Note 236 — XX

The most common prejudice is the supposition, à priori, legitimated strictly scientifically by nothing, that printing with movable types was only an improvement on that with wooden blocks on which the letters were cut; that it was a development of it, an extension, a fortunate application, the highest step of the ladder, consisting of playing cards, images of saints, pictures with super, sub and other scriptions, texts without pictures. In short, xylography, in a technical, logical and reformatorical sense, would be the mother of typography. But it is such only in the sense of an external impulse, of an external push to meditating on quite another means than wood or metal engraving, or another mode of obtaining books. Zell finds that push in the block-Donatuses, but the inspiration of genius, the first invention of a quite independent art, of a totally new principle, which has nothing in common with wood and metal engraving, he ascribes . . . to Gutenberg. In Gutenberg’s mind, the grand idea arose that all words, all writing, all language, all human thoughts, could be expressed by a small number, a score of different letters, arranged according to the requirements; that, with a large quantity of those different letters, united as one whole, a whole page of text could be printed at once, and, repeating this process continually, large manuscripts could be swiftly multiplied. . . . This thought, this idea, begot the invention of typography. . . . Every other explanation is at once unhistorical and unpsychological. Haarlem Legend, p. 11.