(J. H. H.)
[1] It is difficult to know which of the Gutenberg documents can be trusted and which not. Schorbach, in his recent biography of Gutenberg, accepts and describes 27 of them (Festschrift, 1900, p. 163 sqq.), 17 of which are known only from (not always accurate) copies or transcripts. Under ordinary circumstances history might be based on them. But it is certain that some so-called Gutenberg documents, not included in the above 27, are forgeries. Fr. J. Bodmann (1754-1820), for many years professor and librarian at Mainz, forged at least two; one (dated July 20, 1459) he even provided with four forged seals; the other (dated Strassburg, March 24, 1424) purported to be an autograph letter of Gutenberg to a fictitious sister of his named Bertha. Of these two documents French and German texts were published about 1800-1802; the forger lived for twenty years afterwards but never undeceived the public. He enriched the Gutenberg literature with other fabrications. In fact Bodmann had trained himself for counterfeiting MSS. and documents; he openly boasted of his abilities in this respect, and used them, sometimes to amuse his friends who were searching for Gutenberg documents, sometimes for himself to fill up gaps in Gutenberg’s life. (For two or three more specimens of his capacities see A. Wyss in Zeitschr. für Altert. u. Gesch. Schlesiens, xv. 9 sqq.) To one of his friends (Professor Gotthelf Fischer, who preceded him as librarian of Mainz) one or two other fabrications may be ascribed. There are, moreover, serious misgivings as to documents said to have been discovered about 1740 (when the citizens of Strassburg claimed the honour of the invention for their city) by Jacob Wencker (the then archivist of Strassburg) and J. D. Schoepflin (professor and canon of St Thomas’s at Strassburg). For instance, of the above document of 1434 no original has ever come to light; while the draft of the transaction, alleged to have been written at the time in a register of contracts, and to have been found about 1740 by Wencker, has also disappeared with the register itself. The document (now only known from a copy said to have been taken by Wencker from the draft) is upheld as genuine by Schorbach, who favours an invention of printing at Strassburg, but Bockenheimer, though supporting Gutenberg and Mainz, declares it to be a fiction (Gutenberg-Feier, Mainz, 1900, pp. 24-33). Again, suspicions are justified with respect to the documents recording Gutenberg’s lawsuit of 1439 at Strassburg. Bockenheimer explains at great length (l.c. pp. 41-72) that they are forgeries. He even explains (ibid. pp. 97-107) that the so-called Helmasperger document of November 6, 1455, may be a fabrication of the Faust von Aschaffenburg family, who endeavoured to claim Johann Fust as their ancestor. There are also (1) a fragment of a fictitious “press,” said to have been constructed by Gutenberg in 1441, and to have been discovered (!) at Mainz in 1856; (2) a forged imprint with the date 1458 in a copy of Pope Gregory’s Dialogues, really printed at Strassburg about 1470; (3) a forged rubric in a copy of the Tractatus de celebratione missarum, from which it would appear that Johann Gutenberg and Johann Nummeister had presented it on June 19, 1463, to the Carthusian monastery near Mainz: (4) four forged copies of the Indulgence of 1455, in the Culemann Collection in the Kästner Museum at Hanover, &c. (see further, Hessels, “The so-called Gutenberg Documents,” in The Library, 1909).
[2] Among these were perhaps (1) one or two editions of the work of Donatus, De octo partibus orationis, 27 lines to a page, of one of which two leaves, now in the Paris National Library, were discovered at Mainz in the original binding of an account book, one of them having, but in a later hand, the year 1451 (?); (2) the Turk-Kalendar for 1455 (preserved in the Hof-Bibliothek at Munich); (3) the Cisianus (preserved in the Cambridge Univ. Libr.), and perhaps others now lost.
[3] Ulric Zell states, in the Cologne Chronicle of 1499, that Gutenberg and Fust printed a Bible in large type like that used in missals. It has been said that this description applies to the 42-line Bible, as its type is as large as that of most missals printed before 1500, and that the size now called missal type (double pica) was not used in missals until late in the 16th century. This is no doubt true of the smaller missals printed before 1500, some of which are in even smaller type than the 42-line Bible. But many of the large folio missals, as that printed at Mainz by Peter Schöffer in 1483, the Carthusian missal printed at Spires by Peter Drach about 1490, and the Dominican missal printed by Andrea de Torresanis at Venice in 1496, are in as large type as the 36-line Bible. Peter Schöffer (1425-1502) of Gernsheim, between Mainz and Mannheim, who was a copyist in Paris in 1449, and whom Fust called his servant (famulus), is said by Trithemius to have discovered an easier way of founding characters, whence Lambinet and others concluded that Schöffer invented the punch. Schöffer himself, in the colophon of the Psalter of 1457, a work which some suppose to have been planned and partly printed by Gutenberg, claims only the mode of printing rubrics and coloured capitals.
[4] The Leipzig copy of this Bible (which formerly belonged to Herr Klemm of Dresden) has at the end the MS. year 1453 in old Arabic numerals. But certain circumstances connected with this date make it look very suspicious.
GÜTERSLOH, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of Westphalia, 11 m. S.W. from Bielefeld by the railway to Dortmund. Pop. (1905), 7375. It is a seat of silk and cotton industries, and has a large trade in Westphalian hams and sausages. Printing, brewing and distilling are also carried on, and the town is famous for its rye-bread (Pumpernickel). Gütersloh has two Evangelical churches, a Roman Catholic church, a synagogue, a school and other educational establishments.
See Eickhoff, Geschichte der Stadt und Gemeinde Gütersloh (Gütersloh, 1904).