Fig. 386.—Banner of the Corporation of Printers-Booksellers of Autun.
PRINTING
Who was the Inventor of Printing?—Movable Letters in Ancient Times.—Block Printing.—Laurent Coster.—Donati and Specula.—Gutenberg’s Process.—Partnership of Gutenberg and Faust.—Schoeffer.—The Mayence Bible.—The Psalter of 1457.—The “Rationale” of 1459.—Gutenburg prints by himself.—The “Catholicon” of 1460.—Printing at Cologne, Strasbourg, Venice, and Paris.—Louis XI. and Nicholas Jenson.—German Printers at Rome.—Incunabula.—Colart Mansion.—Caxton.—Improvement of Typographical Processes up to the Sixteenth Century.
There is no doubt that printing existed in the germ in ancient times; that it was known and made use of by the ancients. There were stamps and seals bearing legends traced the wrong way, from which positive impressions were obtained on papyrus or parchment, in wax, ink, or colour. We are shown, in museums, plates of copper or of cedar-wood, covered with characters carved or cut out in them, which seem to have been intended for the purpose of printing, and which resemble the block plates of the fifteenth century.
Fig. 387.—Ancient Wood-block Print, cut in Flanders before 1440, representing Jesus Christ after his Flagellation. (Delbecq’s Collection, Ghent.)
Something very much like the process of printing in movable type is described by Cicero in a passage in which he refutes the doctrine of Epicurus on the creation of the world by atoms: “Why not believe, also, that by throwing together, indiscriminately, innumerable forms of letters of the alphabet, either in gold or in any other substance, one can print with these letters, on the ground, the Annals of Ennius?” The movable letters possessed by the ancients were carved in box-wood or ivory; but they were only employed for teaching children to read, as Quinctilian testifies in his “Oratorical Institutions,” and St. Jerome in his “Epistles.” There was then only wanting a fortunate chance to cause this carved alphabet to create the typographic art fifteen centuries earlier than its actual birth.