Note 304 — XXIII

The modern printer who may regard this method of color-printing as puerile and wasteful of time, must be reminded that, slow as it may now seem, it was a quicker method than that of hand-drawing and painting. The difference between the old and the modern process of printing in colors will be fully stated, by saying that Schœffer printed, probably, but forty copies of this initial in one day, and that the modern pressman on a machine press would be required to produce, from two impressions, about twenty-five hundred copies in one day. Far from being a specimen of the skill of the early printers, this initial B is a flagrant example of their inexperience and the rudeness of their methods.