English Binding and Binders, From the Invention of Printing to the Eighteenth Century, Mork Particularly as Relates to Materials and Finish.

Learning had already begun to revive, and to be cultivated with considerable ardour, when the invention of printing by John Gutenburgh, of Mayence, or Mentz, about the year 1438, gave a new stimulus to the human mind, and formed the most important era to the history of literature and civilization. Manuscript books, and those printed many years after the invention of printing, were variously decorated in binding. In his Wardrobe Accounts, A.D. By the above account it is evident that the books belonging to the king's library were adorned with all the splendour the best materials, and state of the art could give to their exteriors. But if, by any existing specimens of binding of this character, it could be proved to have preceded that era, it might become a matter of much speculation, how far the result had an influence in the first essays in block printing by Guttenburg.