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HISTORY]

Here then we have a printer who, before 1472, had manufactured and extensively used at least seven (if not eight or nine) different and primitive looking types; three of the seven must have existed long before 1471, as with them he had printed before that year no less than five folio editions of one book (the Speculum), besides several editions of Donatus and the Doctrinale of Alex. Gallus and other smaller books. This work may be supposed to have extended over a number of years, and before he printed any of these type-printed books he had already engraved, printed and issued at least one large folio blockbook (the Speculum).

And yet the catalogues of the present day, which profess to arrange the incunabula chronologically, under their respective countries, towns, printers, types and dates—according to some “historical” or “natural history method” suggested in 1870 by an eminent bibliographer, and intended to show the “development of printing”—assign this primitive Dutch printer, and his primitive types and books, to what is presumed to be their “chronological” place, after the productions of Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France; that is, they are placed in a period when printing presses had been established in nearly every large town of Europe, and the art of printing was already so fully developed and vulgarized, that the books of that period show, on comparison with the Costeriana, that the latter must have preceded them by at least two or three decades.

Apart from this anachronism, the same catalogues assign this printer and his books no longer to Haarlem in North Holland, to which they had always been attributed in conformity with the tradition that printing had been invented in that town and the Speculum and other books printed there; but they locate them at Utrecht, the capital of the province of the same name, although the types of the Costeriana show that they are imitations of the hand writings indigenous to the province of Holland, not to those of Utrecht.

This bibliographical calamity dates from the year 1870, when Dr Anton Van der Linde published his book The Haarlem Coster Legend. After it had become known to him that for years past the “Lourens Janszoon Coster” mentioned by Junius as the inventor of printing had been confused by some authors with another inhabitant of Haarlem, whose name was “Lourens Janszoon,” but who had never borne the surname “Coster,” he, after an inadequate investigation in the Haarlem archives and elsewhere, professed to prove from documents (1) that the Haarlem tradition was nothing but a “legend,” the kernel of which was “Jacob Bellaert,” who published in 1483 the first Haarlem book with a date; (2) Lourens ]anszoon Coster was a “myth”; (3) Cornelis the bookbinder, Junius's chief witness for the Haarlem tradition, had been Bellaert's servant, and, telling his story in his second childhood, magnified the first Haarlem printer of 1483 into the first printer of the world; (4) the “Spiegel” and the Donatuses could not have been printed before 1470-1474, &c. As Van der Linde's book was apparently based on documents, it was generally thought to have put an end to the Haarlem claims. It seems to have struck nobody at the time that this Haarlem tradition or legend, if it had originated in or after 1483, could not have been so strangely distorted and altered that, within a few decades, “Jacob Bellaert” its hero, according to Van der Linde, was forgotten, while his “servant,” in his second childhood, substituted for him another person of an entirely different name and of a much earlier period; whose descendants all appear in Haarlem's history, and one of whom records him in a genealogy; who is himself mentioned again and again in the Haarlem registers of the time, but who is finally, in 1870, declared to be a “myth.” Nor did it strike anybody at the time that if Cornelis the bookbinder had been Bellaert's servant or binder, and his story of the inventor related to him, and to no other printer, this bookbinder must have used fragments of Bellaert's productions for strengthening his bindings, instead of which he employed fragments of the Costeriana, which are admittedly not printed by Bellaert.