The orthography used in the first books was of almost every variety, defying method. Abbreviations were fashionable, and at length became so numerous and so difficult to be understood that a book or key was published, explaining them. Instead of a comma an oblique stroke was employed. Capital letters were not used to begin a sentence, or for proper names. Blanks were left for the places of titles, initial letters, and other ornaments, in order to have them supplied by illuminators, whose curious art, however, soon gave place to the improvements of the printers. The ornaments made by the old artists to fill the blanks were formed with singular taste; birds, beasts, flowers, and foliage often curiously interwoven with the most desirable colors, and even with gold and silver. Saints were sometimes made to figure in the border of illuminated letters, whether the subject treated required it or not. The artist had no regard to the theme of the author in his adornments. These embellishments were sometimes costly and elaborate; but a cheaper kind could be had. Bibles and Breviaries were most elegantly ornamented. The name of the printer and his place of residence were either omitted, or placed at the end of the book with some pious ejaculation or doxology. There was no date, or it appeared in some odd place, printed in words perhaps, or by numerical letters, and sometimes partly one and partly the other, thus: “One thousand CCCC. and LXXIII.,” but in all cases at the end of a book. The Roman and Italic letters not being invented, the pages were uniformly Gothic through the book. Only a few copies were issued at once; two hundred was a large impression. The early printer was of necessity also a bookbinder, placing his leaves literally between _boards_, and making some works so heavy as to provoke the criticism, “No man can carry them about, much less get them into his head.” About 1469-70, alphabetical tables of the first words of each chapter were introduced as a guide to the binder. After the great secret of printing was spread abroad, the early printers, in their own quaint style, took pains to inform the public that the book they issued was printed. Caxton said of his first book, “It is not written with pen and ink as other books be, to the end that every man may have them at once; for all the books of this story, thus imprinted as ye here see, were begun in one day, and also finished in one day;” that is, the edition. The Mentz printers, at the end of each of their first works, made it known that instead of being drawn or written with a pen, they were made by a new art and invention of printing or stamping them by characters or types of metal set in forms.