The term “Printer’s Devil” is usually accounted for by the fact that Aldus Manutius, the great Venetian printer, employed in his printing shop (about 1485) a black slave, who was popularly thought to be an imp of Satan. This expression may have a deeper significance. It may owe its origin to the fact that Fust, the inventor of the printing press, was believed to have connections with the Evil One. It will be remembered that during the Middle Ages and, in Catholic countries, even for a long time afterwards every discovery of science, every invention of material benefit to man, was believed to have been secured by a compact with the devil. Our ancestors deemed the human mind incapable, without the aid of the Evil One, of producing anything beyond their own comprehension. The red letters which Fust used at the close of his earliest printed volumes to give his name, with the place and date of publication, were interpreted in Paris as indications of the diabolical origin of the works so easily produced by him. (M. D. Conway, Demonology and Devil-Lore.) Sacred days, as is well known, are printed in the Catholic calendar with red letters, and the devil has also employed them in books of magic. This is but another instance of the mimicry by “God’s Ape” of the sanctities of the Church.
In the infernal economy, where a strict division of labour prevails, the printer’s devil is the librarian of hell. The books over which he has charge must be as numerous as the sands on the sea-shore. For nearly every book written without priestly command was associated in the good old days with the devil. The assertion that Satan hates nothing so much as writing or printer’s ink apparently is a very great calumny. He has often even been accused of stealing manuscripts in order to prevent their publication. The prince of darkness naturally rather shuns than courts inquiry. On one occasion Joseph Görres, the defender of Catholicism, complained that the devil, provoked by his interference in Satanic affairs (he is the author of Die christliche Mystik, which is a rich source for diabolism, diabolical possession and exorcism), had stolen one of his manuscripts; it was, however, found some time afterwards in his bookcase, and the devil was completely exonerated.
The concluding paragraph of this story is especially interesting in the light of the present agitation for unbound books and a eulogy of the old Franklin Square Library.
THE DEVIL’S MOTHER-IN-LAW
BY FERNÁN CABALLERO[Story]
Fernán Caballero is the pseudonym of Mrs. Cecilia Böhl von Faber, Marchioness de Arco-Hermoso, who was a Swiss by birth, daughter of the literary historian Johann Böhl von Faber, the Johannes of Campe’s Robinson (1779). Her father initiated her early into Spanish literature, which he interpreted for her in the spirit of the Romantic movement of those early days. The interest in mediaeval traditions, which she owes to this early training, increased when, later, she went to Catholic Spain. The charm of her popular Andalusian tales consists in the fact that she fully shares with the Catholic peasants of that province an implicit faith in the truth of these mediaeval legends. In her stories we find perhaps the purest expression of mediaevalism in modern times. Fernán Caballero gradually drifted to the extreme Right in all questions of religion, art and life. She hated every liberal expression in matters of faith or art with the fanaticism of a Torquemada. This author not only shared the somewhat general Catholic view that all Protestants were eternally damned, but she naïvely believed that every son of Israel had a tail (Julian Schmidt).
The story of woman’s triumph over the Devil is well characteristic of the Land of the Blessed Lady, as Andalusia is commonly called.
The legend of a devil imprisoned in a phial is also found in the work of the Spaniard Luis Velez de Guevara called El Diablo cojuelo (1641), from whom Alain Le Sage borrowed both title and plot for his novel Le Diable boiteux (1707). Asmodeus, liberated from a bottle, into which he had been confined by a magician, entertains his deliverer with the secret sights of a big city at midnight, by unroofing the houses of the Spanish capital and showing him the life that was going on in them. The legend was introduced into Spain from the East by the Moors and finally acclimated to find a place in local traditions. From that country it spread over the whole of Europe. The Asiatics believed that by abstinence and special prayers evil spirits could be reduced into obedience and confined in black bottles. The tradition forms a part of the Solomonic lore, and is frequently told in esoteric works. In the cabalistic book Vinculum Spirituum, which is of Eastern origin, it is said that Solomon discovered, by means of a certain learned book, the valuable secret of inclosing in a bottle of black glass three millions of infernal spirits, with seventy-two of their kings, of whom Beleh was the chief, Beliar (alias Belial) the second, and Asmodeus the third. Solomon afterwards cast this bottle into a deep well near Babylon. Fortunately for the contents, the Babylonians, hoping to find a treasure in the well, descended into it, broke the bottle, and freed the demons (cf. also The Little Key of Rabbi Solomon, containing the Names, Seals and Characters of the 72 Spirits with whom he held converse, also the Art Almadel of Rabbi Solomon, carefully copied by “Raphael,” London, 1879). This legend is also found in the tale of the Fisherman and the Djinn in the Arabian Nights, which was also treated by the German poet Klopstock in his poem “Wintermärchen” (1776).
The devil, as it is said in this story, has a mortal hatred of the sound of bells. The origin of ringing the church bells was, according to Sir James Frazer, to drive away devils and witches. The devil in Poe’s story “The Devil in the Belfry” (1839) was, indeed, very courageous in invading the belfry.
The concluding part of the story is identical with the Machiavellian tale of Belphagor.