The Age of the Reformation | Page 6

states
more than any of the renowned legislators of antiquity. The equally

obscure inventor of mechanical clocks--a great improvement on the {8}
older sand-glasses, water-glasses, and candles--made possible a new
precision and regularity of daily life, an untold economy of time and
effort.
[Sidenote: Printing]
But all other inventions yield to that of printing, the glory of John
Gutenberg of Mayence, one of those poor and in their own times
obscure geniuses who carry out to fulfilment a great idea at much
sacrifice to themselves. The demand for books had been on the increase
for a long time, and every effort was made to reproduce them as rapidly
and cheaply as possible by the hand of expert copyists, but the
applications of this method produced slight result. The introduction of
paper, in place of the older vellum or parchment, furnished one of the
indispensable pre-requisites to the multiplication of cheap volumes. In
the early fifteenth century, the art of the wood-cutter and engraver had
advanced sufficiently to allow some books to be printed in this manner,
i.e. from carved blocks. This was usually, or at first, done only with
books in which a small amount of text went with a large amount of
illustration. There are extant, for example, six editions of the Biblia
Pauperum, stamped by this method. It was afterwards applied, chiefly
in Holland, to a few other books for which there was a large demand,
the Latin grammar of Donatus, for example, and a guide-book to Rome
known as the Mirabilia Urbis Romae. But at best this method was
extremely unsatisfactory; the blocks soon wore out, the text was
blurred and difficult to read, the initial expense was large.
The essential feature of Gutenberg's invention was therefore not, as the
name implies, printing, or impression, but typography, or the use of
type. The printer first had a letter cut in hard metal, this was called the
punch; with it he stamped a mould known as the {9} matrix in which
he was able to found a large number of exactly identical types of metal,
usually of lead.
These, set side by side in a case, for the first time made it possible
satisfactorily to print at reasonable cost a large number of copies of the
same text, and, when that was done, the types could be taken apart and

used for another work.
The earliest surviving specimen of printing--not counting a few
undated letters of indulgence--is a fragment on the last judgment
completed at Mayence before 1447. In 1450 Gutenberg made a
partnership with the rich goldsmith John Fust, and from their press
issued, within the next five years, the famous Bible with 42 lines to a
page, and a Donatus (Latin grammar) of 32 lines. The printer of the
Bible with 36 lines to a page, that is the next oldest surviving
monument, was apparently a helper of Gutenberg, who set up an
independent press in 1454. Legible, clean-cut, comparatively cheap,
these books demonstrated once for all the success of the new art, even
though, for illuminated initials, they were still dependent on the hand of
the scribe.
[Sidenote: Books and Reading]
In those days before patents the new invention spread with wonderful
rapidity, reaching Italy in 1465, Paris in 1470, London in 1480,
Stockholm in 1482, Constantinople in 1487, Lisbon in 1490, and
Madrid in 1499. Only a few backward countries of Europe remained
without a press. By the year 1500 the names of more than one thousand
printers are known, and the titles of about 30,000 printed works.
Assuming that the editions were small, averaging 300 copies, there
would have been in Europe by 1500 about 9,000,000 books, as against
the few score thousand manuscripts that lately had held all the precious
lore of time. In a few years the price of books sank to one-eighth of
what it had been before. "The gentle reader" had started on his career.
{10} The importance of printing cannot be over-estimated. There are
few events like it in the history of the world. The whole gigantic swing
of modern democracy and of the scientific spirit was released by it. The
veil of the temple of religion and of knowledge was rent in twain, and
the arcana of the priest and clerk exposed to the gaze of the people. The
reading public became the supreme court before whom, from this time,
all cases must be argued. The conflict of opinions and parties, of
privilege and freedom, of science and obscurantism, was transferred
from the secret chamber of a small, privileged, professional, and

sacerdotal coterie to the arena of the reading public.
[Sidenote: Exploration]
It is amazing, but true, that within fifty years after this exploit, mankind
should have achieved another like unto it in a widely different sphere.
The horror of