According to this theory, it was Schoeffer who engraved the two founts of small type used in the two sets of Indulgences of 1454-5, and thus demonstrated that the new art could be applied to produce every kind of book and document which had previously circulated in manuscript. Fust gave him his daughter Christina in marriage, and Johann Schoeffer, the offspring of the alliance, distinctly tells us that this was in reward for his services. From the first, or almost the first, the firm adopted a policy of advertisement which other printers were slow to imitate, the partners giving their names in their earliest colophons and making no secret of the fact that they were using an “adinuentio artificiosa imprimendi ac caracterizandi” which enabled them to dispense with the pen. In 1460, in the Catholicon of that year, the work of an anonymous printer to which we shall have to recur (see p. 51 sqq.), the invention is distinctly claimed for Mainz, and from 1467 this claim was taken over by Peter Schoeffer, who in the colophons of his subsequent books again and again celebrated Mainz as the city singled out by divine favour to give the art to the world. The fact that for nearly forty years (1460-99) these statements remained unchallenged, and passed into the contemporary history of the time, is the strongest evidence in favour of the substantial invention of the art at Mainz that can be conceived. A single reference in 1499[22] to prefigurations of a humbler kind in Donatuses printed in Holland and the presentation of a rival theory in 1568 cannot deprive of its due weight the evidence that during all the years when the facts were easily ascertainable judgment in favour of Mainz was allowed to go by default. But the Fust and Schoeffer colophons tell us more than this, for while they make no mention of Gutenberg they never claim the invention of printing as their own achievement. It is clear that Fust could not claim this himself, and while he was alive his son-in-law did not think fit to put forward, or allow to be put forward, any claim on his own behalf. It was only in 1468, when both Gutenberg and Fust were dead, that Schoeffer’s “corrector,” or reader, Magister Franciscus, was permitted to assert on his behalf, in the Justinian of that year, that though two Johns had the better in the race he, like his namesake S. Peter, had entered first into the sepulchre, i.e. the inner mysteries of printing. The claim, thus irreverently put forward, is deprived of much of its weight by the moment at which it was made; nevertheless it can hardly have been baseless.
The desire to credit Gutenberg with some really handsome and important piece of printing has caused his name to be connected with two other large folios, a Latin Bible, of thirty-six lines to a column, printed in a variety of the type used for the Sibyllenbuch and the Kalendar of “1448,” and a Latin Dictionary known by the name Catholicon, the work of a thirteenth century writer, Joannes Balbus, of Genoa. The type of the Thirty-six Line Bible passed into the hands of Albrecht Pfister, of Bamberg, who printed a number of popular German books with it in 1461 and 1462. There is considerable evidence, moreover, that a large number of copies of the Bible itself were sold at Bamberg about 1460. The greater part of the text appears to have been set up from a copy of the Forty-two Line Bible. Where, when, and by whom it was printed we can only guess, but the place was more probably Bamberg than Mainz, and as the type is believed to have been originally Gutenberg’s, and there is evidence that Pfister, when he began printing the popular books of 1461-2, was quite inexperienced, Gutenberg has certainly a better claim to have printed this volume than any one else who can be suggested. The Thirty-six Line Bible is a much rarer book than the Forty-two Line, but copies are known to exist at the British Museum, John Rylands Library, Bibliothèque Nationale, and Musée Plantin, and at Greifswald, Jena, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Wolfenbüttel. A copy is also said to be in private hands in Great Britain, but has not been registered. None has been sold in recent times. Besides the more complete copies mentioned above, various fragments have been preserved and some of these are on vellum. The vellum fragment of leaf 204 now in the British Museum was at one time used as a book-cover.
The Catholicon is printed in a small type, not very cleanly cut. It was issued without printer’s name, but with a long colophon, which has been translated:
By the help of the Most High, at Whose will the tongues of infants become eloquent, and who oft-times reveals to the lowly that which He hides from the wise, this noble book Catholicon, in the year of the Lord’s Incarnation 1460, in the bounteous city of Mainz of the renowned German nation, which the clemency of God has deigned with so lofty a light of genius and free gift to prefer and render illustrious above all other nations of the earth, without help of reed, stilus, or pen, but by the wondrous agreement, proportion and harmony of punches and types has been printed and brought to an end.
