Before passing to the next phase of the discovery, a word should be said about playing cards. Until recently playing cards were considered as having a place in this development which they probably never occupied. Playing cards, like many other things good and bad, were invented in the East. They made their appearance in Europe somewhere about 1375 A. D. and by 1400 they had become popular. The first cards were hand painted which, of course, made them expensive and confined their use to the wealthy. A little later, however, they were painted by the use of stencils so that they could be produced cheaply and plentifully. Later still they were printed from blocks like the image prints and colored by hand. Color being essential to playing cards, the development thus outlined was the most natural. It has been supposed that the comparatively small playing card was first made and that the image print was derived from the playing card. There now seems no question that the process was the other way about, as there are no printed playing cards known as early as the St. Christopher above referred to. The block-printed playing card seems to have been clearly an imitation of the image print, and not the image print an evolution from the playing card. CHAPTER III CLAIMS TO THE INVENTION De Vinne mentions fifteen cities or towns as having been specified by as many different authors as the true birthplace of typography. The names of these are Augsburg, Basle, Bologna, Dordrecht, Feltre, Florence, Haarlem, Lubeck, Mainz, Nuremberg, Rome, Russemburg, Strasburg, Schelestadt, and Venice. The various authors assign to these towns the names of the following alleged inventors: Castoldi, Coster, Fust, Gensfleisch, Gresmund, Gutenberg, Hahn, Mentel, Jenson, Regiomontanus, Schoeffer, Pannartz and Sweynheym, and Louis de Vaelbaeske.