A few words on the connection between early printing and the art of manuscript illumination may not here be out of place. The inventors of printing, Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer, appear to have had no idea of producing cheap books by their new art, but that for a fixed sum they could produce a more magnificent and beautiful book than a scribe could for the same price. Such a finished masterpiece of art as the _Mazarine Bible_, issued by Gutenberg in the year 1455, was not sold at a lower rate than the price of a manuscript Bible; but it was cheaper than a manuscript of equal splendour. So also very few scribes of the fifteenth century could with the utmost labour have produced such a marvel of beauty as the _Mentz Psalter_ of 1559, printed on the finest vellum and illuminated with 280 large initials printed in blue and red--perfect marvels of technical skill in the perfect fit of the two colours, or _registration_ as it is now called[151]. It is not known at what price this magnificent Psalter was originally sold, but existing records show that copies of the _Vulgate_ produced in 1462 at Mentz by the same printers, Fust and Schoeffer, were sold in Paris for no less than sixty gold crowns, equal in modern value to double that number of sovereigns. _Illumination and printing._ _The various arts of the printer._ For this reason, as beauty rather than cheapness was aimed at by the inventors of printing, they left spaces for the introduction of richly illuminated and historiated initials, which were frequently inserted by the most skilful miniaturists of the time. Thus the art of printing and illumination for more than half a century walked hand in hand. Some of the earliest printers had originally been illuminators of manuscripts, as, for example, Peter Schoeffer de Gernsheim[152], Mentelin of Strasburg, Bämler of Augsburg and many others[153]. The workshop of an early printer included not only compositors and printers, but also cutters and founders of type, illuminators of borders and initials, and skilful binders who could cover books with various qualities and kinds of binding[154]. A purchaser in Gutenberg's shop having bought, for example, his magnificent Bible[155] in loose sheets would then have been asked what style of illumination or rubrication he was prepared to pay for, and then what kind of binding and how many brass bosses and clasps he wished to have[156]. _Early Italian printing._