positively says that matrices had already been used by Fust and Gutenberg. Before Schœffer's name is mentioned, it is said that "they" [Fust and Gutenberg] discovered a method of making matrices. Trithemius says that Schœffer's contribution to the invention was "a more easy method of founding types, by which he gave the art its present perfection." He does not explain this easy method. We do not know whether his claimed improvement was in the mould or matrix, in its construction or in its manipulation; but it was not origination or invention, it was improvement only. The passage which seems to say that the first types were cut by hand does not require much comment. Trithemius may have misunderstood, and incorrectly reported, what he heard, or Schœffer may have misrepresented the facts. It is evident that Trithemius is in error; for cut types, cut either as to body or as to face, never were, never could have been used. The most trustworthy evidences tell us that the earliest types were cast in a mould.[1]
If the word formen, which is found in the record of the trial of Strasburg, be construed as the same word must be construed in the colophon to the Catholicon of 1460, in the acknowledgment of Dr. Humery in 1468, and in the order of the King of France in 1458, then we have the most complete evidence that the matrices and the accompanying type-mould were used by Gutenberg long before he knew Schœffer.
It was not necessary that Trithemius should have told us that he derived this curious information from Peter Schœffer. In these perversions of truth we may see the vanity of the man who had already boasted that he was the first to enter the sanctuary of the art. The unreasonableness of his claim
- ↑ The impressions of Gutenberg, which clearly show that his types were cast and not cut, should outweigh the statements of all the chroniclers; but it may be proper to call attention to the fact that the types of the Bible of 42 lines were used by Schœffer in 1476, and that the types of the Letters of Indulgence and of the Bible of 36 lines were in use by Hauman at the end of the fifteenth century. If these types had been cut, they would have been soon worn out. The re-appearance of these faces fifty years after they were first used shows that the types of Hauman must have been cast from the matrices of Gutenberg.
