Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/22

 10 HISTORY OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE teachers, have enjoyed the privilege of personal inter- course with them ? ' The art of printing is the art of arts, 1 the science of sciences. Through its rapid spread the world has been enriched with treasures of knowledge and wisdom that till now have lain hidden. Innumerable books formerly accessible to but a few scholars in Athens or Paris, or in other universities and libraries, will now by means of the printing-press become known to all Arabs and Mongolians. The first known date of a wood-cut is the year 1423. They did not, however, only print with wooden blocks at that time, but engraved their designs in metal. A leaf out of a series of engravings of the Passion bears the date of 1446. An exquisite copper engraving of the Master P bears the date of 1451. ' There was indeed no call for any one to invent printing in the fifteenth century.' The ' Pyldtschnitzers,' wood-cutters, and engravers formed, together with the printers, a guild of their own ; in Nordlingen, for instance, as early as 1428, and in Ulm in 1441. The importance of Gutenberg's invention did not lie in the discovery of movable type (already in Roman antiquity mov- able letters were used; see Van der Linde, pp. 113-120), but in the efficient method of manufacturing metal types of a uniform size. The letters were first of all cut in the form of embossed dies or punches, then from these punches were formed matrices or moulds from which the types were cast. Besides the movableness of the single letters and their combination into words, the production of letters in great numbers was necessary, in order to substitute for the costly process of cutting each letter separately the cheapness and uniformity derived from casting a number of types from a single mould. What the special point was that the inventor himself laid stress on we learn from the appendix to the Catlwlicon of the year 1460 : ' Under the guidance of the Almighty, who often reveals to the lowly - minded what He hides from the wise, this excellent book, Catlwlicon, was printed and completed in the good town of Mentz in the year of our Lord 1460 ; its exquisite finish and accuracy are due to its being executed b}' means of dies and matrices, not with reed, stylum, or pen.' 1 In the year 1507, through the kindness of the late Father Jandel, Superior of the Dominicans at Rome in 1864. On account of its beginning with a panegvric on the art, and its treating of the spread of printing over Europe, it was given at a later period the title of De Arte impressoria. It contains twenty-nine quarto sheets of parchment, and is as beautifully written (possibly by the same hand) as the account of the history of Mentz, to be seen at the castle of Aschaffenburg, which was executed by Wimpluding for the Archbishop Albrecht of Brandenburg.