were rated as literary rubbish. Professors in the universities looked on them with the same contemptuous spirit which men of letters afterward manifested toward early newspapers. The attempts of early printers to furnish these poor substitutes for books to common people, so far from receiving any encouragement from scholars, met with their disdainful neglect. There were, indeed, a few praiseworthy exceptions, but the scholarship of the middle ages took sides with rank, in upholding all the conventional distinctions of society. They wished illiterate people to understand that books were the right of the educated only.[1]
The period in which block-books were printed cannot be fixed within exact limits. They did not go out of fashion when types were invented: the illustrated block-book Opera Nova Contemplativa, the Italian adaptation of the Bible of the Poor, was printed in Venice about 1512; but block-books of inferior merit were made after this date. Berjeau describes one, the Innocentia Victrix, probably engraved in China at the order of the Jesuits, which was printed in 1671. But these books are really the last specimens of a dying art; in the sixteenth century, they were practically obsolete. The period of their greatest popularity may be fixed between the years
- ↑ Southey says that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, many educated men complained that the reputation of learning, its privileges and rewards, were lowered when it was thrown open to all men. It was seriously proposed in Italy to prohibit the publication of any book costing less than three soldi.
The amusing insolence manifested by authors, scholars and readers toward the early development of literature in any new field, or by a new method, is a subject that could be amply illustrated. The city of New-York furnishes a comparatively recent example in the field of journalism. The daily newspapers of 1835, which were then sold for six cents each, refused to recognize the rightful existence of the new daily then sold for one cent. So strong a prejudice was created against "the penny paper," that many timid men were afraid to be seen with the despised sheet in their hands: the six-penny papers were respectable, and the penny paper was vulgar. The same contemptuousness was manifested when duodecimos supplanted the folios and quartos — when books bound in cloth took the place of books bound in leather. The despised forms of printing have had their revenge. The rod of Aaron has swallowed its rivals.
