“Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.”

“For Time will teach thee soon the truth.”

I heartily welcome the new serial, The Book-worm, and I see in the words of the American poet quoted above the very “image” (to use Hooke’s word in Micrographia) of a Book-worm, whether belonging to the genus homo or anobium. In fact the anobium has the advantage of man: he pursues, he labours, he waits, and knows naught beyond the restricted boundary of his paper tunnel, until time in due course develops the winged truth to him. Alas for us human worms! we too grub, we achieve (sometimes), we pursue, we wait, and we call time and history to help us; and at every turn, instead of eating wholesome, natural truths, we feed perforce on adulterated documents, loaded with fibreless gypsum and historical pipe-clay. “Anything,” cried Walpole, “but history, for history must be false,” and if Walpole could say this of history in general, what pungency of satire would have escaped him had the bent of his mind led him to study the most deceitful of all—Typographical history.

For 300 years have writers of all nations in untold abundance been contradicting and vilipending one another; and still the wordy war goes on. Time has, however, in the last few years, taught us some truths and exposed many fables concerning the origin of printing. So many Dutch figments and falsities about Coster and the Haarlem press have lately been swept away by the trenchant pen of Dr. A. von der Linde of Wiesbaden; and so many German forgeries and fallacies about Gutenberg and Mayence have been exposed in the more efficient, if less brilliant, publications of Mr. Hessels of Cambridge, that a much clearer battlefield is now left for the opposing forces. One excellent result of the exposures on each side is that we can afford to ignore the bulk of the old writers on printing, as the data upon which they trusted were incomplete or fallacious. This reduces the books necessary for the study of the subject to a number which can be reckoned upon one’s fingers.

One cause, and perhaps the chief one, why so little progress was made by the older bibliographers in any true criticism of the subject, was the great difficulty of judging from actual inspection of either the original historical documents or the original productions of the press. Dispersed in various libraries throughout Europe, and separated from each other by long distances, the time and money necessary to personal inspection were prohibitory; so that any one wishing to study the origin of printing had to satisfy himself with an examination of the few specimens within his reach, and with adopting the arguments and conclusions of former writers, who in their turn had already done the same.

Thus the subject became encrusted with crude notions and legendary ideas, most of which have been consigned to oblivion by modern criticism. Nowadays the comparative facilities enjoyed by travellers, the ease and speed with which libraries widely separated can be visited, and the greatly developed interest taken by the librarians of all countries in the “incunabula” under their charge, render the examination of any bibliographical treasures both pleasant and easy. Again, the extreme accuracy of the best modern fac-simile plates is another advantage possessed by the present generation over their predecessors, though no plates, however good (and certainly no photographic plates), can ever be to the critic what the originals should be.

The new school of criticism was started in 1870 by Dr. A. van der Linde, who since his German naturalisation has altered the “van” to “von.” In that year appeared De Haarlemsche Costerlegende, which was issued the next year in an English translation as The Haarlem Legend of the Invention of Printing. This was a heavy onslaught upon the very existence of printing or printers in Haarlem anterior to 1483. De Vinne followed on the same lines in 1876 with The Invention of Printing, published in New York. M. Madden, of Versailles, in his Lettres d’un Bibliophile, 1868-78, is also a disciple of the same school. In 1878 Dr. Van der Linde issued a work of nearly 700 pages upon Gutenberg, in which he again treats the Dutch claims with extreme contempt. Nor was this enough, for in 1886, under the patronage of the German Government, he again sent out three prodigious volumes on the same subject, entitled Geschichte der Erfindung der Buchdruckerkunst. These works contain the very latest pleadings on the Gutenberg side. Meantime, the first shock of Dr. Van der Linde’s attack having been overcome, Mr. Hessels opened the case for Coster with a clever introduction to the Haarlem Legend, in which a very useful list of Costerian Incunabula were classified under their various types. Having discovered many blunders and inaccuracies in Van der Linde’s dealing with his subject, he issued in 1882 Gutenberg: was he the Inventor of Printing? which was followed by a series of articles in the Academy for 1887 on the same subject, in which the writer stoutly maintains that not only was Holland the birth-place of printing, but that Coster invented it at Haarlem. These have been enlarged and reprinted under the title, Haarlem, not Mentz.

Italians, and Italians only, maintain that their countryman, Panfilo Castaldi, of Feltre, was, about the year 1450, the originator of cast movable types; and that his pupils were Gutenberg and Fust, who carried to Germany his ideas, and there perfected them. But the claim rests upon no foundation, and need only be mentioned and then dismissed as unworthy of serious examination.

I do not propose, even were it possible, to discuss the origin of printing in the short space of this article, but will as curtly as is compatible with a clear understanding of the subject state the position now held by each of the opposing camps, giving in the next two articles the case of “Coster v. Gutenberg,” and in the following one “Gutenberg v. Coster.”