Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/551

Rh them, the existence of a group of nearly fifty primitively printed books of undoubtedly Dutch origin, the printing of which must have taken a number of years before 1471, would suggest serious doubts as to the priority of Mainz printing. Zell's statement is all the more weighty, as it is not one made at random but meant to be a direct contradiction of the vague rumours and statements about an invention of printing at Mainz by Gutenberg, which had gradually crept into print since 1468 in Italy and France, and had found their way back into Germany about 1476, after Mainz and Germany had given the greatest publicity, during twenty-two years, to the existence of the new art in their midst; while all those who might, and would and could, have told the public that the invention had been made at Mainz, if it had come about there, preserved a profound silence on this particular point, even the supposed inventor himself. And, though Zell accords to Mainz and Gutenberg the honour of having “improved” the art and having made it more artistic, he denies to them the honour of having “invented” or “begun” it, and this latter honour was never claimed by that town before 1476. Junius's account, on the other hand, is the embodiment of a local tradition at Haarlem, the first written traces of which we have in a pedigree (testimony xxxiv) of the family of the reputed Haarlem inventor, which, as regards its central part, may have existed at least as early as 1520, whereas its first part may be dated much earlier. His account is indirectly confirmed by the finding of several fragments at Haarlem, all belonging to the groups of books mentioned above, but still more by the discovery of several fragments of the Donatuses printed in the Speculum type 1 and 3, some of which had been used as binder's waste by Cornelis, the bookbinder, the very man whom Junius alleges to have been the servant of Coster.

As the case stands at present, therefore, we have, after careful and impartial examination, no choice but to repeat that the invention of printing with movable metal types took place at Haarlem between the years 1440 and 1446 by Lourens Janszoon Coster.

Spread of Typography.—Having explained the early printing of Haarlem and Mainz, in so far as it bears upon the controversy as to where and by whom the art of printing was invented, and shown that the testimony of Ulrich Zell (in the Cologne Chronicle of 1499) as to Mainz having learnt the art of printing from Holland through the Donatuses printed there, and that of Hadrianus Junius, as to the tradition of its Haarlem origin, are confirmed by bibliographical and historical facts, we can follow its spread from Haarlem to Mainz, and from the latter place to other towns and countries.