Reduced Facsimile of Early Wood-cut
At first these images appeared upon single sheets bearing only the picture. Later, words were carved upon the block in addition to the picture, giving us on one page the combination of picture and text. Very probably the owner could not read the inscription, but he could be told what it meant and the very form of it would recall to his mind the words which he had learned.
From this single picture there were two lines of development. One was the binding up of several pages of such pictures and texts into a book. Each page was printed from a single block and the result was a block book. Of these there were two especially famous and often printed, The Biblia Pauperum, or Poor Man’s Bible, and the Speculum Humani Salvationis, or Mirror of Human Salvation. The Poor Man’s Bible, of course, was a collection of prints recalling the biblical stories. The Mirror went further afield and showed pictures representing moral teaching. Great numbers of these books were printed and circulated, especially in Holland and Germany.
The other development was the printing of whole pages of text. Certain books were in great demand. The advantage of being able to reproduce them quickly and cheaply was obvious. The two best known are alphabet books for beginners called Abecederia, or Abecederium in the singular, and the elementary Latin grammars abstracted from the works of an old Latin grammarian named Donatus. These grammars were commonly called Donatuses. These books, especially the school books, were printed mostly on vellum, partly because of its greater durability and partly because the use of paper was not yet common.
We have here the lines of development which led directly to the invention of typography. We have already mentioned books printed from plates with pictures without text, pictures with text, and text without pictures. What would be more natural than to cut off the part of the block containing the text and use the picture alone, or to combine the text with text cut from another block or with another picture from which the text had been removed? If we could do this why could we not cut out a single word or a single letter and why not make a considerable number of these single letters and combine them into words? If parts of two or more blocks were to be used for the same picture, they must be fastened together in some way, or as we should say today the form must be locked up. Why could not separate letters be fastened together in the same way so that we could print anything we wanted by the simple process of putting together the necessary letters in the proper relation? As we shall see presently, this is exactly what happened, and the invention of printing thus considered is the most natural thing in the world.
Before passing to the next phase of the discovery, a word should be said about playing cards. Until recently playing cards were considered as having a place in this development which they probably never occupied. Playing cards, like many other things good and bad, were invented in the East. They made their appearance in Europe somewhere about 1375 A. D. and by 1400 they had become popular. The first cards were hand painted which, of course, made them expensive and confined their use to the wealthy. A little later, however, they were painted by the use of stencils so that they could be produced cheaply and plentifully. Later still they were printed from blocks like the image prints and colored by hand. Color being essential to playing cards, the development thus outlined was the most natural. It has been supposed that the comparatively small playing card was first made and that the image print was derived from the playing card. There now seems no question that the process was the other way about, as there are no printed playing cards known as early as the St. Christopher above referred to. The block-printed playing card seems to have been clearly an imitation of the image print, and not the image print an evolution from the playing card.
CHAPTER III
Claims to the Invention
De Vinne mentions fifteen cities or towns as having been specified by as many different authors as the true birthplace of typography. The names of these are Augsburg, Basle, Bologna, Dordrecht, Feltre, Florence, Haarlem, Lubeck, Mainz, Nuremberg, Rome, Russemburg, Strasburg, Schelestadt, and Venice. The various authors assign to these towns the names of the following alleged inventors: Castoldi, Coster, Fust, Gensfleisch, Gresmund, Gutenberg, Hahn, Mentel, Jenson, Regiomontanus, Schoeffer, Pannartz and Sweynheym, and Louis de Vaelbaeske.
Of these claims there are only three which deserve any consideration whatever. The first of these claims, the alleged discovery at Avignon, is by far the most recent and may be quickly disposed of. In 1890 the Abbé Requin discovered five curious documents in the notarial records of Avignon, in southern France. These papers deal with the business dealings of the silversmith Procopius Waldfoghel with certain other persons regarding the art of writing artistically, instruction therein, and certain tools therefor. There are mentioned in these papers two steel alphabets in Latin, one iron alphabet in Hebrew, two iron frames, one steel screw, forty-eight forms of tin, and divers other forms belonging to the art of writing. There is also mention of instruments or tools of iron, steel, copper, latten, lead, tin, and wood for writing artistically. These documents date from 1444 and 1446, before Gutenberg had produced any results. On the evidence of these documents attempts have been made to show that printing was being done at Avignon several years before the earliest date that can be assigned to the 42-line Bible, the Letters of Indulgence, or even the somewhat doubtful Latin Grammar.
A careful study of the documents, however, hardly bears out this claim. It is said that the writing was to be done on “stuffs” (cloth), but nothing is said of paper, ink, or other materials needed for printing, and it is a stretch of the imagination to see punches and matrices in the iron and steel alphabets and the forty-eight forms.