The Invention of Printing. A Collection of Facts and Opinions, Descriptive of Early Prints and Playing Cards, the Block-Books of the Fifteenth Century, the Legend of Lourens Janszoon Coster, of Haarlem, and the Work of John Gutenberg and His Associates

The eight faces of types show their relation to each other, not only by common features, but by the occasional appearance of two faces in one book. That they were never used by...

When strolling in the woods near the city, as citizens who enjoyed ease were accustomed to do after dinner and on holidays, it happened that he undertook as an experiment to fas...

The first edition of the book contains forty engravings on wood, printed on one side only of the leaf. The prints face each other; two pages of illustrations are always followed...

[55] Papillon, _Traité historique et pratique de la gravure en bois_, vol. I, p. 89. His description is very prolix and full of irrelevant matter. I have made use of the transla...

The book was written for the instruction of the traveling mendicant friars who had, since the thirteenth century, gradually monopolized preaching and the pastoral work of the se...

[347] The Brotherhood were forbidden by the vows they had taken to ask for alms or accept gifts, and were required to live by the labor of their hands. They devoted themselves t...

The modern printer takes his proof on dampened paper with a tool known as the proof-planer. This proof-planer is a small thick block of wood, one side of which is perfectly flat...

In this colophon, Schœffer claims superior skill as a letter-cutter. This pretension must be tested by his works. His first types, on English body, appeared in 1459, at least fo...

[4] The accompanying translation of a tablet taken from the record room of the second Assurbanipal (according to some original scholars, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks), king of...

Three of the four methods of printing here named were invented or developed within a period of fifty years. If the statements of some historians could be accepted, this period s...

The modern printer who fairly appreciates the difficulties of printing colors in register, and the force required to secure a good impression from a large, flat surface, may be...

INSTRUMENT of a certain day, when Fust produced an account and confirmed it by an oath. In the name of God. Amen. Be it known to all who shall see this public document or hear i...

The date of the invention and the profession or position of the inventor are omitted. We cannot ascertain from the monument whether Coster was a sheriff or a sexton, whether he...

The printing of books began, not as an independent art, but as an aid to the art of writing. A publisher[103] of London recently described and offered for sale a curious old boo...

The work of Gutenberg will require a treatment different from that given to the work of Coster. It is not necessary to introduce the subject by a description of his books, by pr...

[172] Leon de Bubure, in a paper published in the _Bulletins de l’académie royale de Belgique_, 2d series, vol. VIII, No. 11, shows that printing was practised at Antwerp as ear...

[292] Bernard’s conjectures as to the reason for this change are plausible. He says: The sales of the _Bible_ had not been so great as Fust had expected. Envious copyists had pr...

Were Engraved on Wood . . . Print of St. Christopher . . . Print of Annunciation . . . Print of St. Bridget . . . Other German Engravings on Wood . . . Flemish Indulgence Print...

[243] The commonest meaning of the word form, in most European languages, is a shape or figure prepared by carving; but it has also been applied, colloquially, to the mould made...

The civilization of ancient Rome did not require printing. If all the processes of typography had been revealed to its scholars the art would not have been used. The wants of re...

The short bar of soft steel is known as a Punch. When it has received the impress of the counter-punch, the punch cutter, for so the engraver of letters is called in type-foundr...

No feature of early printing is more unworkmanlike than that of composition. Imitating the style of the manuscript copy, the compositor huddled together words and paragraphs in...

The limitations of xylography are plainly set forth in this review of the more famous block-books. During the first half of the fifteenth century, labor was cheap, skill in engr...

There is nothing incredible in this curious story: on the contrary, it bears internal evidences of its probability. The selection, for printing purposes, of so unpromising a mat...

This block-book[122] was, no doubt, intended for men, but a modern observer would say that it had been made for children. The time-honored method, still used for the child’s alp...

Many German authors claim that playing cards were in common use throughout Germany at a much earlier period. Breitkopf quotes the following passage from a book called the _Golde...

The book thus bound was too weighty to be held in the hand; it was so full of angles and knobs that it could not be placed upon a flat table without danger of scratching it. For...

Printing did not meet with general welcome, but the neglect or opposition it encountered did not come largely from the copyists. The business of the copyist of cheap books was i...

The gravest difficulty in the way of this conjecture is, that the type-mould of modern type-founders has, including the matrix, but three detachable pieces. As this mould is sub...

The development of paper-making in Europe cannot be traced with any degree of certainty. There are Italian authors who assert that linen paper was made in Lombardy and Tuscany a...

[212] This Museum then contained, among other relics, copies of the _Apocalypse_, the _Ars Moriendi_, the _Canticles_, the _Donatus_, the _Speculum_, the _Temptations of Demons_...

It does not appear that any of these block-books were made by monks. The block-printers of a later period were laymen, and men of no note, and it seems probable that the earlier...

The few experts in printing who have examined copies of this book have been so cowed by the rulings of eminent bibliographers that they have not, apparently, dared to trust thei...

27. The exact date of the complete invention of copper-plate printing is unfixed. Vasari says that Finiguerra’s discovery was made in 1450, but that the Italian practice of maki...

Reimboldt, of Ehenheim, testified that he was at the house of Andrew before Christmas, and asked him _what he intended to do with the nice things with which he was busy_. Andrew...

It is not certainly known which was printed first. Each edition was published without printed date, and, like all other works by Gutenberg, without name or place of printer. The...

In 1465, Adolph II made Gutenberg one of the gentlemen of his court for “agreeable and voluntary service rendered to us and our bishopric.” The nature of the service is not defi...

The provision of black ink for the types and brown ink for the cuts seems unnecessary, but Van der Linde’s explanation of this peculiarity is plausible. He says that the oily bl...

At the end of the sixteenth century, the legend had two strong supports—the authority of an eminent scholar, and the patriotic pride of the Hollanders, who accepted it as truthf...

‹f›Osculetur me osculo oris sui; quia Let him kiss me with the meliora sunt ubera tua vino.‹/f› kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine.

At this point it may be proper to record what is exactly known about the old printing offices of this town. The first Haarlem book with a printed date is of the year 1483. It is...

[92] The determination to keep the peasants enslaved was stronger than all enmities. During the insurrection of the _Jacquerie_, the English knights who accompanied King Edward...

Every man, in his heart, desires to be learned and well read. Without books and without teacher, this cannot be. If it were otherwise, all of us would know Latin. These reflecti...

This mask was substantially the same contrivance which modern printers call the frisket. It shielded the white sheet from contact with ink where ink was not required, but could...

No great fact, no social state, makes its appearance complete and at once; it is formed slowly, successively; it is the result of a multitude of different facts of different dat...

_I began this work intending to describe only the mechanical development of early printing, but I could not keep the matter strictly within this limit. Hedged in this narrow spa...

DE LA BORDE LÉON. Débuts de l’imprimerie à Strasbourg, ou recherches sur les travaux mystérieux de Gutenberg dans cette ville, et sur le procès qui lui fut intenté en 1439 à cet...

COLOGNE. The first printer at Cologne was Ulric Zell. He was an industrious printer for more than forty years, but he never printed a book in German, nor did he adopt any of the...

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 51034-h.htm or 51034-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51...

[396] There should have been a gradual improvement in the construction of the press, as there was in the making of the types, but there was no decided change for two centuries....