The pretensions of Haarlem and Koster have for more than a century been a matter of fierce controversy; and there have been upward of one hundred and fifty volumes written for or against, without any approach to a satisfactory decision.  This one thing is certain, that, whether or not we owe the first idea of movable type to Laurence Koster or to Haarlem, we do not owe to the period any very marked use of it; that was reserved for a later day.

There is a story current, dependent on the authority of Junius, that Koster’s principal workman, assumed to be Hans or John Faust—­and some, to reconcile improbabilities, even say John Gutenberg—­who had been sworn to secrecy, decamped one Christmas Eve, after the death of Koster, while the family were at church, taking with him types and printing apparatus and, after short sojourns at Amsterdam and Cologne, got to Mainz or Mayence with them, and there introduced printing.  He is said by Junius to have printed, about the year 1442—­that is, two years after Koster’s death—­the Doctrinale of Alexander Gallus and the Tracts of Peter of Spain, with the very types which Koster made use of in Haarlem; but as no volume of this kind has ever been discovered, nor any trace of one, the entire story is generally regarded as apocryphal.  Laurence Koster died in 1440, at the age of seventy; therefore any printing attributed to him must be within that period.

What has hitherto been advanced proves only that mankind had walked for many centuries on the borders of the two great inventions, chalcography and typography, without having fully and practically discovered either of them.

We now come to the great epoch of printing—­I mean the complete introduction, if not actually the first invention, of movable metal or fusile types.  This took place at Mainz, in or before 1450, and the general consent of Europe assigns the credit of it to Gutenberg.  Of a man who has conferred such vast obligations on all succeeding ages, it may be desirable to say a few words.

John Gutenberg was born at Mainz in 1397, of a patrician and rather wealthy family.  He left his native city, it is said, because implicated in an insurrection of the citizens against the nobility, and settled at Strasburg, where, in 1427, we find him an established merchant, and sustaining a suit of breach of promise brought against him by a lady named Ann of the Iron Door, whom he afterward married.  While resident here, and before 1439, his attention appears to have been actively directed to the art of printing, as we learn by a legal document of the time, found of late years in the archives of Strasburg.  He is there stated to have entered into an engagement with three persons, named Dreizehn, Riffe, and Heilmann, to reveal to them “a secret art of printing which he had lately discovered,” and to take them into partnership for five years, upon the payment of certain sums.