been rounded under the long-continued pressure of a press, or had been founded in old and clogged matrices.
Gutenberg deceived himself as much as he did his Strasburg partners, in his over-sanguine estimate of the profits of printing and the difficulties connected with its practice. His printed work did not meet with the rapid sale he had anticipated, or the cost of doing the work was very much in excess of the price he received. The great success which Andrew Dritzehen hoped to have within one year, or in 1440, had not been attained in 1450. During this year Gutenberg comes before us again as the borrower of money. If he had been only an ordinary dreamer about great inventions, he would have abandoned an enterprise so hedged in with mechanical and financial difficulties. But he was an inventor in the full sense of the word, an inventor of means as well as of ends, as resolute in bending indifferent men as he was in fashioning obdurate metal. After spending, ineffectually, all the money he had acquired from his industry, from his partners, from his inheritance, from his friends,—still unable to forego his great project,—he went, as a last resort, to one of the professional money-lenders of Mentz. "Heaven or hell," says Lacroix, "sent him the partner John Fust."[1]
The character and services of John Fust have been put
- ↑ His name is often improperly written as Faust. In all the books subsequently printed by Fust and his partner, Schœffer, the name appears as Fust. It was so written and printed by all his contemporaries, and is so seen, wherever it occurs, in the record of the famous trial he instituted. It is so spelt in the church record of his burial, During his lifetime, and for at least thirty years after his death, the name is always given as Fust. The notorious reputation subsequently made by Dr. John Faust, who was born in Wurtemberg in 1480 (several years after the death of Fust), who studied magic in Cracow, and, by his learning and wickedness, horrified wise men like Luther and Melancthon; whose life, deeds and death are involved in a mystery that dramatists have turned to such good account, has been transferred by carelessness to John Fust, the printer. The confusion has been perpetuated by a legend. The fable, not yet weeded out of treatises on printing, that Fust was arrested in Paris for selling bibles, supposed to have been manufactured at the instigation of the devil, has served to foster the error.
