Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/444

434 mould. They seem to be the production of an incompetent punch-cutter; the letters were rudely cut, the matrices were not properly fitted up, and the types do not line. The presswork, upon new types, is good.

In the same face of type, but upon a body a little larger, Gutenberg printed the Catholicon of 1460, a great folio of 748 pages of double columns, with 66 lines to each column. In some copies of the Catholicon, the summary of contents is printed in red ink, and ornamented with an engraving which fills one side of the first page. The composition is as rude as that of the Bibles; the right side of each column is always ragged from careless spacing. The colophon annexed states that the book was printed at Mentz in 1460, but it does not give the name of the printer. The silence of Gutenberg concerning his services is remarkable, all the more so, when this silence is contrasted with the silly chatterings of several printers during the last quarter of the fifteenth century,—of whom Peter Schœffer may be considered as the first, and Trechsel of Lyons the last,—each insisting that he, whatever others might have done before him, was the true perfecter of printing. There is no other instance in modern history, excepting possibly that of Shakespere, of a man who did so much and who said so little about it. This colophon is the only passage in this book, and, indeed, in any of his works, which can be attributed to Gutenberg: