The free cities of mediæval Germany were continually torn asunder by petty civil wars. The nobles, who despised commerce, and the burghers, who lived by it, were always fighting for the upper hand, and the laboring people sided now with one party, and now with the other. After each uprising the victors usually banished a great number of the defeated faction from the city. So it happened that John Gutenberg, a young man of good family, who had been born in Mainz about 1400, was outlawed from his home, and went with his wife Anna to live in the city of Strasburg, which was some sixty miles distant from Mainz. He chose the trade of a lapidary, or polisher of precious stones, an art which in that age was held in almost as high esteem as that of the painter or sculptor. He had been well educated, and his skill in cutting gems, as well as his general learning and his interest in all manner of inventions, drew people of the highest standing to his little workshop, which was the front room of his dwelling house.
One evening after supper, as Gutenberg and his wife were sitting in the room behind the shop, he chanced to pick up a playing-card. He studied it very carefully, as though it were new to him. Presently his wife looked up from her sewing, and noticed how much absorbed he was. “Prithee, John, what marvel dost thou find in that card?” said she. “One would think it the face of a saint, so closely dost thou regard it.”
“Nay, Anna,” he answered thoughtfully, “but didst thou ever consider how the picture on this card was made?”
“I suppose it was drawn in outline, and then painted, as other pictures are.”
“But there is a better way,” said Gutenberg, still studying the playing-card. “These lines were first marked out on a wooden block, and then the wood was cut away on each side of them, so that they were left raised. The lines were then smeared with ink and pressed on the cardboard. This way is shorter, Anna, than by drawing and painting each picture separately, because when the block is once engraved it can be used to mark any number of cards.”
Anna took the playing-card from her husband’s hand. It represented a figure that was known as the Knave of Bells. “It’s an unsightly creature,” she said, studying it, “and not to be compared with our picture of good St. Christopher on the wall yonder. Surely that was made with a pen?”
“Nay, it was made from an engraved block, just like this card,” said the young lapidary.
“St. Christopher made in that way!” exclaimed his wife. “Then what a splendid art it must be, if it keeps the pictures of the blessed saints for us!”
The picture of the saint was a curious colored woodcut, showing St. Christopher carrying the child Jesus across the water. Under it was an inscription in Latin, and the date 1423.
“Yes, thou art right, dear,” Gutenberg went on. “Pictures like that are much to be prized, for they fill to some extent the place of books, which are so rare and cost so much. But there are much more valuable pictures in the Cathedral here at Strasburg. Dost thou remember the jewels the Abbot gave me to polish for him? When I carried them back, he took me into the Cathedral library, and showed me several books filled with these engraved pictures, and they were much finer than our St. Christopher. The books I remember were the ‘Ars Memorandi,’ the ‘Ars Moriendi,’ and the ‘Biblia Pauperum,’ and the last had no less than forty pictures, with written explanations underneath.”