Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

Gutenberg could, of course, lay no claim to being in any literal sense of the term the first printer. Printing in one form or another had been carried on in Germany and elsewhere for a number of years, and printing from movable blocks had, in fact, been done in China 400 years or more before the beginning of Gutenberg’s work. As early as the twelfth century, says Kapp, there are numerous references to cloth printers, stampers of letters, and printers of maps. The oldest wood-cut known to have been produced in Europe, is a representation of S. Christopher, and bears date 1423. At about this time, and probably, in fact, some years earlier, was begun in Holland, as previously stated, the work of printing from wooden blocks, the designs being principally devoted to holy subjects. In connection with such designs, there had been printing also from letterings cut out of solid wooden blocks, and these letterings had even in some cases been cut upon blocks sufficient to occupy an entire page.

The practical contribution made by Gutenberg, which developed from the easy processes of stamping designs and brief lines of lettering, a method by means of which whole books could be produced, was first, in the use of movable metal type, produced by casting, and second, in an improvement made in the mechanism of the hand presses by which larger sheets could be worked.

The first work produced with this movable metal type was a Latin version of the Bible. The description of this volume is first given in a chronicle of Cologne, dating from the year 1499, the statements in which rest upon the authority of Ulrich Zell, who was the first printer in Cologne.

Concerning the further operations of Gutenberg, we are mainly dependent upon the references in the records of the suit brought by Fust, in 1445, for the repayment of his loan, and upon a document of 1468 in which a certain Dr. Humery entered into an undertaking with the Archbishop of Mayence that the printing-office plant left by the deceased Johann Gutenberg shall not be permitted to be taken out of the city of Mayence. This later reference had to do with a second printing-press established by Gutenberg with the aid of the said Humery.

In the suit brought by Fust, Gutenberg contended that the second payment of 800 gulden agreed upon had never been given to him in full. He stated further that Fust had agreed to advance 300 gulden per year for use in the purchase of materials, paper, parchment, type-metal, and ink. The matter of the later accountings between Fust and Gutenberg is evidently a complicated one and need not be considered here in detail. Gutenberg’s inability to repay the first and more important loan for the payment of which his first printing-press had been mortgaged, caused the ownership of this office to come into the control of Fust.

Fortunately, by the time his first venture had thus been closed, as far at least as he was concerned, he had been able to give sufficient evidence of the importance and of the commercial value of the undertaking to be in a position to interest others in his schemes.

His second printing-press was in like manner pledged to the associate who provided the capital,—Dr. Humery,—and the business of this office appears to have been continued without break until the time of Gutenberg’s death in 1468. With these new resources at hand, Gutenberg was able to cast some new fonts of type, and to make various improvements in his working methods.

The first issues of the new press, the organisation of which appears to have been completed about 1457, were volumes containing the writings of Mätthaus de Cracovia and Thomas Aquinas. The third book was the famous first edition of the Catholicon, a grammatical compilation of the Dominican monk Balbus from Genoa. The Catholicon was a folio containing no less than 373 rather closely printed sheets. In the meantime, Fust had associated with him Schöffer or Schoiffher, who had been an assistant of Gutenberg, and the two were continuing work in the original printing-office.

The sacking of Mayence, in 1462, by Adolph of Nassau, put an end, for the time, to all business in the city, including the work of the new printing-presses. Gutenberg betook himself to the neighbouring town of Eltville, which, as early as 1420, had given shelter to his parents, and there he carried on his printing for a time under the protection of Archbishop Adolph.

Kapp points out that the printing art had its development, not in a university centre, but in a commercial town, and was from the outset carried on, not by scholars, but by workers of the people, and that this fact doubtless had an important influence in bringing the whole business of the production of books and the distribution of literature into closer relations with the mass of the German people than was the case in France.