The Works of Faust and Schoeffer.—Legend of the Printer’s Devil.—Monuments in Germany to Gutenberg, Faust and Schoeffer.—Separable Letters first invented in China.—Characteristics of ancient printed Books.—The “Composing-stick” and “Setting-rule.”—Early Bindings.

The first book published by Faust and Schoeffer, after their separation from Gutenberg, was a beautiful folio edition of the Psalter, finished on the 14th August, 1457. This is the celebrated work, so often alluded to, the first to which the name of the printer was affixed, as well as that of the place where, and the date when, it was printed. It is from this circumstance that the origin of the Art of Typography has been by certain early writers attributed to Faust rather than to Gutenberg. The fine large Gothic type with which the book is printed, (22 lines to a foot,) is exactly double the size of that cut for the ‘Mazarin’ Bible. The initial capital letters, of which there are in all 288, are from four to six lines in depth, printed in red and blue, with ornamental flower-work and figures cut in the body of the letter, and bordered with scroll-work running into the margins. In the case of the commencing initial, the letter B, this scroll-work extends from the top to the bottom of the page. The capitals commencing each sentence in the body of the work, are also in red ink, as well as whole lines interspersed here and there. The music is on a staff of four lines instead of five, the notes square-headed and diamond-shaped, the words beneath being in roman characters. These portions of the work are engraved on solid blocks. At the end of the Psalter is inserted the Faust and Schoeffer badge, which thenceforth appeared in all their works.[132] This consisted of two shields (on which were their coats of arms) suspended from the branch of a tree. Beneath this was the following imprint or colophon:—

“Presens spalmorum codex venustate capitalium decoratus Rubricationibus que sufficienter distinctus, Adinventione artificiosa imprimendi et caracterizandi absque calami ulla exaratione sic effigiatus. Et ad eusebiam Dei industrie est consummatus[133] Per Johannem Fust Civem moguntinum Et Petrum SchÖffer de Gernszheim. Anno domini Millesimo CCCCLVII. In vigilia Assumpcionis.”

The declaration contained in this colophon seems incompatible with the truth, as well as with the admissions of Schoeffer himself, on other occasions, unless it be understood as applying to the exquisite initial letters, these being printed wholly in colours, instead of being sketched in by the hand of the rubricator or coloured by illuminators. These very letters however, it is believed by some, including Mr. Humphreys, (see p. 86 of his work,) were the work of Gutenberg; and M. Fischer in his interesting essay[134] has shewn, that in several small works[135] which issued from Gutenberg’s press before the forfeiture of his plant to Faust, the identical letters (the smaller initials) used in the Psalter, as well as some of those printed in two colours, and of which he has given fac-similes, appear. But if, as there is abundant reason to believe was the case, Schoeffer was engaged as an assistant at the Zum Jungen at, or soon after the year 1450, when Gutenberg first obtained advances from Faust, these capitals, the beauty of which is undisputed, may have been, and most probably were, designed by him for the projected works for which the money was advanced; and, as his ‘inventions,’ and not the work of Gutenberg, they would be included in the property which was transferred to Faust on the termination of the law-suit. Looked at from this point of view, they may be thought to justify the assertion in the colophon of the Psalter of 1457, although there can be no doubt but that that work was partly completed while the whole property was still in the possession of Gutenberg, and that therefore to him must be attributed the honour of planning, and cutting the fount of types with which it was executed.

“The most perfect copy known of this work, (says Mr. Timperley,) is that in the Imperial Library of Vienna. It was discovered in the year 1665, near Innspruck in the castle of Ambras, where the Archduke Francis Sigismund had collected a prodigious quantity of manuscripts and printed books; taken for the most part from the famous library of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, from whence it was transported to Vienna. The book is printed in folio on vellum, and of such extreme variety, that though not more than six or seven copies are known to be in existence, all of them differ from each other in some respect. The Psalter occupies one hundred and thirty-five, and the recto the hundred and thirty-sixth, and the remaining forty-one leaves are appropriated to the litany, prayers, responses, vigils, &c. The Psalms are executed in larger characters than the hymns; the capital letters are cut in wood, with a degree of delicacy and boldness which are truly surprising: the largest of them—the initial letters of the Psalms—which are black, red, and blue, must have passed three times through the press.”

