The Bookman's Journal for August 13th gives a four-page photographic
facsimile of a very remarkable fragment of early printing which has just been discovered. This piece of vellum, from a binding, forms two complete leaves of a Donatus—the elementary Latin grammar of the middle ages—probably printed by Gutenberg at Mainz about 1450. Tattered portions of the same edition are ureserved in the British Museum, where they are regarded as " probably the earliest piece of European type-printing " in the library. It is conjectured reasonably enough that Gutenberg—if indeed he was the first printer—. began with small popular books like the Donatus before ven- turing on an edition of the Latin Bible. As the grammars were worn out by the rough handling of schoolboys, only a few fragments survive in various European collections. The newly found leaves appear to be in unusually good condition, and the large square Roman type is obviously akin to that of the two Bibles, with forty-two and thirty-six lines to the page respectively, which are traditionally attributed to Gutenberg.
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