Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/60

50 wood-cuts with descriptive text of type. If either of these versions is accepted in the form in which it is usually told, we must also believe that printing, in the form of perfected typography, leaped, Minerva-like, fully equipped, from the brain of the inventor.

There is another belief, which is strongly maintained by a few scholars, that typography was not an original invention, that it was nothing more than a new application of the old theories and methods of impression which have already been described. According to this view, the practice of engraving is at least as old as the oldest Egyptian seal; the publication of written language can be traced to the Babylonish bricks; printing with ink, as indicated by old Roman hand stamps, was practised as early as the fifth century; the combinations of movable letters were suggested by Cicero and St. Jerome. All that was needed for the full development of typography was the invention of paper. Supplied with paper, the so-called inventor of typography did no more than combine the old theories and processes, and give them a new application. He really invented nothing.

In this conflict of opinion, the critical reader will note an inability to perceive the difference between impression and typography. Those who believe in the entire originality of typography ascribe its merit to the mind that first thought of the combinations of types; those who deny its originality find its vital element in pressure. With one class, the merit of the invention is in the idea of types; with the other, it is in the impression of types. Neither view is entirely correct.

A printer may see how these errors could be developed. The unreflecting observer, who, for the first time, surveys the operations of a printing office, finds in the fast presses the true vital principle of printing. With him, presswork is printing; type-setting and type-making are only adjuncts. He was the inventor of the modern art of printing who built the first press, and printed the first book. The conclusion is illogical, as will be shown on another page. If a radical