From 1457 to 1466 the following works were printed by Faust and Schoeffer.

(1) The Psalter, 2d edition.—1459.

(2) Rationale divinorum Officiorum Guillelmi Durandi.—1459.

A folio work consisting of 160 leaves, with the text in two columns of 63 lines each. For this work two new founts of type were cast, of smaller sizes than those used for the Psalter of 1457, and Bible of 1455. The first was of the depth of 53 lines to a foot; the smaller 66, equivalent to the English of type-founders of the present day. The latter was used for the body of the work.

(3) Constitutiones Clementis V. PapÆ cum Apparatu Joannis AndreÆ.—1460.

This consisted of 51 leaves of folio, two columns to a page. The text was in the larger of the above two types, surrounded by a glossary or commentary, ten times its bulk, in the smaller type. Of this work two subsequent editions were published in 1467 and 1471.

(4) Manifest des Erzbischofs von Mainz, Diether von Isenburg, gegen Adolph von Nassau.—1462.

(5) Biblia Sacra Latina VulgatÆ editionis, ex translatione et cum prÆfatione S. Hieronymi.—1462.

This is the Bible commonly known as the ‘Mentz,’ in order to distinguish it from the ‘Mazarin.’ It is the first published with a date; the colophon being nearly the same as that appended to the Psalter of 1457. It is, however, believed that it was originally issued with the intention of selling it as manuscript; that portion of the colophon containing the words “artificiosa adinventione imprimendi seu caracterizandi absque calami exaratione,” being omitted from some of the copies. The subsequent insertion of the above words, it is supposed, was owing to the compulsion of circumstances, which will be hereafter alluded to. The book consists of 1001 pages, each in two columns of 48 lines of the same type as that used for the text of the ‘Constitutiones.’ Copies were printed on both vellum and paper, many of the larger initials being beautifully illuminated.

(6) Bulla cruciata Sanctissimi Domini nostri PapÆ (Pii II.) contra Turchos.—1464.

The heading is in the Psalter type, the text in that of the ‘Rationale.’

(7) Liber sextus Decretalium Domini Bonifacii PapÆ VIII. cum glossa.—1465.

A work of 141 leaves of large folio, in double columns. The type of the text is the same as that of the Bible of 1462; the glossary is in that of the ‘Rationale.’

(8) M. T. Ciceronis De Officiis Libri III Paradoxa et Versus XII sapientium.—1465.

This work, “the first tribute of the new art to polite literature,” and the first in which Greek characters (cut in wood) appeared, is a handsome quarto (or small folio) of 88 leaves[136] with 28 lines to a page, in the same type as the ‘Rationale.’ The striking peculiarity of this book is, that it is the first in which ‘leads,’ spacing the lines apart from one another, are used. Great care seems to have been taken to print it with the utmost elegance. The fine large initial letters of the Psalter of 1457 were again used, printed in blue and red inks; and in some copies the blank spaces left for illuminated letters were filled up in the highest style of art. The most elaborately finished specimens are decorated with borders round the pages, in the same style and evidently by the same hand that was employed for that purpose, on the superb copies of the Mazarin Bible of 1455. That the printers were growing proud of their art is evident by the colophons they now used. That to the Decretals is in the following terms:—

“Presens hujus sexti Decretalium opus alma in urbe Magontia inclyte nationis Germanice, quam Dei clementia tam alto ingenii lumine donoque gratuito ceteris terrarum nacionibus preferre illustrareque dignatus est. Non atramento, plumali canna, neque Ærea, sed artificiosa quadam adinventione imprimendi, etc. etc. per Joh. Fust civem et Petrum Schoiffer de Gernsheym. Anno. Dom. MCCCCLXV. die verÒ 17, mensis decembris.”

The colophon to the ‘Offices’ differs. It is as follows:—

“Presens Marci Tuly clarissimum opus. Johannes Fust Mogintinus civis non atramento plumali canna neque Ærea, sed arte quadam perpulcra, Petri manu pueri mei feliciter effeci finitum Anno MCCCCLXV.”

