[3] “The names of Koster and Gutenberg will ever remain associated with its positive invention; and to Koster, if we are to be guided by a vast mass of unanswerable evidence in his favour, must be assigned the glory of achieving the first actual steps in that art, of which Gutenberg was soon destined, not only to extend and solidify the basis, but to raise at once upon that basis a most noble superstructure.”—_Humphreys_, p. 50. [4] For detailed and conflicting accounts, see Humphreys’s _History of the Art of Printing_, (London,) and De Vinne’s _Invention of Printing_, (New York.) Humphreys dispassionately goes over the ground, and while giving due credit to Gutenberg, awards to Koster the honour of the invention of the art of printing. A perusal of De Vinne, on the other hand, leaves the impression of an effort to prove a preconceived opinion, every probability in favour of Koster being curtly set aside, and every perchance on the side of Gutenberg being regarded as incontrovertible fact. De Vinne derides the idea that types were at first cut, and not cast or founded; and this in the face of the fact that in the earliest printed books, there are not two letters of one kind that are precisely alike in a page; that is, every letter a varies somewhat from all other a’s, and so with b and all other letters. This could not be the case if the types were cast or founded. To support his view, De Vinne copies from De la Borde a wood engraving representing letters cut and sawn apart; and from the imperfection of this experiment argues that the first types could not have been cut. This proves nothing except the incapacity of the experimenter. A dozen years ago an ingenious man in Philadelphia produced copper-headed types in a mass on type-metal bodies, which had to be cut apart singly. The specimen of these types here given proves conclusively that the thing can be done far better than was done by Koster on wood or metal, though his types were ten times larger than these:— [Illustration: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ New York New Jersey Mississippi Georgia Virginia Louisiana Tennessee Arkansas Kentucky New Hampshire Maine Massachusetts Kansas]