These are the numerous _Books of Hours_ printed on vellum, richly decorated with wood-cut[144] borders and pictures, and frequently illuminated by painting in gold and opaque colours over the engravings. One of the earliest of these vellum-printed _Horae_ was produced by Pigouchet for the bookseller Simon Vostre in 1487[145]; the pictures and borders are very simply treated in broad outline, which the illuminator was meant to fill in with colour, aided only in the general design by the wood-cut[146]. In 1498 Pigouchet began to execute for S. Vostre _Books of Hours_ of quite a different and still finer style, with engravings of the most exquisite beauty of design and delicacy of detail, perfect masterpieces of the engraver's art. The decorative borders in these lovely books have dotted (_criblée_) backgrounds, and the whole effect, though merely in black and white, is rich and decorative in the highest degree. The comparatively coarse touch of the illuminator ruins the beauty of these _Horae_; but luckily a good many copies have escaped this tasteless treatment, which must have appealed only to a very ignorant love of gold and gaudy colour on the part of the purchasers. _Decadence of style._ In the early part of the sixteenth century immense numbers and varieties of these vellum-printed _Horae_[147] were issued by Pigouchet and Vostre, Antoine Verard[148], Thielman Kerver and his widow, the brothers Hardouyn, and other Paris printers and publishers. The cuts from the earlier, fifteenth century editions[149], were reproduced, and a great number of new ones were cut; but after the year 1500 there was a most rapid deterioration of style. Even between the cuts of 1498 and those of 1503 a very marked change for the worse is apparent, the fine mediaeval French style being replaced by somewhat feeble imitations of the works of the Italian Renaissance. These Parisian prayer-books gradually superseded the coarse manuscript _Horae_ which were still produced in the early part of the sixteenth century; and the latest examples of these vellum-printed books, the work of Geoffroi Tory and others as late as 1546, came to be sold without any assistance from the hand, one can hardly say the art, of the illuminator in his extreme decadence. _Latest decadence._ In a feeble way the art of writing and illuminating manuscripts, as a sort of plaything for the wealthy, lingered on in Paris till the seventeenth century. An illuminated _Book of Hours_ (_Office de la Sainte Vierge_), with four miniatures and many floriated head-pieces of very minute workmanship, which was in the Perkins collection[150], is signed _N. Jarry Parisinus Scribebat_, 1660. Other elaborate examples of Nicholas Jarry's work exist in the Paris library, mostly painted in _grisaille_. _Early printing._ _The Mentz Psalter._