The accompanying illustrations show a reproduction of a page of a Donatus printed from blocks, and a reproduction of a Donatus printed from type by Coster. They are taken from Holtrop’s Monuments Typographiques des Pays-Bas. Two pages, not consecutive, of the printed Donatus, were found in the binding of a book published in Delft in 1484. The leaves are of vellum, printed on one side only. The ink is pale and is soluble in water. There is no punctuation and there are no hyphens at the ends of lines where words are divided, showing that the font contained only letters. The lines are fairly regular in length and end with either a complete word or a syllable. The form is well locked up and the presswork is fair. The letters are of slightly varying size and are not in perfect alignment. Apparently each letter was cut independently on the end of the type body and the cutter was not sufficiently skillful to center them perfectly.
Compare this page with the reproductions of the Mazarin, or forty-two line Bible, shown on pages [48] and [49]. We know that the Mazarin Bible was printed not later than 1456. By some it has been attributed to Gutenberg, or at least to his types, but it is now considered the work of Schoeffer. The Mazarin Bible is one of the most perfect and splendid pieces of typography that has ever been produced. Other work attributed to Gutenberg shows a high degree of excellence. It has always been one of the wonders of invention that so difficult and complicated an art as typography should have sprung into being fully perfected, without trace of imperfect experiment. In the rough page of Coster’s Donatus we clearly see the imperfect beginning—the missing link.
These peculiarities are exactly what we should expect to find in the missing links between the printing of block books and the printing of books from type. The printer is experimenting. He cuts the lettering off his blocks and combines them with type. He uses type and blocks for the same edition. He experiments with paper. He is very primitive in his methods. A block book could be printed only on one side. He is not yet sure that the type-set book can be printed on both sides. Not improbably he began by using for his type page the same method of printing that he used with his wooden block. It seems pretty clear that in this mass of material, known collectively as the Costeriana, we have the records of the course of experimentation which led from the printing of the image print, with its legend cut on the same block, by placing a sheet of paper or vellum on the inked surface of the block and pressing it down with a frotten, to the production of the book from type-set pages impressed upon both sides of the paper by means of a press.
We have thus gone through the evidence of the first class which exists for the invention of printing. We have seen that there exists indisputable evidence that forty-seven editions were printed at Haarlem before 1474 by an experimenter who seems to have gone over the road from the block book to the type-set book.
Reduced Facsimile of Type Page by Coster.
Reduced Facsimile of Block Printing
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.