The _Bible of 36 lines_ should have been in press a long time, for it cannot be supposed that Gutenberg had the means to do this work with regularity. His office was destitute of composing sticks and rules, iron chases, galleys, and imposing stones. Deprived of these and other labor-saving tools, without the expertness acquired by practice, frequently delayed by the corrections of the reader, the failures of the type-founder and the errors of pressmen, it is not probable that the compositor perfected more than one page a day. He may have done less. Even if, as Madden supposes, two or more compositors were engaged on this, as they were upon other early work, the _Bible of 36 lines_ should have been in press about three years.[259] The newness of the types seems to favor the opinion that this must be the earlier edition. The same types, or types cast from the same matrices, were frequently used in little books printed between the years 1451 and 1462, but they always appear with worn and blunted faces, as if they had [p416] been rounded under the long-continued pressure of a press, or had been founded in old and clogged matrices. Gutenberg deceived himself as much as he did his Strasburg partners, in his over-sanguine estimate of the profits of printing and the difficulties connected with its practice. His printed work did not meet with the rapid sale he had anticipated, or the cost of doing the work was very much in excess of the price he received. The great success which Andrew Dritzehen hoped to have within one year, or in 1440, had not been attained in 1450. During this year Gutenberg comes before us again as the borrower of money. If he had been only an ordinary dreamer about great inventions, he would have abandoned an enterprise so hedged in with mechanical and financial difficulties. But he was an inventor in the full sense of the word, an inventor of means as well as of ends, as resolute in bending indifferent men as he was in fashioning obdurate metal. After spending, ineffectually, all the money he had acquired from his industry, from his partners, from his inheritance, from his friends,—still unable to forego his great project,—he went, as a last resort, to one of the professional money-lenders of Mentz. “Heaven or hell,” says Lacroix, “sent him the partner John Fust.”[260]