been printed. It is probable that Gutenberg was required to compose and print the form at three different times; but we do not know why he found it necessary to make a new face of text type for the second and third editions,[1] for it is very plain that the types of the first edition were not worn out.
The Appeal of Christianity against the Turks, sometimes called the Almanac of 1455, is another small work attributed to Gutenberg. It is a little quarto of six printed leaves, in German verse, in the large type of the Bible of 36 lines. As it contains a calendar for the year 1455, it is supposed that it was printed at the close of 1454. Its typographical appearance is curious: the type was large, the page was narrow, and the compositor run the lines together as in prose, marking the beginning of every verse with a capital, and its ending by a fanciful arrangement 
of four full points. It is the first typographic work in German, and the first work in that language which can be attributed to Gutenberg. But one copy of this book is known.
Gutenberg's fame as a great printer is more justly based on his two editions in folio of the Holy Bible in Latin. The breadth of his mind, and his faith in the comprehensiveness of his invention, are more fully set forth by his selection of a book of so formidable a nature. There was an admirable propriety in his determination that his new art should be fairly introduced to the reading world by the book known
- ↑ It is possible that other books, now lost and forgotten, may have been printed in the small types, but Helbig thinks that the types were some made expressly for the Letters of Indulgence, as bank-notes are now made, with the intention that the copies of each edition should be exactly alike in appearance, and that they should be difficult of imitation. Bernard dissents from the belief that the Letters of Indulgence were printed by Gutenberg. He attributes them to some printer of unknown name in Mentz, supposed by him to have been either the false workman described by Junius, or graduate or seceding malcontent of Gutenberg's printing office. But we have no evidence of a typographical printer before Gutenberg. Jäck has endeavored to prove that two Letters were printed by Pfister of Bamberg. De la Borde thinks one of the faces of type used in the Letters was cut by Schœffer in a friendly competition with Gutenberg. These conjectures cannot be made plausible.
