Angelo Rocca, in the Appendix to the Account of the Vatican Library printed at Rome in 1591, states, from personal knowledge, that “the types used by the inventors of printing were perforated, and connected together by a thread which was passed through them, of which he remembered to have seen specimens at Venice.”[53] These perforations were no doubt the origin of the ‘nicks’ in the shanks of the types, which now enable compositors to place them in their proper positions, without examining their faces. But the threading of the letters by means of such perforations must have proved a great obstacle to progress in printing, and the perforations must also have greatly weakened the letters themselves. This will be at once understood from the annexed figures, shewing the sides of the shanks of two types, one perforated and the other nicked as at present. Obviously it was a great improvement to nick the type instead of perforating it. The object in view, that of keeping the letters in line, would be better secured by laying a thin wire in and along the nicks, than by stringing them together with a thread. Time in composing and correcting would also be saved by the alteration. As soon however as Type-founding was established as a scientific art, and types were made to adjust together with mathematical accuracy, neither threads nor wires were longer wanted; but the nicks still served as a useful aid to the compositor, in the speedier execution of his work; while the type-founder, by multiplying their number and varying their positions, enabled him at once to distinguish the differently-faced founts of the same class of types. However occupied in the five years after 1439, Gutenberg’s means became exhausted; and having been obliged, in order to extricate himself from his difficulties, to part with a portion of his paternal property to the Church of St. Thomas, he resolved to leave Strasburg and return to Mentz, his native city. This he did about the year 1444, taking up his residence in the ‘Zum Jungen,’ the house of his uncle on the Platz of the Franciscans. Here, still busily engaged in the work to which he had now exclusively devoted himself, he again ran out of funds, and had to borrow 150 florins from Reinhart Brömser and Johan Rodenstein, for which sum his kinsman, Arnulphus Gelthus, became security. His first business transaction with John Fust or Faust, the banker and money-lender, seems to have been in 1448, Faust’s name appearing as a witness to a deed of purchase made by Gutenberg in that year.[54] Two years later a contract was entered into between them, which from that date has made their names inseparable in the annals of the origin of Typography.