Some Dutch writers, inspired by a not unnatural feeling of patriotism,
have endeavoured to claim the honour of inventing the Art of Printing
for a countryman of their own, Laurence Coster of Haarlem. Their sole
reliance, however, is upon the statements of one Hadrian Junius, who was
born at Horn, in North Holland, in 1511. About 1575 he wrote a work,
entitled "Batavia," in which the account of Coster first appeared. And,
as an unimpeachable authority has remarked, almost every succeeding
advocate of Coster's pretensions has taken the liberty of altering,
amplifying, or contradicting the account of Junius, according as it
might suit his own line of argument; but not one of them has succeeded
in producing a solitary fact in confirmation of it. The accounts which
are given of Coster's discovery by Junius and his successors present
many contradictory features. Thus Junius says: "Walking in a
neighbouring wood, as citizens are accustomed to do after dinner and on
holidays, he began to cut letters of beech-bark, with which, for
amusement--the letters being inverted as on a seal--he impressed short
sentences on paper for the children of his son-in-law." A later writer,
Scriverius, is more imaginative: "Coster," he says, "walking in the
wood, picked up a small bough of a beech, or rather of an oak-tree,
blown off by the wind; and after amusing himself with cutting some
letters on it, wrapped it up in paper, and afterwards laid himself down
to sleep. When he awoke, he perceived that the paper, by a shower of
rain or some accident having got moist, had received an impression from
these letters; which induced him to pursue the accidental discovery."
Not only are these accounts evidently deficient in authenticity, but it
should be remarked that the earliest of them was not put before the
world until Laurence Coster had been nearly a hundred and fifty years in
his grave. The presumed writer of the narrative which first did justice
to his memory had been also twelve years dead when his book was
published. His information, or rather the information brought forward
under cover of his name, was derived from an old man who, when a boy,
had heard it from another old man who lived with Coster at the time of
the robbery, and who had heard the account of the invention from his
master. For, to explain the fact of the early appearance of typography
in Germany, the Dutch writers are forced to the hypothesis that an
apprentice of Coster's stole all his master's types and utensils,
fleeing with them first to Amsterdam, second to Cologne, and lastly to
Mentz! The whole story is too improbable to be accepted by any impartial
inquirer; and the best authorities are agreed in dismissing the Dutch
fiction with the contempt it deserves, and in ascribing to JOHN
GUTENBERG, of Mentz, the honour to which he is justly entitled.
* * * * *
Of the career of Gutenberg we shall speak presently, but let us first
point out that the invention of typography, like all great inventions,
was no sudden conception of genius--not the birth of some singularly
felicitous moment of inspiration--but the result of what may be called a
gradual series of causes. Printing with movable types was the natural
outcome of printing with blocks. We must go back, therefore, a few
years, to examine into the origin of "block books."
Mr. Jackson observes that there cannot be a doubt that the principle on
which wood engraving is founded--that of taking impressions on paper or
parchment, with ink, from prominent lines--was known and practised in
attesting documents in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Towards
the end of the fourteenth, or about the beginning of the fifteenth
century, he says, there seems reason to believe that this principle was
adopted by the German card-makers for the purpose of marking the
outlines of the figures on their cards, which they afterwards coloured
by the practice called _stencilling_.
It was the Germans who first practised card-making as a trade, and as
early as 1418 the name of a _kartenmacher_, or card-maker, occurs in the
burgess-books of Augsburg. In the town-books of Nuremburg, the
designation _formschneider_, or figure-cutter, is found in 1449; and we
may presume that block books--that is, books each page of which was cut
on a single block--were introduced about this time. These books were on
religious subjects, and were intended, perhaps, by the monks as a kind
of counterbalance against the playing-cards; "thus endeavouring to
supply a remedy for the evil, and extracting from the serpent a cure for
his bite."
The earliest woodcut known--one of St. Christopher--bears the date of
1432, and was found in a convent situated within about fifty miles of
the city of Augsburg--the convent of Buxheim, near Memmingen. It was
pasted on the inside of the right hand cover of a manuscript entitled
_Laus Virginis_, and measures eleven and a quarter inches in height, by
eight and one-eighth inches in width.