylographic publications. No Basle book bears a printed date earlier than 1473, but the absence of such printed date does not prove that the introduction of printing into Basle did not take place earlier, and a note of the purchase in 1468 of a copy of St. Gregory’s _Moralia in Job_, printed by Berthold Rodt or Ruppel of Hanau, shows that he must have been at work at that time. From the point of view of initial letters we will pass over Berthold Rodt and Michael Wenssler, to come to the publications of Bernard Richel, the most interesting of which are his _Sachsenspiegel_ of 1474 and the Latin Bible, which had several editions, these appearing in 1471-75-77. In describing this work, Panzer in his _Annales Typographici_ remarks that the woodcut initials do not occur in all the copies. In some of them their place is left blank. This is another evidence of the early printer’s reluctance to adopt printed ornaments as the definite formula, and if any further proof is necessary it will be found in the fact that even where woodcut letters are used, they are often more or less enlivened with colours. We have already alluded to these initials in describing those of Bämler, and we have touched upon the point as to who was the first to make use of the historiated S which has a certain analogy with the xylographic letter mentioned in a former chapter, from the _Ars Memorandi_. There are in this Bible four different sets of letters, but of none of these is there a complete alphabet, although but few letters are wanting of the largest. The next nearly complete is the second in size. Of the four different sets, the second in size is of a special design, different to anything we have met with. The others are pure specimens of Maiblümchen ornamentation, and amongst the best of the kind. The three different-sized initials with human faces are the only letters in the volume with any trace of historiation. Several Psalters were published either at the end of the fifteenth or at the beginning of the sixteenth century, of exactly the same size and general disposition, two of them with initial letters that correspond in subject although very different in treatment. These are the Psalters of Basle and Augsburg. The latter has been dealt with in a previous chapter. The Basle Psalter was published by Furter in 1501, and the initials of the two volumes can be contrasted and compared with those that have just been dealt with.