color was produced by painting the letters with a pen. The brilliancy of the black ink has consequently been unwisely praised, for it is a triumph not of printing, but of painting.
The same observation may be applied to the colored ink of the great initials. Savage denies the statement of Papillon that the red ink is of the most perfect beauty: he says that "it is a very heavy brick-dust color." Heineken says it is a dull red. A closer examination of the book revealed the fact to Savage that the initials also had been retraced or painted.
I could not avoid expressing my astonishment at seeing in some pages two distinct red inks: one, the dull color before spoken of, and the other, a red which, in printing, might fairly be called of the most perfect beauty; and I had nearly left it with the belief that there were two inks, red and blue, used in the printing of the book, which, for brilliancy of color, would set at defiance all the efforts of the present day to equal them. Some accidental circumstance caused me to view the book in a different light, when I discovered that the beautiful red was not printed but written in, so exactly like the type that it could only be ascertained by the want of indentation in the paper, which is invariably produced by pressure in the process of printing. By the same means, I also ascertained that the fine delicate blue was painted. Thus the colors produced by printing in the capital letters are reduced to two, namely, dull blue and dull red.[1]
It is not difficult to explain this curious circumstance. The red and blue printing inks first used by Schœffer were so dull and faded that he would not suffer them to be compared with the brighter colors of fair manuscripts. He was compelled to brighten the colors by painting. Although sold as a printed book, the Psalter was the joint work of the printer and the illuminator, and the features which the modern bibliographer most admires are those made by the illuminator.
The process employed by the printer of the Psalter for securing an exact register of the colors was just as irregular. It is an error to assume that the two-colored initials were printed as similar work is now printed, by two impressions. Bernard says that the red and the blue blocks of the initials,
- ↑ Practical Hints on Decorative Printing, p. 50.
