The Invention of Typography: A Brief Sketch of the Invention of Printing and How it Came AboutHamilton, Frederick W. (Frederick William)
History
The Invention of Typography: A Brief Sketch of the Invention of Printing and How it Came About
Hamilton, Frederick W. (Frederick William)
Printing -- History -- Origin and antecedents
We have a few bits of evidence of the second and third class which bear
upon this subject and confirm our conclusions. Jean Le Robert, Abbot of
Cambray, says in his diary that he bought in 1446 and 1451 copies of the
Doctrinale of Alexander Gallus printed from type. Certainly no
Doctrinales were printed from type in Mainz as early as 1446, although
we know that the Costeriana include Doctrinales in eight editions which
may well have gone back to 1451. The opponents of the Haarlem theory
claim that the Abbot refers to Doctrinales printed from blocks but we
have no knowledge of the existence of any Doctrinales so made, and the
term by which he describes them is a term which from the beginning has
been specifically applied to the making of type and could not be applied
to the making of blocks. Presumably the Abbot knew what he was talking
about and told the truth.
Hadrianus Junius, in 1568, tells the story of Coster and the birch bark
letters as we have previously told it. It is not necessary to repeat the
story, but it is interesting to note certain features of it. Junius says
that Coster printed his leaves on one side, pasting two together to
avoid the recurrence of alternate blank pages. He further says that he
saw one or two of Coster’s books thus made. He claims that he got the
story in his youth from his tutor, Nicholas Gaal, a very aged man, but
of good memory, who said that in his boyhood he had heard a certain
Cornelis, a book binder, then eighty years old, tell the story of
Coster’s invention and his struggles to perfect it, including the use of
one side of the paper and of several different materials for type. The
Burgomaster of Haarlem, Quirinius Talesius, admitted to Junius that in
his youth Cornelis had told him the same story, and it is interesting to
note in this connection that some of the Costeriana fragments are found
in bindings made by this same Cornelis.
One more evidence which, like that of Junius, falls into the third class
remains to be cited. In 1499 Koelhoff published the Cologne Chronicle in
which he speaks of the invention of printing, using as his authority
Ulrich Zell, a printer of the Mainz school, who settled in Cologne. He
says that Zell told him that “the art of printing was first found at
Mainz, but in the manner as it was then (1499) practiced; the first
prefiguration, however, the beginning of that at Mainz, was found in
Holland from the Donatuses which had been printed in that country
before.” Certainly this is not an attribution of the invention of
printing either to Mainz or to Gutenberg. It is a distinct confession
that it is only the sort of work then being done which was invented at
Mainz and that it was suggested by work brought from Holland. It
entirely agrees with the Junius account above quoted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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