represent him as having been engaged there in some experiments
requiring money, with Andreas Dritzehn, a fellow-citizen, who
became not only security for him but his partner to carry out
Gutenberg’s plan for polishing stones and the manufacture of
looking-glasses, for which a lucrative sale was expected at the
approaching pilgrimage of 1440 (subsequently postponed, according
to the documents, although there is no evidence for this
postponement) to Aix-la-Chapelle. Money was lent for this
purpose by two other friends. In 1438 another partnership was
arranged between Gutenberg, Andreas Dritzehn, and Andreas
and Anton Heilmann, and that this had in view the art of
printing has been inferred from the word “drucken” used by one
of the witnesses in the law proceedings which soon after followed.
An action was brought, after the death of Dritzehn, by his two
brothers to force Gutenberg to accept them as partners in their
brother’s place, but the decision was in favour of the latter. In
1441 Gutenberg became surety to the St Thomas Chapter at
Strassburg for Johann Karle, who borrowed 100 guilders (about
£16) from the chapter, and on November 17, 1442, he himself
borrowed 80 livres through Martin Brechter (or Brehter) from
the same chapter. Of his whereabouts from the 12th of March
1444 (when he paid a tax at Strassburg) to the 17th of October
1448 nothing certain is known. But on the latter date we find
him at Mainz, borrowing 150 gold guilders of his kinsman, Arnold
Gelthus, against an annual interest of 712 gold guilders. We do
not know whether the interest on this debt has ever been paid, but
the debt itself appears never to have been paid off, as the contract
of this loan was renewed (vidimused) on August 23, 1503, for
other parties. It is supposed that soon afterwards Gutenberg
must have been able to show some convincing results of his work,
for it appears that about 1450 Johann Fust (q.v.) advanced him
800 guilders to promote it, on no security except that of
“tools” still to be made. Fust seems also to have undertaken to
advance him 300 guilders a year for expenses, wages, house-rent,
parchment, paper, ink, &c., but he does not appear to have ever
done so. If at any time they disagreed, Gutenberg was to return
the 800 guilders, and the “tools” were to cease to be security.
It is not known to what purpose Gutenberg devoted the money
advanced to him. In the minutes of the law-suit of 1455 he
himself says that he had to make his “tools” with it. But he
is presumed to have begun a large folio Latin Bible, and to have
printed during its progress some smaller books[1] and likewise the
Letter of Indulgence (granted on the 12th of April 1451 by Pope
Nicholas V. in aid of John II., king of Cyprus, against the Turks),
of 31 lines, having the earliest printed date 1454, of which
several copies are preserved in various European libraries. A
copy of the 1455 issue of the same Indulgence is in the Rylands
Library at Manchester (from the Althorp Library).
It is not known whether any books were printed while this partnership between Gutenberg and Fust lasted. Trithemius (Ann. Hirsaug. ii. 421) says they first printed, from wooden blocks, a vocabulary called Catholicon, which cannot have been the Catholicon of Johannes de Janua, a folio of 748 pages in two columns of 66 lines each, printed in 1460, but was perhaps a small glossary now lost.[2] The Latin Bible of 42 lines, a folio of 1282 printed pages, in two columns with spaces left for illuminated initials (so called because each column contains 42 lines, and also known as the Mazarin Bible, because the first copy described was found in the library of Cardinal Mazarin), was finished before the 15th of August 1456;[3] German bibliographers now claim this Bible for Gutenberg, but, according to bibliographical rules, it must be ascribed to Peter Schöffer, perhaps in partnership with Fust. It is in smaller type than the Bible of 36 lines, which latter is called either (a) the Bamberg Bible, because nearly all the known copies were found in the neighbourhood of Bamberg, or (b) Schelhorn’s Bible, because J. G. Schelhorn was the first who described it in 1760, or (c) Pfister’s Bible, because its printing is ascribed to Albrecht Pfister of Bamberg, who used the same type for several small German books, the chief of which is Boner’s Edelstein (1461, 4to), 88 leaves, with 85 woodcuts, a book of fables in German rhyme. Some bibliographers believe this 36-line Bible to have been begun, if not entirely printed, by Gutenberg during his partnership with Fust, as its type occurs in the 31-line Letters of Indulgence of 1454, was used for the 27-line Donatus (of 1451?), and, finally, when found in Pfister’s possession in 1461, appears to be old and worn, except the additional letters k, w, z required for German, which are clear and sharp like the types used in the Bible. Again, others profess to prove (Dziatzko, Gutenberg’s früheste Druckerpraxis) that B36 was a reprint of B42.
Gutenberg’s work, whatever it may have been, was not a commercial success, and in 1452 Fust had to come forward with another 800 guilders to prevent a collapse. But some time before November 1455 the latter demanded repayment of his advances (see the Helmasperger Notarial Document of November 6, 1455, in Dziatzko’s Beiträge zur Gutenbergfrage, Berlin, 1889), and took legal proceedings against Gutenberg. We do not know the end of these proceedings, but if Gutenberg had prepared any printing materials it would seem that he was compelled to yield up the whole of them to Fust; that the latter removed them to his own house at Mainz, and there, with the assistance of Peter Schöffer, issued various books until the sack of the city in 1462 by Adolphus II. caused a suspension of printing for three years, to be resumed again in 1465.
We have no Information as to Gutenberg’s activity, and very little of his whereabouts, after his separation from Fust. In a document dated June 21, 1457, he appears as witness on behalf of one of his relatives, which shows that he was then still at Mainz. Entries in the registers of the St Thomas Church at Strassburg make it clear that the annual interest on the money which Gutenberg on the 17th of November 1442 (see above) had borrowed from the chapter of that church was regularly paid till the 11th of November 1457, either by himself or by his
- ↑ Among these were perhaps (1) one or two editions of the work of Donatus, De octo partibus orationis, 27 lines to a page, of one of which two leaves, now in the Paris National Library, were discovered at Mainz in the original binding of an account book, one of them having, but in a later hand, the year 1451 (?); (2) the Turk-Kalendar for 1455 (preserved in the Hof-Bibliothek at Munich); (3) the Cisianus (preserved in the Cambridge Univ. Libr.), and perhaps others now lost.
- ↑ Ulric Zell states, in the Cologne Chronicle of 1499, that Gutenberg and Fust printed a Bible in large type like that used in missals. It has been said that this description applies to the 42-line Bible, as its type is as large as that of most missals printed before 1500, and that the size now called missal type (double pica) was not used in missals until late in the 16th century. This is no doubt true of the smaller missals printed before 1500, some of which are in even smaller type than the 42-line Bible. But many of the large folio missals, as that printed at Mainz by Peter Schöffer in 1483, the Carthusian missal printed at Spires by Peter Drach about 1490, and the Dominican missal printed by Andrea de Torresanis at Venice in 1496, are in as large type as the 36-line Bible. Peter Schöffer (1425–1502) of Gernsheim, between Mainz and Mannheim, who was a copyist in Paris in 1449, and whom Fust called his servant (famulus), is said by Trithemius to have discovered an easier way of founding characters, whence Lambinet and others concluded that Schöffer invented the punch. Schöffer himself, in the colophon of the Psalter of 1457, a work which some suppose to have been planned and partly printed by Gutenberg, claims only the mode of printing rubrics and coloured capitals.
- ↑ The Leipzig copy of this Bible (which formerly belonged to Herr Klemm of Dresden) has at the end the MS. year 1453 in old Arabic numerals. But certain circumstances connected with this date make it look very suspicious.
