There are many inaccuracies in this statement Gutenberg and Fust are represented as foolishly squandering money in vain efforts to invent xylography, a method of printing then in common use in many cities of Germany, Italy and Holland. The Catholicon, which is mentioned as one of the productions of block-printing, was printed from metal types in 1460. In the beginning, Gutenberg is acknowledged as the inventor of printing, yet, a few lines further, we are told that Fust was the first inventor. And it seems that Gutenberg could do nothing with his invention until helped by the advice, as well as the money, of John Fust. After the improved invention,[1] Gutenberg and Fust fell in hopeless difficulties, having spent four thousand florins before they had completed sixty pages of the Bible. From these difficulties they were extricated by Peter Schœffer, "son-in-law of the first inventor," who invented a more easy method of making types, and who gave the art its present perfection, and without whose aid the earlier inventions would have been of little value. The intention of the writer is plain: Gutenberg, Fust and Schœffer may be regarded as co-inventors, but Schœffer did the most effective service.
It is a curious fact that this paper, which has been so often quoted as evidence in favor of Schœffer's invention of matrices,
- ↑ The description of the more ingenious 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," has been denounced by many writers on typography as the confused statement of a man who did not thoroughly understand what he related, and who has reversed the proper order of the process of type-making. A more careful reading will show that Trithemius attempted to describe the process of matrix-making, which is set forth in page 302 of this book. He says the types were made either of brass or the of tin, for his memory failed him, and he could not recollect that it was the matrix which should have been of brass, and the type of tin. The characters "which before this had been cut by hand " may be regarded not as types, but as punches of soft metal. They would necessarily be damaged by pressure in the semi-fluid metal selected for making the matrices. The tools which Trithemius vainly tried to describe were the punch of steel and the mould and matrices of brass. That punches and matrices of wood or of soft metal unequal to hard pressure were used by the earlier printers is proved by variable shapes of their types.
