The First Printers. 91 



the possibilities latent in the letters of the alphabet if separated 

 and used in various combinations. But his generation did not 

 take the hint, and no progress was made till the end of the 

 fourteenth century after Christ, when the Venetians began to 

 produce playing cards and devotional pictures from engraved 

 blocks. In due time, words were engraved along with the 

 pictures, and the block books of the middle ages were produced, 

 each page of which was the impression of a solid wood block. 

 The block books were an advance on anything the world had 

 yet seen in the way of printing, although they were only a 

 development of the immemorial method, and did not admit the 

 new principle of movable types. The lecturer then called 

 attention to one of these block books, the " Speculum," certain 

 editions of which were partly xylographic, and partly printed 

 in movable type. Here then we abruptly find the new art side 

 by side with the old, apparently an accomplished fact before the 

 world suspected its existence. The old art of engraving still 

 survived and served its purpose, but compared with the new 

 art it could express comparatively little, while the letters of the 

 alphabet in infinite combination are capable of expressing every 

 idea the world contains. 



Coming now to the vexed question of the invention of typo- 

 graphy, Mr. Reed dealt generally with the conflicting claims 

 put forward on behalf of Coster of Haarlem, and of Gutenberg 

 of Mayence. The former depend mainly upon the circum- 

 stantial narrative of Hadrian Junius in the sixteenth century, 

 which, though in many ways unsatisfactory, is in other ways 

 strongly confirmed by the existence of a number of anonymous 

 Dutch printed books in the type of the " Speculum," which 

 need to be accounted for before discussing Coster's claims. The 

 earliest known specimens of printing, apart from these debatable 

 works, are the two Letters of Indulgence of 1454, generally 

 allowed to have been printed one by Gutenberg and the other 

 by Peter Schoeffer in the city of Mayence. Mr. Reed dwelt 

 upon the condition of Europe at this critical epoch, and briefly 

 described the manner in which the scribes of the day would be 



