About one hundred and twenty-eight years ago there dwelt in a house of some magnificence (as may be verified by inspection, for it stands intact to this day) in Haarlem, near to the market, and opposite the royal palace, Laurentius Joannes, surnamed Æditus, or Custos, by reason of this lucrative and honorable office, which by hereditary right appertained to the distinguished family of that name. . . . 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 fashion the bark of a beech tree in the form of letters. The letters so made, he impressed the reverse way, consecutively, upon a leaf of paper, in little lines of one kind and another.... Thereupon he made, by the addition of letters, explanations for pictures on engraved wood. Of this kind of printing, I myself have seen some stamped block books, the first essays of the art, printed on one side only, with the printed pages facing each other, and not upon both sides of the leaf. Among them was a book in the vernacular written by an unknown author, bearing the title “Spieghel onzer Behoudenis” [_Dutch edition of the “Mirror of Salvation,” two pages of the Latin edition of which are here shown_].... He subsequently changed the beech-wood letters for those of lead, and these again for letters of tin, because tin was a less flexible material, harder and more durable. To this day may be seen in the very house itself ... some very old wine flagons, which were made from the melting down of the remnants of these very types. The new invention met with favor from the public and ... attracted purchasers from every direction.... He added assistants to his band of workmen, and here may be found the cause of his troubles. Among these workmen was a certain John. Whether or not, as suspicion alleges, he was Faust ... or another of the same name I shall not trouble myself to ascertain. This man, altho bound by oath to the typographic art, when he knew himself to be perfectly skilled in the operation of type setting, in the knowledge of type founding, and in every other detail appertaining to the work, seized the first favorable opportunity ... and flew into the closet of the types, and packed up the instruments used in making them that belonged to his master, and ... immediately after slunk away from the house with the thief. He went first to Amsterdam, thence to Cologne and finally regained Mainz.... Within the space of a year, or about 1442, it is well known that he published, by the aid of the same types which Laurentius had used in Haarlem, the “Doctrinal” of Alexander Gallus ... and also the “Treatises” of Peter, of Spain.... I remember that Nicholas Gallius, the preceptor of my boyhood, a man of tenacious memory,