Its floating Archive down the floods of Time.”
With this object in view, the Gutenberg Society, to which all the writers of the Rhenish provinces belong, meet yearly at Mentz, there to celebrate the fame of Gutenberg, the chief inventor. And in 1837, a grateful posterity, animated by similar sentiments, erected in the same city, in commemoration of the Four Hundredth anniversary of the Origin of the Art, a monumental statue to his memory. On the festival at the inauguration of the statue (August 14, and following days), the Provost of Mentz published an address, to the following sentences from which every reader will doubtless most cordially assent. “If,” says the ardent Provost, “the mortal who invented that method of fixing the fugitive sounds of words which we call the Alphabet, has operated on mankind like a divinity, so also has Gutenberg’s genius brought together the once isolated inquirers, teachers and learners,—all the scattered and divided efforts for extending God’s kingdom over the whole civilized earth,—as though beneath one temple. Gutenberg’s invention, not a lucky accident, but the golden fruit of a well considered idea,—an invention made with a perfect consciousness of its end,—has, above all other causes, for more than four centuries, urged forward and established the dominion of science; and what is of the utmost importance, has immeasurably advanced the mental formation and education of the people. This invention, a true intellectual sun, has mounted above the horizon, first of the European Christians, and then of the people of other climes and other faiths, to an ever-enduring morning. It has made the return of barbarism, the isolation of mankind, the reign of darkness, impossible for all future times. It has established a public opinion,—a court of moral judicature common to all civilized nations, whatever natural divisions may separate them, as much as for the provinces of one and the same state. In a word, it has formed fellow-labourers at the never-resting loom of Christian European civilization in every quarter of the world, in almost every island of the ocean.”
The example set by the citizens of Mentz was a few years later followed by those of Strasburg, in which city, as already stated, Gutenberg’s earliest efforts were made; nor were the inhabitants of Frankfort-on-the-Maine long behind,—excelling even those of Strasburg and Mentz, by combining in one grand group the statues of Gutenberg, Faust and Schœffer. Of these several specimens of the sculptor’s art Mr. Humphreys gives the following account:—
“It was not till the nineteenth century that worthy memorials of the great founder of the Printing-Press in Germany were erected. The first was that at Mayence. As a statue it is not equal to the one of Coster at Haarlem, although the work of Thorwaldsen. It was executed at Rome in 1835, and cast in Paris in 1837. The gown of the period with its fur collar, or rather cape, is effective enough as a mere matter of costume, and so is the furred cap closely copied from supposed authentic portraits of Gutenberg. One hand holds a book, and the other, types; but the general effect is tame and unimpressive. It is well that the great name of Thorwaldsen should be thus allied to that of Gutenberg, but it is not one of the great Dane’s most successful works. The inscription, stating that it was erected by the citizens of Mayence, with the concurrence of the whole of Europe, is grandly simple, as it ought to be.
“The statue at Strasburg, the scene of Gutenberg’s first typographic efforts, is the work of the celebrated French sculptor David d’Anger, and the market-place in which it is erected is now called La Place Gutenberg. The position of the figure is full of life and spirit; a proof-sheet is held proudly forward, bearing the inscription, as though in answer to one of the first fiats of Creation—‘Let there be light.’ It is intended to express that, through the medium of the Printing Press, intellectual light came, as expressed in the words, ‘And there was light.’ On the pedestal are four bassi-relievi, in which the dissemination of knowledge by means of the Printing Press is illustrated. In the one on the front, all the great authors of modern Europe are grouped round a Printing Press; among them Shakespeare, Corneille, Bacon, Dante, Voltaire, and Goethe, are conspicuous.
“The Memorial at Frankfort is, on the whole, more impressive than either of the preceding. It consists of three separate statues, forming together a single group. The statues are those of Gutenberg, Faust and Schœffer, who each assisted in the first great work of founding the Printing Press in Germany, and whose memorials found a fitting place in the imperial city, which was still the seat of the Germanic Diet at the time of the Memorial in 1837. The subsidiary figures which embellish the face of the structure,—Literature, &c., &c.—are very good and appropriate. The entire composition is imposingly raised on steps connected with the secondary pedestals, which support the allegorical figures. Altogether, the memorial is a fine one. But it has one defect—there is no name nor description of any kind—so that travellers unacquainted with the subject, might mistake the group for that of any other celebrated triumvirate. A statue, even of Shakespeare, should be accompanied at least by the simple name.”[141]
Still, although Gutenberg is most justly entitled to the honour of being considered the inventor of the Art of Typography, as now practised in Europe, he was not, in fact, the first who printed books from separate moveable types. In this, as in block printing, the Chinese again bear away the palm. For, singularly enough, it is ascertained that although the general mode of printing in China is, and always has been, from wooden blocks, yet separable letters were known to the Chinese as early as the Eleventh century. For a time, single characters made of clay and baked hard were used in that empire, but were soon abandoned for the mode now almost universally practised, except for the Imperial Calendar, published once a quarter, and the Pekin Gazette, issued daily, which are still wretchedly printed from moveable types made of a plastic gum.
