The book : its printers, illustrators, and binders, from Gutenberg to the present time / By Henri Bouchot ... With a treatise on the art of collecting and describing early printed books, and a Latin-English and English-Latin topographical index of the earliest printing places. Ed. by H. GRevel. Containing one hundred and seventy-two fac-similes of early typography, book-illustrations, printers' marks, bindings, numerous borders, initials, head and tail pieces, and a frontispiece.

Henri Bouchot

Date:: 1890

Credit: The book : its printers, illustrators, and binders, from Gutenberg to the present time / By Henri Bouchot ... With a treatise on the art of collecting and describing early printed books, and a Latin-English and English-Latin topographical index of the earliest printing places. Ed. by H. GRevel. Containing one hundred and seventy-two fac-similes of early typography, book-illustrations, printers' marks, bindings, numerous borders, initials, head and tail pieces, and a frontispiece. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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debtor in a contract for six per cent, interest, besides a share in the profits. In addition he stipulated repayment in case of failure. Gutenberg, incautious, as is the way of inventors, had signed away all that he possessed to procure funds. It is however presumed that, during the continuance of his investigations, he set up in type some current books with the resources at his disposal, that served a little to lighten his debts. But the printing house of the Zum Jungen at Mayence was far from shining in the world, because the partnership with Fust was aimed only at the publication of a Bible, and not at all with the Speculums and Donatus that were so much in vogue at that time. Besides, the money-lender made a point of pressing his debtor, and did not allow him any leisure to labour outside the projected work. About this time a third actor entered upon the scene. Peter Schoeffer, of Gernsheim, a caligrapher, who was introduced into the workshop of Gutenberg to design letters, benefited by the abortive experiments, and, taking up the invention at its deadlock, carried it forward. John of Tritenheim, called Trithemius, the learned abbot of Spanheim, is the person who relates these facts ; but, as he got his information from Schoeffer himself, too much credence must not be given to his statements. Besides, Schoeffer was by no means an ordinary artisan. If we credit a Strasbure manuscript written by his hand in 1449, he had been a student of the most glorious university of Paris. In the workshop of Gutenberg his industrious and inventive spirit, to use the same expressions as the Abbot of Tritenheim, found natural food and a productive mine, and this caligrapher dreamt of other things than merely drafting his letters for wood blocks, to be cut by the engravers. Gutenberg, arrested in his career by the wants of life, the worries of business, and perhaps also by

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