(9) Grammatica vetus rhytmica.—1466.

A work of eleven leaves of small folio, in the type of the ‘Rationale.’ The concluding lines are as follows:—

In the same year the book “S. Augustini Liber de Arte Predicande” appeared. It is attributed to the press of Faust and Schoeffer, but I have no means of further particularising it.

The year 1462 was memorable for the siege and sack of Mentz by the Elector Archbishop, Count Adolphus of Nassau. After the capture of the city, Faust proceeded to Paris with a supply of Bibles, amongst which were no doubt a goodly number of the edition only just then completed. Tradition has it, that he sold one of these Bibles to the King for 750 crowns, and another to the Archbishop for 300; and that gradually lowering his prices he at last disposed of copies for 50 and 40 crowns a-piece.[137] The King and the Archbishop, comparing their purchases, which they had bargained for as manuscripts, found so exact a conformity between them, as to be convinced that they were produced by some other method than that of transcribing; besides which, it was impossible that two such Bibles could be executed by the same hand in a lifetime. Upon inquiry, it was found that a considerable number of similar copies had been sold in the city. Hereupon orders were given to apprehend Faust, who was accordingly seized, tried for witchcraft, and condemned to be executed as a wizard in league with the Devil. So runs the tale; in which fact and fiction have been strangely blended, the latter greatly predominating,—John Faust the banker, and one of the three first printers of Mentz, being confounded with Jean Frederic Faust, a charlatan and almanac maker of the sixteenth century, who to ensure his almanacs a large sale, advertized them as actually dictated to him by Beelzebub. It was thus that the legend obtained currency, that Faust of Mentz invented printing in consequence of a compact entered into between himself and the Evil One. The diabolical stigma once attached to the profession, the monks and scribes, the ‘brief-men’ of the day, took care that it should remain. Hence the origin of the term “Printer’s Devil,” the by no means complimentary honorific bestowed upon youngsters on their first initiation into the mysteries of the Divine and Noble Art.

No doubt the sale of his Bibles in Paris, the great book-mart of the day, excited a considerable cabal against Faust, on the part of the scribes; who would readily enough assert that such works could only have been produced by the aid of witchcraft. An assertion of this nature was, at that time, dangerous in the extreme to the party against whom it was made. Authors, writing shortly after the time of Faust’s visit, say that such a charge was made, and that he had to leave the city in consequence. The most effectual way of rebutting it would be the avowal of the method adopted in bringing out the work, and this was done by the insertion, in freshly printed leaves, of the words mentioned in page 358 as having been omitted from the early copies. It has been urged, that it was impossible for Faust to have attempted the imposition of passing these Bibles off as manuscripts, inasmuch as he had already divulged the fact of his printing such works in the imprint to the Psalter of 1457. But that imprint applied to that work alone; and Faust, who was a sharp man of business, would not have purposely omitted from the imprint to the Bible, that part of the sentence which notified that the work was done “by a newly invented art of casting letters, printing,” &c., unless he had intended to derive a profit by so doing. There does not however, seem to be any foundation for the assertion that he was brought to trial. His absence from Paris was a very temporary one. It is certain he was well received by persons of eminence there, and ultimately succeeded in establishing an agency for the sale of his books in the city, in spite of the opposition of the scribes. In 1466, he made another business visit to Paris, where he was taken ill, and died, as some suppose, of a pestilence which was raging at the time, to which, as he was then seventy-one years of age, he would have fallen an easy victim. His remains were interred with honor, in the Church of St. Victor. “An anniversary mass was afterwards appointed to be said for the repose of his soul, on the presentation by Peter Schoiffher and Conrad Fust of a copy of the ‘Epistles of Jerome,’ printed on parchment, and considered so important a work, that the AbbÉ of St. Victor deemed it right to pay back the sum of twelve gold crowns, the work exceeding by that sum the value of the fees due for the annual masses. This fact is contained in an entry in the ‘Necrology of St. Victor,’ which is preserved at Paris, in the BibliothÈque Nationale, (MSS. fonds St. Victor). The copy of the ‘Epistles of St. Jerome’ here alluded to is now in the library of the Arsenal.”[138]

