It does not seem easy to account for the existence of what the partisans of Gutenberg contemptuously term the Coster legend. It has been conjectured, somewhat plausibly, that Haarlem's jealousy of the superiority and fame of Mentz and its printers began very early, and arose from the narrow vanity of those Haarlemers who imagined that the first printing press in Haarlem must necessarily be the first printing press in the world. However this may be, the legend arose, and waxed strong, and many believed in it. Laurenz Janssoen, or Coster, was born in Haarlem about 1370. He is said to have held various high offices, such as sheriff, treasurer, officer of the city guard, and especially that of Coster to the great church of Haarlem. Coster means sacristan or sexton, but the position was one of far greater honour than is now associated with it. But another account, which is supported by all the available records, represents him as a tallow-chandler, and subsequently as an innkeeper, and if he had anything at all to do with the great church, it was only that he supplied it with candles. But whether chandler or coster, nothing is heard of him as a printer until 1568, more than a hundred years after his alleged success in printing from types--in itself a strange fact, since if Coster were the inventor, why were the Mentz printers allowed to appropriate all the credit to themselves, unchallenged by Coster's kinsfolk or countrymen, and supported by the opinions of sixty-two writers, including Caxton, the chronicler Fabian, Trithemius, and the compilers of the Cologne and Nuremberg chronicles? It is true that "few sometimes may know when thousands err," but silence is no proof of truth, and if Coster's representatives possessed the truth, how came they to withhold it from a deluded world? Although Coster is not named till 1568, the claims of Haarlem to be the birthplace of printing had been put forward (for the first time) some years earlier by Jan Van Zuyren in a work on the Invention of Typography, of which only a fragment remains. The claims of Haarlem, he says, "are at this day fresh in the remembrance of our fathers, to whom, so to express myself, they have been transmitted from hand to hand from their ancestors." Thus, though probably writing in all good faith, Van Zuyren bases his statements on nothing better than tradition. "The city of Mentz," he goes on to say, "without doubt merits great praise for having been the first to publish to the world, in a becoming garb, an invention which she received from us, for having perfected and embellished an art as yet rude and imperfect.... It is certain that the foundations of this splendid art were laid in our city of Haarlem, rudely, indeed, but still the first."