Of Lawrence Coster, his invention, and his loss, the world knew nothing until he had been nearly a hundred and fifty years in his grave. The presumed writer of the account which had to do justice to his memory had been also twelve years dead when his book was published. His information, which he received when he was a boy, was derived from an old man who when a boy had heard it from another old man who lived with Coster at the time of the robbery, and who had heard the account of the invention from his master. Such is the list of the Harlem witnesses. If Junius had produced any evidence on the authority of Coster’s great-grandson that any of his predecessors--his father or his grandfather--had carried on the business of a printer at Harlem, this might in part have corroborated the narrative of Cornelius; but, though subsequent advocates of the claims of Harlem have asserted that Coster’s grand-children continued the printing business, no book or document has been discovered to establish the fact. The account of Cornelius involves a contradiction which cannot be easily explained away. If the thief stole the whole or greater part of Coster’s printing materials,--types and press and all, as the narrative seems to imply,--it is difficult to conceive how he could do so without being discovered, even though the time chosen were Christmas Eve; for on an occasion when all or most people were engaged at their devotions, the fact of two persons being employed would in itself be a suspicious circumstance: a tenant with a small stock of furniture who wished to make a “moonlight flitting” would most likely be stopped if he attempted to remove his goods on a Sunday night. As the dishonest workman had an assistant, who is rather unaccountably called “_the_ thief,” it is evident from this circumstance, as well as from the express words of the narrative,[III-67] that the quantity of materials stolen must have been considerable. If, on the contrary, the thief only carried away a portion of the types and matrices, with a few other instruments,--“all that could be moved without manifest danger of immediate detection,” to use the words of Mr. Ottley,--what was there to prevent Coster from continuing the business of printing? Did he give up the lucrative trade which he had established, and disappoint his numerous customers, because a dishonest workman had stolen a few of his types? But even if every letter and matrice had been stolen,--though how likely this is to be true I shall leave every one conversant with typography to decide,--was the loss irreparable, and could this “shrewd and ingenious man” not reconstruct the types and other printing materials which he had originally contrived? [Footnote III-67: “Choragium omne typorum involat, instrumentorum herilium ei artificio comparatorum suppelectilem convasat, deinde _cum fure_ domo se proripit.”--H. Junii Batavia, p. 255.]