Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/61

Rh improvement had not been made in the earliest method of printing books, the art would have been as unproductive in Europe as it has been in China. The fast press may do its work admirably, but its only functions are those of inking and impressing, and impression is not typography.

The thoughtful observer will perceive that the merit of modern printing is not in impression; that there would be neither fast presses, nor great books, nor daily newspapers, if there were no types. With him, whatever of greatness there is in printing is due to the mind that first imagined the utility of types. The grandness of the results that have been achieved by typography seem all the grander when he thinks that these results have been accomplished with such simple tools as little cubes of metal. The making of these tools he regards as a matter of minor importance. For in these types are visible no intricacy of mechanism as in the power loom, no indications of a mysterious agency as in the magnetic telegraph, no evidences of scientific skill as in photographic apparatus. There are in types, apparently, no more evidences of genius or science than there are in pins or needles. The grotesque types of the fifteenth century are rated by him, and even by many mechanics, as rude workmanship which could have been done by a carver in wood or a founder in metal. He who could imagine them could make them. To think was to do. The merit of the invention of typography is accordingly adjudged, not to the inventive spirit which constructed the mould by which the types were made, but to the genius which first thought of the utility of types. This is a grave error.

Speculations like these, which assign all the merit of the invention of typography to him who first conceived the idea of types, are opposed to many facts and probabilities. Cicero and Jerome could not have been the only men who thought of the combinations of engraved letters; nor were the old Roman lamp-makers and branders of cattle the only men who used types. The idea of stamping with detached letters