After Faust’s death, Schoeffer continued the business in partnership with his father-in-law Conrad Faust, who did not however take an active share in its management, and who died about the year 1479. Conrad Helif and Dr. Humery seem also to have been for a time connected with him. From 1467 to 1503, the date of Schoeffer’s death, he printed, according to Wetter, 49 works,[139] several of which were second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth editions of those previously issued. The agency which John Faust the elder had established in Paris for the sale of his books, became an emporium to which other printers besides Schoeffer sent the productions of their presses. This was managed by one Hermann de Stathoen, who had been appointed by Schoeffer; but he dying in Paris, in 1474, an unnaturalized foreigner, the whole stock of books in his charge was confiscated by the King, Louis XI. Schoeffer at once made such representations to the monarch as led to a royal decree, awarding him the sum of 2425 crowns, by way of compensation for the confiscated property. Besides the agency at Paris, Schoeffer established business relations at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, where in 1479, he was entered on the roll of burghers. In 1489 he became one of the secular judges of Mentz. A wealthy, an honoured, and an influential citizen, he died, it is supposed, in the year 1503. His last work was a fourth edition of his celebrated Psalter, published in 1502. The next year, his eldest son, John, issued the “Mercurius Trismegistus,” which is declared in the imprint to be his first work, and by him the business was continued until 1538.[140] The death of Schoeffer brings us to a point in the narrative, where we may pause a moment, to note the progress of the art, of which, next to Gutenberg, he was the most eminent founder. Perhaps no art ever rose to perfection with such rapidity, after its groundwork had been completed, as that of Typography. Little more than thirty years had elapsed from the time of printing the Biblia Pauperum from wooden blocks, when Gutenberg’s separable hand-cut letters were followed and superseded by Schoeffer’s cast fusile metal types. The art, which with Faust’s assistance, Gutenberg founded and Schoeffer perfected, remains to this day essentially the same that it was in 1455. Steam power and machinery may to a large extent have superseded the old hand-press invented by Gutenberg; and the art of stereotyping may also have multiplied the power of the types in disseminating and cheapening useful knowledge; but the foundation and principles of Letter-press Printing remain unaltered and unalterable. Types, ink, and pressure, still produce books as they were first produced, and the finest productions of the present day are not superior in Typographic beauty, or aught else that stamps a work a masterpiece, to the best efforts of the Fathers of the Art, four hundred years and more ago.

It has been reserved for the Nineteenth century to render due honor to the “grand Typographical Triumvirate,” as they have been termed, for the noble Art by which

With this object in view, the Gutenberg Society, to which all the writers of the Rhenish provinces belong, meet yearly at Mentz, there to celebrate the fame of Gutenberg, the chief inventor. And in 1837, a grateful posterity, animated by similar sentiments, erected in the same city, in commemoration of the Four Hundredth anniversary of the Origin of the Art, a monumental statue to his memory. On the festival at the inauguration of the statue (August 14, and following days), the Provost of Mentz published an address, to the following sentences from which every reader will doubtless most cordially assent. “If,” says the ardent Provost, “the mortal who invented that method of fixing the fugitive sounds of words which we call the Alphabet, has operated on mankind like a divinity, so also has Gutenberg’s genius brought together the once isolated inquirers, teachers and learners,—all the scattered and divided efforts for extending God’s kingdom over the whole civilized earth,—as though beneath one temple. Gutenberg’s invention, not a lucky accident, but the golden fruit of a well considered idea,—an invention made with a perfect consciousness of its end,—has, above all other causes, for more than four centuries, urged forward and established the dominion of science; and what is of the utmost importance, has immeasurably advanced the mental formation and education of the people. This invention, a true intellectual sun, has mounted above the horizon, first of the European Christians, and then of the people of other climes and other faiths, to an ever-enduring morning. It has made the return of barbarism, the isolation of mankind, the reign of darkness, impossible for all future times. It has established a public opinion,—a court of moral judicature common to all civilized nations, whatever natural divisions may separate them, as much as for the provinces of one and the same state. In a word, it has formed fellow-labourers at the never-resting loom of Christian European civilization in every quarter of the world, in almost every island of the ocean.”

