“About one hundred and twenty-eight years ago, Laurens Zanssen Coster
inhabited a decent and fashionable house in the city of Haarlem, situated
on the market-place, opposite the royal palace. The name of Coster was
assumed, and inherited from his ancestors, who had long enjoyed the
honourable and lucrative office of coster or sexton to the church. This
man deserves to be restored to the honour of being the first inventor
of printing, of which he has been unjustly deprived by others, who have
enjoyed the praises due to him alone. As he was walking in the wood
contiguous to the city, which was the general custom of the richer
citizens and men of leisure, in the afternoon and on holidays, he began
to cut letters on the bark of the beech; with these letters he enstamped
marks upon paper in a contrary direction, in the manner of a seal, until
at length he formed a few lines for his own amusement and for the use of
the children of his brother-in-law. This succeeding so well, he attempted
greater things; and, being a man of genius and reflection, he invented,
with the aid of his brother- or son-in-law, Thomas Pietrison, a thicker
and more adhesive ink, as the common ink was too thin and made blotted
marks. With this ink he was able to print blocks and figures, to which
he added letters. I have seen specimens of his printing in this manner.
In the beginning he printed on one side only. This was a Dutch book,
entitled _Spiegal enser Behoudenisse_. That it was one of the first books
printed after the invention of the art, appears from the leaves, which
are pasted together, that the naked sides might not be offensive to the
eyes; and none at first were printed in a more perfect manner. As this
new species of traffic attracted numerous customers, thus did the profits
arising from it increase his love for the art and his diligence in the
exercise of it.
“He engaged workmen, which was the source of the mischief. Among these
workmen was one Jan ⸺: whether his surname be that of Faust, or any
other, is of no great importance to me, as I will not disturb the dead,
whose consciences must have smote them sufficiently while living. This
Jan, who assisted at the printing press under oath, after he had learned
the art of casting the types, setting them, and other articles belonging
to the art, and thought himself sufficiently instructed, having watched
the opportunity, as he could not find a better, he packed up the types
and the other articles on Christmas eve, while the family was engaged
in celebrating the festival, and stole away with them. He first fled to
Amsterdam, thence to Cologne, until he could establish himself at Mentz,
as a secure place, where he might open shop and reap the fruits of his
knavery. It is a known fact that within the twelve months (that is, in
the year 1440) he published the _Alexandri Galli Doctrinale_, (a grammar
at that time in high repute,) with _Petri Hispani Tractatibus Logicis_,
with the same letters which Laurens had used. These were undoubtedly the
first products of his press. These are the principal circumstances that I
have collected from creditable persons far advanced in years, which they
have transmitted like a flaming torch from hand to hand: I have also met
with others who have confirmed the same.”—_Hadrianus Junius_, 1568.
[2] The first copies of the Bible are not dated, and do not contain the
printer’s name. Only a few impressions have been preserved to the present
time; indeed, they were entirely lost to the world until the latter
half of the last century, when a copy was discovered in the library of
Cardinal Mazarin in Paris; hence, the few existing copies are generally
spoken of as Mazarin Bibles. Some of these were printed on vellum, but
the earliest copies were on paper. There are only six copies now extant;
two of which are in the United States, one belonging to the collection
of the late Mr. George Brinley of Connecticut, and the other owned by
the late Mr. James Lenox of New York. These two copies are on paper. The
Brinley copy is said to have a leaf or two in fac-simile, while the Lenox
copy is perfect in every respect. This copy, together with his unequalled
collection of rare Bibles, now enriches the magnificent Lenox Library,
founded in New York, in 1870, by this excellent and wisely beneficent
man. The four remaining copies are in Europe, two of which were sold in
London at auction; one on vellum selling for $20,000, and the other, on
paper, bringing $14,000.
[3] “The names of Koster and Gutenberg will ever remain associated with
its positive invention; and to Koster, if we are to be guided by a vast
mass of unanswerable evidence in his favour, must be assigned the glory
of achieving the first actual steps in that art, of which Gutenberg was
soon destined, not only to extend and solidify the basis, but to raise at
once upon that basis a most noble superstructure.”—_Humphreys_, p. 50.
[4] 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:—
[Illustration: 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.
[5] Two copies of Bradford’s Almanac are known to be in existence. We
give the Address of