Gutenberg did not appear in person at the final hearing of the case, but empowered “the respectable Sieur Henry Gunther, late curate of St. Christopher’s at Mentz, Henry Keffer, and Bertolff of Hanau, his servant and domestic,” to hear and see what was done in the matter. He did not deny the fact of the advances, but pleaded against the demand for immediate payment,—“that it was well understood that he was to complete the work with the money which he (Faust) had lent to him upon his pledges, but that he considers he was not obliged to employ these 800 florins in the making of books; and although it be stated in the letter of agreement, that he was to give six per cent. interest; nevertheless Joh. Faust promised that he would not ask him for this interest; and, further, that these 800 florins were not paid to him, according to the tenor of the agreement, all at one time, as he pretends in the first article of his demand; and that with regard to the last 800 florins he is willing to render an account. He (Gutenberg) does not admit that he ought to pay either interest or usury, and he hopes he will not be obliged to do so by the Court; all which has appeared in the demand, the answer, the reply, the rejoinder, and in various other written papers, &c.”
But the magistrates gave judgment against him in the following terms:—“That when Joh. Gutenberg shall have rendered an account of all his receipts, and of the sums expended by him for their joint advantage, whatever further moneys he may have received, over and above, shall be counted in the 800 florins; but that if it shall appear by the account, that Faust has advanced to him any money beyond the 800 florins, which has not been employed for their joint advantage, he (Gutenberg) shall repay it to him; and if Joh. Faust shall prove by oath or other good evidence, that he borrowed the said money at interest, and that he did not advance it out of his own funds, then Joh. Gutenberg shall also pay to him the said interest, according to the tenor of the letter of agreement.”
Whereupon the said Joh. Faust declared upon oath as follows: “I, Joh. Faust, did borrow fifteen hundred and fifty florins which were delivered to Joh. Gutenberg, and have been employed for our joint advantage. I have been obliged annually to pay interest and usury for the same, and I still owe a part; therefore I charge him, for each hundred florins that I have borrowed, as is said above, six florins annually for the money borrowed, which he has received, and which has been employed upon our joint work, as appears in the account; I demand of him the interest, according to the tenor of the judgment; and in proof that such is the fact, I am willing to abide, as is just, by the tenor of the judgment given upon the first count of the demand which I have made against the said Joh. Gutenberg.”
This closed the proceedings, which were duly attested by Ulric Helmasperger, clerk of the Bishopric of Bamberg, by Imperial authority Notary Public, and sworn Notary of the Holy See at Mentz, on the sixth day of November 1455. The persons present as witnesses were Pieter Grantz, Joh. Kilsen, Joh. Knopff, Joh. Iseneckh, Jaques Faust, Burgher of Mentz, and Pieter Gernszheim and Joh. Bonne, Clerks of the city and Bishopric of Mentz.
Gutenberg, not being able to meet the demand, the mortgage on the materials was foreclosed, and Faust thus became possessor of types and presses in his own right. These, with “the stock of partially complete Bibles, were removed from Gutenberg’s residence, and taken to the house of Faust in the Schuster Gasse, (Shoemaker’s street) which was eventually styled ‘The Printing Office,’ as the house of Gutenberg had previously been.”[62]
Before proceeding further it will be well to ascertain what there was in the plant of the printing establishment at the Zum Jungen which could occasion so great an outlay. We have already seen how much time and money had been spent in the experiments at Strasburg. It is not recorded how Gutenberg arranged with his partners there; but it may be fairly assumed, that in 1444 he brought with him to Mentz his original blocks, and types, as well as apparatus for setting up presses. The making of new founts of type would therefore be his chief concern. If the small works attributed to him by Fischer, Van Praet, and others, really issued from his press, (and there is no reason to doubt the fact,) three founts of type were already made, before the one for the Latin Bible was commenced. Now supposing that these three founts consisted of 10,000 letters in all, an equal number would, at least, be required to complete four pages of the Bible; for the printing of such a work could hardly have been begun with less type than would suffice for two formes of two pages each. How then were these letters made? The answer to this question is given in the statement of the Abbot Trithemius, who says, that to the engraved letters on solid blocks “succeeded a more ingenious invention, for they found out a way of stamping the shapes of every letter of the Latin alphabet in what they called matrices, from which they afterwards cast their letters in copper or tin, hard enough to be printed upon, which they first cut with their own hands.”[63] This information was given to the Abbot by Peter Schœffer of Gernszheim, one of Faust’s witnesses in the lawsuit with Gutenberg, the same who invented the art of type-founding as at present practised, and who moreover added, “that before the third quaternion (twelve sheets) of the bible was completed, no less a sum than 4000 florins had been expended.”[64] From this statement it is clear that the matrices consisted of a number of small troughs of uniform length, each one the size, in regard to depth and thickness, of the shape of a letter; that these shapes were stamped into a prepared mould of clay or plaster; that the fused metal was poured into these matrices; and that a considerable number of small ingots, or cast ‘blanks’ might thus be made at each pouring of the metal. The accompanying diagram, in which the border represents the rim of the mould, and the inside figures the matrices, renders further explanation unnecessary. On one end of each of these cast ‘blanks,’ a letter would be cut or engraved by hand, while the sides would be ‘dressed’ (with perhaps a greater amount of labour,) in the same way as ordinary type now-a-days. It is not at all unlikely that this method, called by some the fuso-sculpte, may have been suggested by the goldsmith John Dünne, the friend of Gutenberg at Strasburg; or if not, by Faust himself.
With a ready method at hand for preparing his blanks, let us now see how long the engraving of the letters would take. Assuming that one, or say two, small founts had been finished at Strasburg, comprising about 4000 letters, and that 6000 were completed at Mentz before the contract was made with Faust, what length of time would be required to complete them? An expert modern punch-cutter can complete, in one day, two steel types for striking matrices with.[65] Supposing that with softer metal Gutenberg engraved his blanks at the rate of four a day; and that deducting Sundays and Saints’ days, he worked three hundred days a year; five years would be occupied in completing two founts of 3000 letters each; which, when finished, might weigh about one hundred pounds. With the additional funds placed at his command by Faust in 1450, Gutenberg would most probably engage another engraver; and supposing that the two engraved eight letters a day, 10,000 letters would keep them both fully occupied upwards of four years. With the making of presses, type-cases, ink, and all the remaining paraphernalia of a printing office, supposing Gutenberg employed two or three assistant engravers instead of one, and that the bible was begun with type for one page only, while the engravers still went on cutting fresh supplies, his time would be amply taken up; and the amount of money that would thus be sunk would come in the long run to something enormous.