Note 4 — RISE AND PROGRESS OF PRINTING.

For detailed and conflicting accounts, see Humphreys’s History of the Art of Printing, (London,) and De Vinne’s Invention of Printing, (New York.)

Humphreys dispassionately goes over the ground, and while giving due credit to Gutenberg, awards to Koster the honour of the invention of the art of printing. A perusal of De Vinne, on the other hand, leaves the impression of an effort to prove a preconceived opinion, every probability in favour of Koster being curtly set aside, and every perchance on the side of Gutenberg being regarded as incontrovertible fact. De Vinne derides the idea that types were at first cut, and not cast or founded; and this in the face of the fact that in the earliest printed books, there are not two letters of one kind that are precisely alike in a page; that is, every letter a varies somewhat from all other a’s, and so with b and all other letters. This could not be the case if the types were cast or founded. To support his view, De Vinne copies from De la Borde a wood engraving representing letters cut and sawn apart; and from the imperfection of this experiment argues that the first types could not have been cut. This proves nothing except the incapacity of the experimenter. A dozen years ago an ingenious man in Philadelphia produced copper-headed types in a mass on type-metal bodies, which had to be cut apart singly. The specimen of these types here given proves conclusively that the thing can be done far better than was done by Koster on wood or metal, though his types were ten times larger than these:—

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

New York New Jersey Mississippi Georgia Virginia Louisiana Tennessee Arkansas Kentucky New Hampshire Maine Massachusetts Kansas

We have repeated the experiment in our own foundry with Long Primer type, and with a similar result. These experiments are sufficient to show the ungroundedness of Mr. De Vinne’s argument. He further states that in some of the specimens given by him, the letters have been so worn that they have run into one another; but the fact is, such letters were logotypes, and cut on the same block. Any accurate type-founder can verify this fact almost at a glance. In a lecture by Mr. Josiah Marples, an accurate English printer, before the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society on Type-founders and Type-founding, the speaker alluded to Caxton and his types, and to Mr. Vincent Figgins’s reproduction of the “Game of Chesse,” whose nephew had enabled him to exhibit a copy of the same to the meeting. “Mr. Vincent Figgins, whose skill as a practical type-founder,” it was remarked, “entitled his opinion to great weight, believed that the book was not printed from types such as were cast by Schœffer, but from types which were cast with solid faces, upon which were cut with the graver each letter separately. To this Mr. Figgins attributed the fact that in the original book no pure style of letters was used, but a mixture between the old black and that called Secretary; that no two letters were exactly alike, and that frequent use was made of logotypes.”

Mr. De Vinne finds some difficulty in demolishing the Koster “legend” (as he and Van der Linde call it) in the fact that the existence of numerous volumes and fragments of ancient printing have to be somehow accounted for; and he thereupon adopts the hypothesis of an unknown printer, to whom he attributes these early productions. The admittedly ancient water-marks in the paper he rules out, simply because such water-marks were used long afterward. He gives fac-simile specimens of the types used in these books; but, in violation of all the laws of probability, he gives the inferior specimens last. The necessities of his theory compelled him to this course, the natural order being the reverse of the one adopted by him. The inferior specimens show clearly the first attempts of an inventor, an inventor too who had before been a block printer. The succeeding books show as clearly the successive stages of improvement, the last stage of which was equal or even superior to any thing executed by Gutenberg before the appearance of the great Bible. This “unknown printer” was doubtless Koster.

It is by no means a wild question whether the credit of even the first Bible belongs to Gutenberg or to Peter Schœffer; for, after the dissolution of the partnership between Gutenberg and Fust, the former produced nothing worthy of note, while Schœffer printed the Bible again, as well as other works, notably the Psalter, a most wonderful specimen of ancient typography. Schœffer appears to be as undoubtedly the inventor of type-founding as Koster was of printing,—Gutenberg was neither, though we must award him high credit for his skill in availing himself of the knowledge derived from Koster, and his perseverance through a series of years. But the almost impenetrable cloud of mystery that surrounds the discovery of printing should induce a spirit of hesitancy that is not at all characteristic of Van der Linde and others. Neither ifs, buts, nor perhapses, nor strained inferences, prove anything except the weakness of the argument that rests upon them.

We are satisfied that the types used by the first printers were not cast or founded in a mode at all approximating to the modern method. The question is, not who was the first type-founder in the modern style, but who was the first printer with movable types, no matter whether of wood, pewter, or tin; and we agree with the judicious Isaiah Thomas in the opinion that Koster was that man.

See Haarlem the Birthplace of Printing, not Mentz, by J. H. Hessels, Cambridge, England, 1887: an emphatic confutation of the Gutenberg legend.