Note 11 — INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER THE TYPES AND TYPEFOUNDING OF THE FIRST PRINTERS.

The history of these “fatal, unhistorical wooden types” is worth recording for the warning of the over-credulous typographical antiquary. Wetter, writing his book in 1836, and desirous to illustrate the feasibility of the theory, “spent,” so Dr. Van der Linde writes, “really the amount of ten shillings on having a number of letters made of the wood of a pear-tree, only to please Trithemius, Bergellanus, and Faust of Aschaffenburg. . . . His letters, although tied with string, did not remain in the line, but made naughty caprioles. The supposition—that by these few dancing lines the possibility is demonstrated of printing with 40,000 wooden letters, necessary to the printing of a quarternion, a whole folio book—is dreadfully silly. The demonstrating facsimile demonstrates already the contrary. Wetter’s letters not only declined to have themselves regularly printed, but they also retained their pear-tree-wood-like impatience afterwards.” The specimen of these types may be seen in the Album of plates accompanying Wetter’s work, where they occupy the first place, the matter chosen being the first few verses of the Bible, occupying nineteen lines, and the type being about two-line English in body. M. Wetter stated in his work that he had deposited the original types in the Town Library of Mentz, where they might be inspected by anyone wishing to do so. From this repository they appear ultimately to have returned to the hands of M. Wetter’s printer. M. Bernard, passing through Mentz in 1850, asked M. Wetter for a sight of them, and was conducted to the printing office for that purpose, when it was discovered that they had been stolen; whereupon M. Bernard remarks, prophetically, “Peutêtre un jour quelque naïf Allemand, les trouvant parmi les reliques du voleur, nous les donnera pour les caractères de Gutenberg. Voilà comment s’établissent trop souvent les traditions.” This prediction, with the one exception of the nationality of the victim, was literally fulfilled when an English clergyman, some years afterwards, discovered these identical types in the shop of a curiosity-dealer at Mayence, and purchased them as apparently veritable relics of the infancy of printing. After being offered to the authorities at the British Museum and declined, they were presented in 1869 to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where they remain to this day, treasured in a box, and accompanied by a learned memorandum setting forth the circumstances of their discovery, and citing the testimony of Roccha and other writers as to the existence and use of perforated types by the early printers. The lines (which we have inspected) remain threaded and locked in forme exactly as they appear in Wetter’s specimen. It is due to the present authorities of the Bodleian to say that they preserve these precious “relics,” without prejudice, as curiosities merely, with no insistence on their historic pretensions.