Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/35

THE SPREAD OF THE ART OF PRINTING 23 show how greatly the habit of reading prevailed among all classes. ' In the district of Utrecht alone,' writes the truly Catholic reformer, Johannes Busch, concerning the spread of German books in the Netherlands, ' there are more than one hundred free associations of nuns and sisters possessing large collections of German books, which are used daily either for private or communal reading. The men and women all round this neighbour- hood,' he continues, ' from the highest to the lowest, have numbers of German books which they read and study. In Zutphen, Zwolle, and Deventer, as indeed in all the towns and villages, German books are much read.' Those books naturally which had the largest sale and widest circulation were oftenest produced. We can thus judge of the importance attributed by contemporaries to any particular works, and of the in- fluence of such works, by the measure of their repro- duction ; and it is no insignificant fact towards a right understanding of the times that the Bible reached more than one hundred editions, that a theological work by Johannes Heynlin, of Spire, reached twenty editions between 1488 and 1500, the works of Wimpheling thirty editions in twenty-five years, and the ' Imitation of Christ,' translated into different languages, no fewer than fifty-nine editions up to the year 1500. There still exist at the present day samples of ten different editions of a collection of German proverbs. Of the number of copies issued in the different editions we can form only an approximate idea. From two passages from Wimpheling's works we gather that this edition consisted of 1,000 copies. The edition of Johann Cochlaus' 'Latin Grammar,' printed in 1511,