Printing began in Paris not as a commercial enterprise, but as the private initiative of two university scholars in sympathy with humanistic culture: Johann Heynlin, prior of the Sorbonne, and Guillaume Fichet, librarian of the college, both former rectors of the university. Heynlin had come to Paris in the 1460s from Basel. He arranged for three German printers to travel to Paris, create a roman type font, and begin printing in rooms within the Sorbonne. The first book , and so the first book printed in France, was a somewhat dated collection of model letters composed by the early humanist Gasparinus Barzizius (d. 1431). It can be reliably dated from external evidence to the second half of 1470. Their roman font is very distinctive, using a much wider range of punctuation characters than did the Italian roman fonts. The second book of the Sorbonne press, the Orthographiae of Barzizius, was completed at the very end of 1470. On New Years Day 1471, Fichet sent a just-finished copy through the Left Bank streets to his friend Robert Gaguin in the couvent des Mathurins, with an accompanying letter, written “rapidly, at first light”, in which he acclaimed Johann Gutenberg of Mainz (latinized as Joannes Bonemontanus) as the inventor of typography. Gaguin may be seen as a living link between the age of Gutenberg and the vibrant 16th-century printing world. In the late 1490s, now an eminent figure with contacts at court, Gaguin was a patron of the obscure and impoverished Paris student Erasmus, whose subsequent meteoric literary career would have been inconceivable in a world without printing shops.