I began this work intending to describe only the mechanical development of early printing, but I could not keep the matter strictly within this limit. Hedged in this narrow space, the story would be but half told. The true origin of typography is not in types; nor in block-books nor image prints. These were consequences, not causes. The condition of society at the close of the middle ages; the growth of commerce and manufactures; the enlarged sense of personal liberty; the brawls of ecclesiastics in high station, and their unworthy behavior; the revolt of the people against the authority of church and state; the neglect of duty by the self-elected teachers of the people in their monopoly of books and knowledge; the barrenness of the education then given in the schools; the eagerness of all people for the mental diversion offered in the new game of playing cards; the unsatisfied religious appetite which hungered for image prints and devotional books; the facilities for self-education afforded by the introduction of paper,—these were among the influences which produced the invention of printing. They are causes which cannot be overlooked. My inability to describe them with the fullness which they deserve would not justify their total neglect. I have devoted more space to them than is customary in treatises on early printing, but I have to admit, with regret, that they have been too curtly treated. I have done but little more than record a few of the more noticeable facts—enough, perhaps, to show that the state of education and society, in its relation to the invention of printing, deserves a more extended description than it has hitherto received. If I can succeed in awakening the attention of printers, and those who look on a knowledge of printing as a proper accomplishment of the scholar, to the nature and extent of these influences, to the curiosities of literature hidden in apparently dry books of bibliography, and to the value of the lesson of patient industry and fixed purpose taught by the life of John Gutenberg, the object of this book will have been accomplished.
