Page:The practice of typography; correct composition; a treatise on spelling, abbreviations, the compounding and division of words, the proper use of figures and nummerals by De Vinne, Theodore Low, 1828-1914.djvu/360

346 could not be foreseen or prevented. That no one should be held responsible for some forms of misprint (another convenient phrase) is a comfortable doctrine for the authors, compositors, and proofreaders who work with haste and negligence, for the press is inanimate and cannot respond. The silent are always wrong.

Another belief has been fostered in the mind of the reader: that printing in its early days was done much better than it is now; that books were printed more accurately when the methods and machinery of the art were simpler, when printers and publishers were men of high scholarship and had more intimate intercourse with the literati of their time. This belief has no good basis. The demigods of typography are like the demigods of so-called history: the greatest are those who are at the greatest distance. Not much research is needed to show that demigods of all kinds do not belong to history but to fiction, and that errors of the press were, to say the least, quite as common in the early days of typography as they are now. With a few exceptions, the early printers were foolishly boastful. They bragged of the superior beauty of their types and the greater accuracy of their texts. Gutenberg, first and best of all, seems to have been the only one who refused to magnify himself. Printing had been practised less than twenty years when Peter Schoeffer, the surviving member of the triumvirate who developed the art,