Upon this follow four Latin verses in honour of the Holy Trinity and the Virgin Mary and the words “Deo Gracias.” We can imagine an inventor who, despite his invention, remained profoundly unsuccessful, writing the opening words of this colophon, and it is not easy to see their appropriateness to any one else. It is thus highly probable that Gutenberg set up this book and refused to follow Fust and Schoeffer in their advertising ways. He may even have had a special reason for this, for among the forty-one copies registered (almost all in great libraries) two groups may be distinguished, one embracing the copies on vellum and the majority of the paper copies, the other the rest of the paper copies. The groups are distinguished by various differences, of which the most important is that in the one case the workmen used four and in the other two pins to keep the paper in its place while being printed. An attractive explanation of all this would be that while Gutenberg set up the book and was allowed to print for himself a certain number of copies, there was a richer partner in the enterprise whose pressmen pulled the greater part of the edition. But Dr. Zedler, who has brought together all the available information about the book in his monograph Das Mainzer Catholicon, has a different explanation.
In the same type as the Catholicon are two small tracts of little interest, the Summa de articulis fidei of Thomas Aquinas, and the Dialogus of Matthaeus de Cracovia; also an Indulgence of Pope Pius II. In 1467 the type is found in the hands of Heinrich Bechtermünze at Eltvil, who died while printing a vocabulary. This was completed by his brother Nicholas, who also printed three later editions of it.
During the years which precede 1457, Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, the one a goldsmith, the other a clerk in minor orders of the diocese of Mainz, are involved in the obscurity and uncertainty which surround Gutenberg’s career. Reasons have been offered for believing that it was Schoeffer who designed the small neat types used in the Mainz Indulgences of 1454-5, and that he with his skill and Fust with his money pushed the Forty-two Line Bible to a successful completion. If they printed this, they no doubt printed also a liturgical psalter in the same type, of which a fragment is preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. But we do not touch firm ground until we come to the famous Psalter of 1457, the colophon of which leaves us in no doubt as to its typographical authorship. This runs:
Presens psalmorum[23] codex venustate capitalium decoratus Rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus Adinuentione artificiosa imprimendi ac caracterizandi absque calami ulla exaracione sic effigiatus, Et ad eusebiam dei industrie est consummatus, Per Iohannem fust ciuem maguntinum, Et Petrum Schoffer de Gernszheim Anno domini Millesimo .cccc.lvij. In vigilia Assumpcionis.
The present book of the Psalms, decorated with beautiful capitals and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any ploughing of a pen, And to the worship of God has been diligently brought to completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim, in the year of the Lord, 1457, on the vigil of the Assumption.
Thus in the Psalter of 1457 we have the first example of a book informing us when and by whom it was manufactured; it also illustrates in a very remarkable way the determination of the new partners to produce a volume which should fully rival the best shop-made manuscripts. The effort to print rubrics had already been made in the Forty-two Line Bible, but the red printing was abandoned in that instance as too troublesome. Now it was revived with complete success, and with the printed rubrics came also printed capitals or initial letters in two colours, red and blue, and several different sizes. A good discussion of the manner in which these were printed will be found in the Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Printed Books exhibited at the Historical Music Loan Exhibition (1886) by Mr. W. H. J. Weale. In an article in the first volume of Bibliographica Mr. Russell Martineau showed that part of the edition was printed twice. When Mr. Martineau wrote nine copies were known, all on vellum, viz. (i) five of an issue of 143 leaves containing the Psalms and Canticles only, these being at the British Museum, Royal Library Windsor, John Rylands Library, Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, and Royal Library Darmstadt; (ii) four of an issue of 175 leaves, containing also the Vigils of the Dead, these being at the Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, University Library Berlin, Royal Library Dresden, and Imperial Library Vienna. To these must now be added a copy of the larger issue, wanting five leaves, presented in 1465 by René d’Anjou to the Franciscans of La Baumette-les-Angiers and now in the municipal library at Angers. The distribution of the Psalms in this 1457 edition is that of the general “Roman use,” but blank spaces were left for the insertion of the characteristic differences of the use of any particular diocese.