Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
According to this theory, it was Schoeffer who engraved the two founts
of small type used in the two sets of Indulgences of 1454-5, and thus
demonstrated that the new art could be applied to produce every kind of
book and document which had previously circulated in manuscript. Fust
gave him his daughter Christina in marriage, and Johann Schoeffer, the
offspring of the alliance, distinctly tells us that this was in reward
for his services. From the first, or almost the first, the firm adopted
a policy of advertisement which other printers were slow to imitate, the
partners giving their names in their earliest colophons and making no
secret of the fact that they were using an "adinuentio artificiosa
imprimendi ac caracterizandi" which enabled them to dispense with the
pen. In 1460, in the _Catholicon_ of that year, the work of an anonymous
printer to which we shall have to recur (see p. 51 _sqq._), the
invention is distinctly claimed for Mainz, and from 1467 this claim was
taken over by Peter Schoeffer, who in the colophons of his subsequent
books again and again celebrated Mainz as the city singled out by divine
favour to give the art to the world. The fact that for nearly forty
years (1460-99) these statements remained unchallenged, and passed into
the contemporary history of the time, is the strongest evidence in
favour of the substantial invention of the art at Mainz that can be
conceived. A single reference in 1499[22] to prefigurations of a humbler
kind in _Donatuses_ printed in Holland and the presentation of a rival
theory in 1568 cannot deprive of its due weight the evidence that during
all the years when the facts were easily ascertainable judgment in
favour of Mainz was allowed to go by default. But the Fust and Schoeffer
colophons tell us more than this, for while they make no mention of
Gutenberg they never claim the invention of printing as their own
achievement. It is clear that Fust could not claim this himself, and
while he was alive his son-in-law did not think fit to put forward, or
allow to be put forward, any claim on his own behalf. It was only in
1468, when both Gutenberg and Fust were dead, that Schoeffer's
"corrector," or reader, Magister Franciscus, was permitted to assert on
his behalf, in the _Justinian_ of that year, that though two Johns had
the better in the race he, like his namesake S. Peter, had entered first
into the sepulchre, i.e. the inner mysteries of printing. The claim,
thus irreverently put forward, is deprived of much of its weight by the
moment at which it was made; nevertheless it can hardly have been
baseless.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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