Block-books are nearly all of German, Dutch, or Flemish workmanship. As a rule the illustrations are roughly coloured by hand. The method by which they were printed is generally supposed to have been that of laying a dampened sheet of paper on the inked block, and rubbing it with a dabber or frotton until the impression was worked up. But De Vinne, in his _History of Printing_, says that there are practical reasons against the correctness of this view, and considers it more probable that a rude hand-press was used. Those who wish to see some modern examples of block-printing may be referred to the books printed by the late William Morris at the celebrated Kelmscott Press at Hammersmith. The title-pages and initial words of these volumes were executed by means of wood blocks, and are as beautiful examples of block-printing as the texts of the works they adorn are of typography. All the Kelmscott printing, whose history, though most interesting, is nevertheless outside the present subject, was done by hand presses. CHAPTER VII WHO INVENTED MOVEABLE TYPES? The wood-block, however, was merely a stepping-stone to the greatest of all events in the history of printing, the invention of moveable types; that is, of letters formed separately, which, after being grouped into words, and sentences, and paragraphs, could be redistributed and used again for all sorts of books. Here once more our Chinese friends were ahead of the rest of the world, for, more than four centuries before German printers existed, Picheng, a Chinese smith, had shown his countrymen how to print from moveable types made of burnt clay. But the process which was to prove of such untold value to those who employed the simple Roman alphabet was almost useless to the Chinese, since the immense number of their characters rendered the older method the less tedious and cumbersome of the two. In China and Japan, therefore, the use of moveable types was of short duration. In Europe, however, when the art of printing from moveable types once became known, the case was very different.