he subsequently showed as a printer could have been attained by the labor of a few months or years. If it is also considered that Gutenberg was poor, and that he collected the money he needed with great delay and difficulty, the doubt may assume the form of denial. It is a marvel that he was so well prepared at the end of the ten years which Zell says were given up to investigation.
It would be gratifying to know the form in which the idea of typography first presented itself to Gutenberg; but there is in this case, no story like that of Franklin and the kite, or of Newton and the apple. Zell, in the Cologne Chronicle, says that the first prefiguration of Gutenberg's method was found in the Donatuses published in Holland before 1440. That the xylographic Donatus, the only block-book without cuts, was the forerunner of all typographic books, may not be denied. That some stray copy of a now lost edition of the book may have suggested to Gutenberg the superior utility of typography is possible, but the suggestion was that of the feasibility of a grander result by an entirely different process. For, although typography took its beginnings in an earlier practice of xylography, it was not the outgrowth[1] of that practice. It took up the art of printing at a point
- ↑ The most common prejudice is the supposition, à priori, legitimated strictly scientifically by nothing, that printing with movable types was only an improvement on that with wooden blocks on which the letters were cut; that it was a development of it, an extension, a fortunate application, the highest step of the ladder, consisting of playing cards, images of saints, pictures with super, sub and other scriptions, texts without pictures. In short, xylography, in a technical, logical and reformatorical sense, would be the mother of typography. But it is such only in the sense of an external impulse, of an external push to meditating on quite another means than wood or metal engraving, or another mode of obtaining books. Zell finds that push in the block-Donatuses, but the inspiration of genius, the first invention of a quite independent art, of a totally new principle, which has nothing in common with wood and metal engraving, he ascribes … to Gutenberg. In Gutenberg's mind, the grand idea arose that all words, all writing, all language, all human thoughts, could be expressed by a small number, a score of different letters, arranged according to the requirements; that, with a large quantity of those different letters, united as one whole, a whole page of text could be printed at once, and, repeating this process continually, large manuscripts could be swiftly multiplied. … This thought, this idea, begot the invention of typography. … Every other explanation is at once unhistorical and unpsychological. Haarlem Legend, p. 11.
