This same copy made its appearance again, half a century later, at the
Duke of Roxburghe's sale in 1812, a time when bibliomania was at its
height. Loud notes of preparation foretold that it would sell for a
considerable sum; five hundred and even one thousand guineas were
guessed, as it was known that Lord Spencer, the Duke of Devonshire, and
the Marquis of Blandford were all bent on its possession, but nobody
anticipated the extravagant sum it was to realize. After a very spirited
competition, it was knocked down to the Marquis of Blandford for two
thousand sixty pounds. This book was resold at the Marquis of Blandford's
sale, in 1819, for eight hundred seventy-five guineas, and passed to Lord
Spencer, in whose extraordinary library it now reposes.

Before the commencement of the sixteenth century, that is, within forty
or fifty years of the invention of printing with movable type, upward of
twenty thousand volumes had issued from at least a thousand different
presses. All the principal Latin classics, many of the Greek, and upward
of two hundred fifty editions of the Bible, or parts of the Bible, had
appeared.

One of the most active and enterprising of the early printers was Anthony
Koburger of Nuremberg, an accomplished scholar, who began there in 1472,
and before the year 1500 had printed thirteen large editions of the Bible
in folio, and a prodigious number of other books. He kept twenty-four
presses at work, employing one hundred workmen, and had sixteen shops for
the sale of books in the principal cities of Germany, besides factors
and agents all over Europe. He printed, in 1493, that grand volume, the
_Nuremberg Chronicle_, which is illustrated with upward of one thousand
woodcuts by Michael Wohlgemuth, the master of Albert Dürer, and is
curious as being one of the first books in which cross-hatchings occur in