The completion of books at first by a colophon, afterwards by a titlepage, may be illustrated in the same way as that by which we have traced the evolution of the text from incompleteness to completeness and the development of different classes of types. At least one printer, Johann Mentelin of Strassburg, seems to have considered the addition of colophons as the proper business of the rubricator. While printed colophons in his books are exceptionally rare, several copies have come down to us in which full colophons have been added by hand, e.g. in a vellum copy of the _Speculum Morale_ in the Bibliotheque Nationale, after praise of the book, we read: Impressumque in inclyta vrbe Argentinensium ac nitide terse emendateque resertum per honorandum dominum Dominum Iohannem Mentelin artis impressorie magistrum famosissimum. Anno a partu virginis salutifero millesimo quadringentesimo septuagesimo sexto. die mensis nouembris sexta. Despite a few instances of this kind, however, it is certain that the majority of printers who omitted to print colophons to their books did so, not in the expectation that they would be supplied by hand, but in imitation of the manuscript books to which they were accustomed, in which it is distinctly exceptional to find any mention of the name of the scribe. But the men who took a pride in their new art, and who thought that their work was good enough to bring more custom to their press if their name were associated with it, took the opposite course, and so colophons from 1457 onwards are common in the best books, and may perhaps be found in about 40 per cent of the incunables that have come down to us. By the men who were skilful in using red ink they were often thus printed, and whether in red or in black, they frequently had appended to them the printer's mark or device, which gave a very decorative finish to the book. Nowadays, when we have been accustomed all our lives to the luxury of titlepages, it may well seem to us merely perverse to hide the title of a book, the name of the author, and information as to where, when, and by whom it was printed in a closely set paragraph at the end of the book. But if we think for a moment of how the manuscript books to which the early printers were accustomed had been produced we shall see that it was the most natural thing in the world. A scribe would take his quire of paper or vellum, and if he were a high-class scribe, mindful of the need of keeping his text clean, he would leave his first leaf blank and begin at the top of his second. But here he would begin to write straight away, sometimes with the first words of his text, sometimes with a preliminary paragraph, which may be called the _Incipit_, from the important word in it. In this paragraph he would give either the name of his book or, almost as commonly, the name of the first section of it, introducing the title only incidentally. Incipit Racionale diuinorum officiorum.