The thorough dishonesty of this statement is abundantly proved by its suppression of the name and services of Gutenberg. It is also evident that the writer could not, or dared not, point out the improvements which he alleges were made by Schœffer. This deficiency was soon supplied by a more credulous writer. About 1514, Trithemius,[1] one of the most learned men of that century, wrote the following description of the invention, which he says he had from Peter Schœffer himself:
It was at this period (1450) in Mentz, a city of Germany on the Rhine, and not in Italy, as some people have falsely asserted, that this admirable, and till then unheard-of, art of printing books by the aid of types was planned and invented by John Gutenberg, a citizen of Mentz. When he had spent all his property in his search after this art, and was almost overwhelmed with difficulties, unable to find relief from any quarter, and meditating the abandonment of his project, Gutenberg was enabled by the counsel and by the money of John Fust, also a citizen of Mentz, to finish the work which he had begun.
They first printed, with engravings of letters on blocks of wood, arranged in proper order in the manner of ordinary manuscripts, the vocabulary then called the Catholicon; but with the letters on these blocks they were not able to print anything else, for the letters were not movable, but fixed and unalterable upon the blocks, as has been stated. To this invention succeeded another much more ingenious. They discovered a method of founding the forms of all the letters of the Latin alphabet, which they called matrices, from which [matrices] they again founded types, either in tin or in brass, strong enough for any pressure, which [types ?] before this had been cut by hand. In right earnest, I was told, nearly thirty years ago, by Peter Schœffer of Gernszheim, citizen of Mentz, the son-in-law of the first inventor, that this art of printing had encountered, in its first essays, great difficulties. For, when they were printing the Bible, they were obliged to expend more than 4,000 florins before they had printed three sections [sixty pages]. But the Peter Schœffer already mentioned, at that time a workman, but afterward son-in-law, as has been said, of the first inventor, John Fust, a man skillful and ingenious, devised a more easy method of founding types, and thus gave the art its present perfection. And the three men kept secret among themselves, for a while, this method of printing, up to the time when their workmen were deprived of the work, without which they were unable to practise their trade, by whom it was divulged, first in Strasburg, and afterward in other cities.
- ↑ Annales Hirsaugienses, vol. ii, p. 421.
