Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/59

III

The Key to the Invention of Typography

Conflicting Theories about the Invention of Typography…Was it an Invention or a Combination? Errors of Superficial Observers…Merit of the Invention is not in Impression…Not altogether in Types or Composition…Types of no value unless they are Accurate…Hand-made Types Impracticable…Merit of Invention is in the Method of Making Types…Is but One Method. Description…Counter-Punch…Punch…Matrix…Mould…Illustrations…Type-Making as Illustrated by Moxon in 1683…As Illustrated by Amman in 1564…Notices of Type-Making by Earlier Authors…Type-Mould the Symbol of Typography…Inventor of the Type-Mould the Inventor of Typography…A Great Invention, but Original only in the Type-Mould.

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The character of typography is not pressing and printing but mobilization. The winged A is its symbol. The elements unchained, the letters freed from every bond in which the pen or chisel of calligrapher or xylographer held them entangled; the cut character risen from the tomb of the solitary table into the substantive life of the cast types—that is the invention of printing.

Van der Linde.

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THERE is a wide-spread belief that typography was, in all its details, a purely original invention. A popular version of its origin, hereafter to be related, says that it was the result of an accidental discovery; a conflicting version says that it was the result of more than thirteen years of secret experiment. Each version teaches us that there was no perceptible unfolding of the invention; that the alleged inventor created all that he needed, that he made his types, ink and presses, that he derived nothing of value from the labors of earlier printers. If typography was invented by Gutenberg, it was fitly introduced by the sudden appearance of the printed Bible in two folio volumes; if invented by Coster, by the unheralded publication of a thin folio of large