The example set by the citizens of Mentz was a few years later followed by those of Strasburg, in which city, as already stated, Gutenberg’s earliest efforts were made; nor were the inhabitants of Frankfort-on-the-Maine long behind,—excelling even those of Strasburg and Mentz, by combining in one grand group the statues of Gutenberg, Faust and Schoeffer. Of these several specimens of the sculptor’s art Mr. Humphreys gives the following account:—

“It was not till the nineteenth century that worthy memorials of the great founder of the Printing-Press in Germany were erected. The first was that at Mayence. As a statue it is not equal to the one of Coster at Haarlem, although the work of Thorwaldsen. It was executed at Rome in 1835, and cast in Paris in 1837. The gown of the period with its fur collar, or rather cape, is effective enough as a mere matter of costume, and so is the furred cap closely copied from supposed authentic portraits of Gutenberg. One hand holds a book, and the other, types; but the general effect is tame and unimpressive. It is well that the great name of Thorwaldsen should be thus allied to that of Gutenberg, but it is not one of the great Dane’s most successful works. The inscription, stating that it was erected by the citizens of Mayence, with the concurrence of the whole of Europe, is grandly simple, as it ought to be.

“The statue at Strasburg, the scene of Gutenberg’s first typographic efforts, is the work of the celebrated French sculptor David d’Anger, and the market-place in which it is erected is now called La Place Gutenberg. The position of the figure is full of life and spirit; a proof-sheet is held proudly forward, bearing the inscription, as though in answer to one of the first fiats of Creation—‘Let there be light.’ It is intended to express that, through the medium of the Printing Press, intellectual light came, as expressed in the words, ‘And there was light.’ On the pedestal are four bassi-relievi, in which the dissemination of knowledge by means of the Printing Press is illustrated. In the one on the front, all the great authors of modern Europe are grouped round a Printing Press; among them Shakespeare, Corneille, Bacon, Dante, Voltaire, and Goethe, are conspicuous.

“The Memorial at Frankfort is, on the whole, more impressive than either of the preceding. It consists of three separate statues, forming together a single group. The statues are those of Gutenberg, Faust and Schoeffer, who each assisted in the first great work of founding the Printing Press in Germany, and whose memorials found a fitting place in the imperial city, which was still the seat of the Germanic Diet at the time of the Memorial in 1837. The subsidiary figures which embellish the face of the structure,—Literature, &c., &c.—are very good and appropriate. The entire composition is imposingly raised on steps connected with the secondary pedestals, which support the allegorical figures. Altogether, the memorial is a fine one. But it has one defect—there is no name nor description of any kind—so that travellers unacquainted with the subject, might mistake the group for that of any other celebrated triumvirate. A statue, even of Shakespeare, should be accompanied at least by the simple name.”[141]

Still, although Gutenberg is most justly entitled to the honour of being considered the inventor of the Art of Typography, as now practised in Europe, he was not, in fact, the first who printed books from separate moveable types. In this, as in block printing, the Chinese again bear away the palm. For, singularly enough, it is ascertained that although the general mode of printing in China is, and always has been, from wooden blocks, yet separable letters were known to the Chinese as early as the Eleventh century. For a time, single characters made of clay and baked hard were used in that empire, but were soon abandoned for the mode now almost universally practised, except for the Imperial Calendar, published once a quarter, and the Pekin Gazette, issued daily, which are still wretchedly printed from moveable types made of a plastic gum.

The account of the invention is too interesting to be omitted. In the period King-li (between 1041 and 1048) one of the people, a blacksmith named Pi-ching, invented another manner of printing with ho-pan, or tablets formed of moveable types. This name is still retained in the Imperial Printing Office at Pekin. On a fine and glutinous earth, formed into plates, Pi-ching engraved the characters most in use. Each character was a type. These he burnt in the fire to harden them. When he wished to print he took a frame of iron, divided interiorly and perpendicularly by strips of the same metal (Chinese being read vertically); this he laid on a table of sheet iron coated with a fusible gum composed of resin, wax, and lime; he then inserted the types, placing them one close against the other. Each frame, when filled, formed a tablet. This was brought near the fire to make the gum melt, after which a level piece of wood was pressed forcibly on the surface of the types, by which means they were pushed down into the gum and became firm and even as a stone. The tablets were then printed from in the usual manner. When a new character was wanted it was immediately prepared on the spot, and the inventor shewed the advantage of clay over wood; there was neither grain nor porosity, with a greater facility of separation from the gum when required for distribution.

