there are those still alive who testify that books were printed at Venice before Nicol. Jenson came there and began to cut and make letters. But the first inventor of printing was a citizen of Mentz, born at Strasburg, and named Junker Johan Gutenberg. From Mentz the art was introduced first of all into Cologne, then into Strasburg, and afterward into Venice. The origin and progress of the art was told me verbally by the honorable master Ulrich Zell, of Hanau, still printer at Cologne, anno 1499, and by whom the said art came to Cologne.[1]
Ulrich Zell is a candid and a competent witness, yet he narrates not what he had seen, but what he had heard He was but a mere child, possibly unborn, when Gutenberg began to experiment with types at Strasburg about the year 1436, or sixty-three years before this chronicle was printed.
Zell's statement is the earliest acknowledgment of the priority of book-printing in Holland, but it is an incomplete and unsatisfactory acknowledgment. He names Gutenberg, but he does not name the printer of the Donatus. He specifies the period between 1440 and 1450 as the time, and Mentz as the place, and the great Latin Bible as the first product, of the German invention; but he does not specify the year nor the city in which the Donatus was first printed. The only specifications are—in Holland,[2] before Gutenberg, and by an inferior method. It is apparent that Zell did not have exact knowledge of the details of early Dutch printing, and that he could not describe its origin nor its peculiarities with accuracy.
We cannot supplement Zell's imperfect description of early Dutch printing with knowledge or with inferences that might
- ↑ Hessel's translation, as given in The Haarlem Legend of Van der Linde, p. 8.
- ↑ Van der Linde takes exception to this part of the chronicle. He says that Zell's knowledge of geography was confused, and that he wrote Holland where he should have written the Netherlands. His reasons for suggesting this correction are, that the manufacture of block-books and the prints of images, and the cultivation of literature and of literary arts, during the first half of the fifteenth century, were in their most flourishing condition in the cities of Bruges, Antwerp, Brussels and Louvain, all of the Southern Netherlands, while they were comparatively neglected in Haarlem, Leyden, Delft and Utrecht, of the Northern Netherlands. At that period Holland had not taken its place as the foremost state of Europe, in its championship of liberty and civilization.
