He does not indicate how far back he was turning his regretful gaze; whether to the early years of the fifteenth century when Nicholas of Cues was a scholar at Deventer, or to the more recent times of Erasmus, who was about three school-generations ahead of him. But of the books used there in the last quarter of the fifteenth century we can form a clear notion from the productions of the Deventer printers, Richard Paffraet and Jacobus of Breda. School-books then as now were profitable undertakings, if printed cheap enough for the needy student; and Paffraet, with Hegius living in his house, must have had plenty of opportunities for anticipating the school's requirements. Between 1477 and 1499 he printed Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's _De Senectute_ and _De Amicitia_, Horace's _Ars Poetica_, the _Axiochus_ in Agricola's translation, Cyprian's Epistles, Prudentius' poems, Juvencus' _Historia Euangelica_, and the _Legenda Aurea_: also the grammar of Alexander with the commentary of Synthius and Hegius, Agostino Dato's _Ars scribendi epistolas_, Aesop's Fables, and the _Dialogus Creaturarum_, the latter two being moralized in a way which must surely have pleased Butzbach. Jacobus of Breda, who began printing at Deventer in 1486, produced Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's _De Senectute_ and _De Officiis_, Boethius' _De consolatione philosophiae_ and _De disciplina scholarium_, Aesop, a poem by Baptista Mantuanus, the 'Christian Virgil', Alan of Lille's _Parabolae_, Alexander, two grammatical treatises by Synthius and the _Epistola mythologica_ of Bartholomew of Cologne.