where xylography had failed, and developed it by new ideas and new methods. Typography was an invention pure and simple. In the theory and practice of block-printing, there was nothing that could have been improved until it reached the discovery of the only proper method of making types.
It may have been from his experience in the melting and pouring of lead, in the engraving of designs for the frames of his mirrors, in the use of a press for the moulding of the designs for these frames, that Gutenberg derived his first practical ideas of the true method of making types. Whatever the external impulse which led Gutenberg to printing, it was so strong that it compelled him to abandon the practice of all other arts. After this trial we hear no more of him as a maker of mirrors, or a polisher of gems.
The record of the trial before Cune Nope is not the only evidence we have that Gutenberg's unknown art was that of typography. Wimpheling, one of the most learned men of his age, and nearly contemporary with Gutenberg, gives the following testimony concerning early printing in Strasburg:[1]
In the year of our Lord 1440, under the reign of Frederic iii, Emperor of the Romans, John Gutenberg, of Strasburg, discovered a new method of writing, which is a great good, and almost a divine benefit to the world. He was the first in the city of Strasburg who invented that art of impressing which the Latin peoples call printing. He afterward went to Mentz, and happily perfected his invention.
In another book, in which Wimpheling pays compliment to the intelligence of the people of Strasburg, he writes:
Your city is acknowledged to excel most other cities by its origination of the art of printing, which was afterward perfected in Mentz.
The Chronicle of Cologne[2] is as explicit as to date, but not as to place. It specifies 1440 as the date of the discovery of printing "in the manner that is now generally used."
- ↑ Wolf, Monumenta Typographica, vol. i, p. 586.
- ↑ See page 315 of this book. The chronicler is in error in specifying Mentz as the place where the art was discovered, but the specification of the period between 1440 and 1450 as that in which "the art was being investigated" by John Gutenberg is sustained by other testimonies.