The account of the invention is too interesting to be omitted. In the period King-li (between 1041 and 1048) one of the people, a blacksmith named Pi-ching, invented another manner of printing with ho-pan, or tablets formed of moveable types. This name is still retained in the Imperial Printing Office at Pekin. On a fine and glutinous earth, formed into plates, Pi-ching engraved the characters most in use. Each character was a type. These he burnt in the fire to harden them. When he wished to print he took a frame of iron, divided interiorly and perpendicularly by strips of the same metal (Chinese being read vertically); this he laid on a table of sheet iron coated with a fusible gum composed of resin, wax, and lime; he then inserted the types, placing them one close against the other. Each frame, when filled, formed a tablet. This was brought near the fire to make the gum melt, after which a level piece of wood was pressed forcibly on the surface of the types, by which means they were pushed down into the gum and became firm and even as a stone. The tablets were then printed from in the usual manner. When a new character was wanted it was immediately prepared on the spot, and the inventor shewed the advantage of clay over wood; there was neither grain nor porosity, with a greater facility of separation from the gum when required for distribution.
At Pi-ching’s death, all this apparatus was carefully preserved by his successors. Printing, however, went on in the old way, the reason being that the Chinese has not, as other languages, an alphabet made up of a few characters, with which all sorts of books may be printed, but a separate type is wanted for every word; and as the language is divided into classes of 106 sounds, so 106 cases (part of the furniture of a Printing Office) would be required, each one to contain a prodigious number of types, thus rendering the mechanical task of composing and distributing, one of enormous difficulty and labour. It was easier and cheaper to follow the usual method, and print either from blocks of wood or plates of stereotyped copper.[142]
All honour to the memory of Pi-ching, the Chinese blacksmith! One might almost be tempted to suppose, did we but believe in the doctrine of metempsychosis, that after a lapse of 400 years, disgusted at the neglect of his invention in the East, his spirit migrated to the West, and that in Gutenberg he was permitted to be born again. A like spirit animated them both, and to the end of time their labours will live and their memories be blest.
The account given in the foregoing description of the method of composing his types used by Pi-ching, is not very dissimilar to that said to have been adopted by the first Typographers of the Western World. Frames, or coffins, were made of planks of wood, in which rectangular hollows were cut the size of the pages to be printed; and in these the types, after having been strung together, were placed in horizontal lines, the ends of the lines and the bottoms of the pages being tightly wedged in, to prevent slips and damage while on the press.
All works printed during the first few years after the invention of Typography, were of the size of large or small folio. The latter was what is now-a-days called quarto, from the sheets being folded into four;—then, for the smaller size, whole sheets were cut into two, on each of which two pages were printed, in order to suit the presses, and the stocks of type the printers possessed. These sheets, or half sheets, were printed in sections of 3, 4, or 5, called ternions, quaternions, and quinternions. On the backs of these sections strips of parchment were sometimes pasted, to guard against tears when the sheets were stitched together by the book-binder. The first and third pages so printed were called those on the recto of the sheet, the second and fourth those on the verso. A quaternion consisted of eight formes; the first, containing pages 1 and 16, and the second 2 and 15, formed the outer sheet; the next sheet consisted of pages 3 and 14, 4 and 13, the third and fourth formes; the third sheet consisted of pages 5 and 12, 6 and 11, the fifth and sixth formes; the fourth sheet consisted of pages 7 and 10, 8 and 9, the seventh and eighth formes; the next quaternion commenced with pages 17 and 32, and so on. When all the formes were printed, the sheets of which the quaternion consisted were folded one inside the other, the pages then reading regularly on from the first to the sixteenth. So long as books represented fac-similes of manuscripts,—which was the object originally aimed at,—to print in this way was a matter easily accomplished. But as the new art drove out the old, and scribes turned compositors and pressmen, and manuscripts came to be carelessly written, this could no longer be done. Larger founts of type then became necessary, to enable the printer to complete the whole number of pages contained in the section; and to avoid this necessity as much as possible, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos would be resorted to, a single sheet folded and re-folded serving equally as well in binding as a ternion, quaternion, or quinternion of folio sheets. This, of course, led to the ‘imposition’ of pages in formes of 4, 8, and 12 pages and upwards, according to the size of the book printed.