The same conditions of doubt and obscurity surround the invention of printing. As we shall later see, more at length, the invention of printing was a development of existing processes called for by the needs of the time and arising out of the conditions of the time. It was inevitable that typographic printing should be discovered by somebody in the middle of the fifteenth century. So far as the evidence at our command shows, the art was not invented in several places at the same time, but was developed by one man out of familiar processes. For some reason which is not now clear, the work of this man, though considerable in extent, appears to have been without immediate direct results of much importance. At a very early stage the invention was seized upon by another who, with his associates, established a center from which the art steadily grew and developed. So important in its practical results was the work of this man and his associates that he has been for centuries hailed as the inventor of printing. It is needless to say that this man was John Gutenberg.
In the judgment of the present writer, however, the claim that Gutenberg invented typographic printing cannot be maintained. The discussion has been long and sometimes bitter. The arguments, or at least many of them, are of a highly technical nature and many minor points yet remain to be cleared up. In a book of this sort it would be obviously out of place to go at length into the details of the argument. The writer, moreover, lays no claim to original investigation. An attempt will be made in the following pages to show the conditions out of which the discovery arose, to tell the story of the invention, to place the credit both of actual invention and practical application where it belongs, and to bring out certain points which may be interesting about the work of the very earliest printers.
In taking the position which he does with regard to the invention the writer regrets that he is obliged to dissent from the conclusions of De Vinne. In his Invention of Printing, De Vinne ably maintains the claims of Gutenberg. No one can be more ready than the present writer to pay homage to the greatness of De Vinne and to acknowledge the immense debt which the printers of America owe to him. His series of historical and critical essays on the practice of typography are still unapproachable. In spite of the changes which have taken place in the years since they were written, their substance is not affected excepting in some minor and unimportant details. They are still supreme authority in their field. De Vinne’s historical work was also of great importance and for the most part may still be accepted without question. Under these circumstances it is only natural that the conclusions of De Vinne should carry great weight and that the great body of American printers should have accepted the Gutenberg attribution without question upon De Vinne’s authority.
It must be remembered, however, that De Vinne’s work was written nearly forty years ago. Just before he wrote, Dr. Van der Linde had published a voluminous work in which the theory of the Gutenberg invention was supported at great length and with great show of scholarship. This was later followed by other volumes of similar purport. For a considerable time Van der Linde’s books were considered as settling the question. De Vinne, as may clearly be seen from his preface, wrote under the spell of Van der Linde’s influence. Later investigations, however, have shown that Van der Linde’s scholarship was largely show, that he was not only uncritical but unskillful in his use of authorities, and that his voluminous works are written with the sole purpose of bolstering up a preconceived theory. Most of this investigation had not been conducted when De Vinne wrote. The discussion cannot be said to have swung the balance of probability to the other side until after De Vinne’s literary activities ceased. The knowledge we now possess, however, has forced the present writer to abandon the De Vinne position and to base the historical part of this series of text-books on acceptance of the belief that typographic printing was discovered by Coster, of Haarlem, in Holland.
CHAPTER I
Conditions in the Middle of the Fifteenth Century
As was briefly indicated in the preceding volume in this series, the conditions existing in the world of letters at the middle of the fifteenth century were such as to demand imperatively some new method of making books. The slow march of civilization had gone on with many setbacks and interruptions through the centuries, but was now proceeding with a swiftness hitherto unknown. The demands of the human mind were pressing hard against the physical boundaries to progress created by the methods of book-making then in use. It must be remembered that men were still making books just as they had done for nearly two thousand years. A vast store of knowledge had been accumulated and additions were being made with tremendous rapidity, but there was no adequate means of getting this knowledge before the people. At the same time there were more people intensely eager for knowledge than ever before.
It is worth while to stop for a moment to consider the conditions of the period. The Hundred Years’ War between France and England, which had paralyzed the energies of a divided France and had exhausted the powers of England in useless attempts at an impossible conquest, had at last come to an end. The English had withdrawn to their own island. They had given up the dreams of a continental empire which had danced before their eyes ever since William of Normandy, in 1066, had added England to his possessions. In reading English history we are liable to forget that during a great part, if not the whole, of the four hundred years succeeding the Conquest, the English kings had considered their continental possessions the more important, regarding the little island which they shared with the Scotch, then an independent nation, as a sort of colonial possession. It is true that they maintained their capitals there and took their titles thence, because in England they were kings, whereas they governed their broad possessions on the continent as dukes or counts only. From the time of Henry V they had claimed to be kings of France. Now these continental ambitions were definitely given up and England was free to develop her own nationality, and a much more vigorous national life immediately began.
The same events mark an era in the development of France. Free from the horrors of war and the dread of another conquest, a new opportunity was given for the development of the arts of peace.
Italy was still divided into a great number of independent states whose quarrels and changing alliances make the Italian history of the period extremely difficult to study on its political side. There had, however, developed in Italy a group of strong rulers who governed states of respectable size and kept them for considerable periods in comparative stability. The Italian states had rallied more quickly from the barbarian invasions which overthrew the Roman Empire than the rest of Europe and their progress in civilization had been very remarkable when one considers the civil wars and wars between small states which had been almost continuous.
For the most part Germany had lagged far behind the rest of Europe in the development of civilization. The greater part of it, however, was now in a fairly stable political condition and many of the German states had become important centers of learning. This was especially true of western and southern Germany, where the influence of Rome had been strongest and where the influence of France and Italy had been most felt.