At Pi-ching’s death, all this apparatus was carefully preserved by his successors. Printing, however, went on in the old way, the reason being that the Chinese has not, as other languages, an alphabet made up of a few characters, with which all sorts of books may be printed, but a separate type is wanted for every word; and as the language is divided into classes of 106 sounds, so 106 cases (part of the furniture of a Printing Office) would be required, each one to contain a prodigious number of types, thus rendering the mechanical task of composing and distributing, one of enormous difficulty and labour. It was easier and cheaper to follow the usual method, and print either from blocks of wood or plates of stereotyped copper.[142]

All honour to the memory of Pi-ching, the Chinese blacksmith! One might almost be tempted to suppose, did we but believe in the doctrine of metempsychosis, that after a lapse of 400 years, disgusted at the neglect of his invention in the East, his spirit migrated to the West, and that in Gutenberg he was permitted to be born again. A like spirit animated them both, and to the end of time their labours will live and their memories be blest.

The account given in the foregoing description of the method of composing his types used by Pi-ching, is not very dissimilar to that said to have been adopted by the first Typographers of the Western World. Frames, or coffins, were made of planks of wood, in which rectangular hollows were cut the size of the pages to be printed; and in these the types, after having been strung together, were placed in horizontal lines, the ends of the lines and the bottoms of the pages being tightly wedged in, to prevent slips and damage while on the press.

All works printed during the first few years after the invention of Typography, were of the size of large or small folio. The latter was what is now-a-days called quarto, from the sheets being folded into four;—then, for the smaller size, whole sheets were cut into two, on each of which two pages were printed, in order to suit the presses, and the stocks of type the printers possessed. These sheets, or half sheets, were printed in sections of 3, 4, or 5, called ternions, quaternions, and quinternions. On the backs of these sections strips of parchment were sometimes pasted, to guard against tears when the sheets were stitched together by the book-binder. The first and third pages so printed were called those on the recto of the sheet, the second and fourth those on the verso. A quaternion consisted of eight formes; the first, containing pages 1 and 16, and the second 2 and 15, formed the outer sheet; the next sheet consisted of pages 3 and 14, 4 and 13, the third and fourth formes; the third sheet consisted of pages 5 and 12, 6 and 11, the fifth and sixth formes; the fourth sheet consisted of pages 7 and 10, 8 and 9, the seventh and eighth formes; the next quaternion commenced with pages 17 and 32, and so on. When all the formes were printed, the sheets of which the quaternion consisted were folded one inside the other, the pages then reading regularly on from the first to the sixteenth. So long as books represented fac-similes of manuscripts,—which was the object originally aimed at,—to print in this way was a matter easily accomplished. But as the new art drove out the old, and scribes turned compositors and pressmen, and manuscripts came to be carelessly written, this could no longer be done. Larger founts of type then became necessary, to enable the printer to complete the whole number of pages contained in the section; and to avoid this necessity as much as possible, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos would be resorted to, a single sheet folded and re-folded serving equally as well in binding as a ternion, quaternion, or quinternion of folio sheets. This, of course, led to the ‘imposition’ of pages in formes of 4, 8, and 12 pages and upwards, according to the size of the book printed.

