Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/532

HISTORY] 23. Propugnacula, seu Turris sapientiae (Sotheby ii. 164). One sheet, plano, in the British Museum (IC. 30). It may have originated in the Netherlands.

Blockbooks of Netherlandish origin are:—

Early Printing with movable Metal Types.—When the art of writing, and that of printing from wooden blocks (xylography), and all the subsidiary arts of illuminating, decorating and binding manuscripts, books, pictures, &c., were at their greatest height, and had long passed out of the exclusive hands of the monasteries into the hands

of students and artisans, the art of printing with movable cast-metal types (typography) was invented. As to when, where and by whom this invention came about, a dispute has been waged for more than four hundred years. It will be seen below that we must attribute it, as in our former edition, to Lourens Janszoon Coster, of Haarlem, and not to Johan Gutenberg, of Mainz.

In saying this, we are aware that in the year 1900 (exactly four hundred years after the Cologne Chronicle had publicly started the dispute by saying that Gutenberg had improved but not invented the art) Germany enthusiastically celebrated the supposed 500th anniversary of his birthday. The speeches delivered on that occasion, after

making faint allusions to the doubts and opposition of former times, all declared that, after the rediscovery of the Helmasperger document of 1455, which could not be found in 1880 (Hessels, Gutenberg, pp. 99-101), it was impossible for any unbiased person to dispute Gutenberg’s claims to the honour of the invention any longer.

We admit the great value of these learned and painstaking publications, and those who have the time and patience to study the mass of material here brought together in a somewhat bewildering fashion, will find their knowledge enriched on various subjects connected with early printing, but no proofs that Gutenberg invented it. It is clear from these books that their authors firmly believed from the outset that Gutenberg invented printing, and printed nearly every book that appeared or can be placed before his death in 1468. Under this impression they always speak of him as the “great master,” the “great genius,” &c., and represent him, not as inventing printing by accident, but as conceiving, somewhere about 1436 or earlier, the idea of inventing it, and meditating from that moment over the problems which he had to solve. Consequently, our authors read a good deal between the lines of their documents, which we fail to find there, and in this way the texts of the documents always show somehow that “the great master” is making or has already made his invention. For instance, the Strassburg lawsuit of 1436–1439 is to them an unimpeachable proof that Gutenberg was secretly working there at printing and trying to solve his problems; when he is paying there, during the same time, a considerable sum in duties for large quantities of wine, we are told that he was then in good circumstances; but when he borrows money in 1442, 1448, 1450 and 1452, and is summonsed in 1455 for not repaying the two last loans, and prosecuted in 1457 for not paying the interest due on his first debt, it is all owing to his difficulties in working out the problems of his invention, though the documents themselves never allude to any “invention” and may be interpreted in quite a different way.

We proceed to examine the documents. The earliest mention and description of the new art is perhaps that in the Donatus issued