Here ben endyd the Cronycles of the Reame of Englond, with their apperteignaunces. Enprentyd in the Duchy of Braband in the towne of Andewarpe In the yere of our Lord M.cccc.xciij. By maistir Gerard de leew a man of grete wysedom in all maner of kunnyng: whych nowe is come from lyfe unto the deth, which is grete harme for many [a] poure man. On whos sowle God almyghty for hys hygh grace haue mercy. Amen. Leeu had been killed accidentally by one of his workmen in the course of a dispute, and this testimonial to him in the colophon, which reads as if the compositor had slipped it in of his own accord, is very gracious and touching in its simplicity. Just as the possession of a personal colophon brings a book within a circle of interest to which it otherwise would not have approached, so we may justly value a piece of printing all the more if it chances, through any accident, to throw light on the printer's methods. I have felt a peculiar affection for an edition of Valerius Maximus, printed by Schoeffer in 1471, ever since I discovered that a change in the form of the punctuation at certain points of the book makes it possible to work out the number of presses on which it was being printed, the order in which the sheets were being set up, and how quickly the type of the worked pages was distributed. The slowness of the presswork in the simple form of press at first used obliged the printers to keep several presses, sometimes as many as six, occupied with different sections of the same book, and the trouble they were given to make the end of one section join neatly to the beginning of the next has left many traces. Any book which thus lets us into the secrets of the early printing offices possesses in a very high degree the charm which should attach to an incunable, if that hardly used word is to retain, as it should, any reference to the infancy of printing. But more will be said as to this aspect of early books in our next chapter. FOOTNOTES: [25] Two editions of Boner's _Edelstein_, both illustrated with over a hundred woodcuts, one dated 14th February, 1461 (copy at Wolfenbuttel), the other undated (Royal Library, Berlin); _Die Historij von Joseph, Danielis, Judith, Hester,_ dated in rhyming verse 1462 "nat lang nach Sand Walpurgentag" (Rylands Library and Bibliotheque Nationale); the _Belial seu Consolatio peccatorum_ of Jacobus de Theramo (Rylands and Germanisches Museum, Nuremberg); two issues of a German _Biblia Pauperum_ with thirty-four woodcuts (both at the Bibliotheque Nationale, the first also at Rylands and Wolfenbuttel); the same work in Latin (Rylands); lastly two editions of a poem called _Rechtstreit des Menschen mit dem Tode_ (both at Wolfenbuttel, the second also at the Bibliotheque Nationale).