Title-pages, folios, running head-lines, catch-lines, signatures, and imprints with dates and names, were matters about which the Fathers of Typography did not at first much concern themselves. Their orthography, as well as their divisions of words, was arbitrary; their abbreviations abominable, and their punctuation absurd; the comma and the semicolon were unknown, the points made use of being an oblique dash (/) the colon (:) and the full point (.); these were occasionally varied as follows, / /. /? /? ?/. // ? .:. ?:? &c. A straight dash " supplied the place of a hyphen, and a parallel "" indicated the end of a paragraph. The first leaf of a book was generally left a blank, and a blank space was left at the head of the commencing chapter of a work, to be filled up with a vignette or an illuminated scroll. Spaces were also left for initial capitals, and for capitals commencing sentences, when small letters were not used instead. These were so left in order to be filled in by the rubricator, who sometimes carelessly inserted a wrong letter. Names of persons and places were printed indifferently with or without capitals.[143] But in all these matters the printers merely followed bad examples—that of the scribes whose downfall they were effecting. One feature is especially characteristic of the oldest books, viz. the irregularity of the lines on the right hand margin of the columns or pages, particularly when the larger kinds of type were used. This arose from the mode of composing, which interfered with the spacing out of the words to the ends of the lines. When however that ingenious implement, the metal composing stick—the printer’s space-compelling gauge,—was invented, this defect was remedied; and before the first generation of printers passed away, all the blemishes above recounted had disappeared from the works of those who deserve to be distinguished as Masters in their Art. The engraving given below will explain the nature of this implement better than any written description. The slide, running parallel with the head, with its slotted foot into which was inserted the nut for the screw which passed through and fastened it down to the ledge on which the types rested, enabled the compositor to ‘set’ his types with accuracy to any measure required, and to space out the words to the right hand, so as to make them line in the margin as straight and even as the commencing letters on the left hand. With the aid of the useful adjunct to the ‘stick,’ the ‘setting-rule,’—(a strip of brass the height and length of the line, with a projecting neb at the top right hand corner)—he could compose line after line with ease and speed. The special use of the ‘rule’ was to prevent the letters as they were lifted into the ‘stick,’ catching on those of the line below, which, without the interposition of the polished strip of brass, they were liable to do from the nicks in their shanks. When the ‘stick’ was full, he could also with the assistance of the ‘rule’ empt out its number of lines into his ‘galley,’ where, when a sufficient number was collected, they would be made into pages, ready for the forme. The inventor of the composing stick is not known; but as it appears in the hands of the compositor in the engraving facing page 116, and the original of that engraving was first printed about 1498, and the ‘stick’ must have then been in use for some time; and as the principle of the slide is analogous to that which would be adopted in regulating the width of the chamber in the moulds for casting types, it is highly probable that the credit of its invention is due to Schoeffer, who had previously immortalized himself by inventing the art of type-founding.

Besides the appearance of the insides of early printed books, their ordinary outside bindings demand attention here. Many of the finer specimens were cased in sumptuous covers, in which the art of the goldsmith and jeweller was richly displayed; but for common use a stiff sheet of parchment generally sufficed, the edges of which were folded in, a blank leaf being pasted over them. Others, somewhat superior, had boards of beech or oak for their sides, over which was pasted a sheep-skin leather, on which figures were stamped or embossed;[144] while others again had stiff covers made of waste sheets, or remnants of unsaleable copies, cut down and pasted together. These last have furnished many unique specimens of the works of the earliest printers; and whenever any such are suspected to lie beneath an ancient book-cover, the cover is carefully removed and subjected to a variety of processes to separate its parts, and compel it to give up to the ardent gaze of the palÆotypographist, its possible treasure of an invaluable unique specimen of the work of a Gutenberg, a Schoeffer, a Zell, a Jenson, a Martens, a Caxton, or some other worthy of the olden time.

[132] “The early printers generally marked their publications by some monogram or cipher peculiar to themselves, and containing their initials, their arms, or some curious device. These are all well known to the initiated bibliopole, and their presence on a title-page is received as evidence of the genuineness of a scarce copy. The oldest of them is that of Faust and Schoeffer, annexed to their first Psalter, and consisting of two shields tied together and hanging from a branch. Raphelengius, of Leyden, adopted the anchor; Sporinus of Basle, chose the arion; Jansen of Amsterdam, the sphere; the Elzevirs exhibited the olive tree, and the celebrated Aldus had for a device, the anchor and dolphin.”—(“History of Printing,” published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge). Gotfridus de Os, of Gouda, had for his device an elephant and castle, combined with the arms of the city.