From the PREFACE:
IT is a remarkable thing, as a French writer has pointed out, that the only art which can record all others should, practically, have forgotten to record its own history. The story of the invention and rise of the most potent factor in the spread of knowledge - one might almost say in the development of civilization- is marked by all too many gaps and surmises. Its origin, although so recent, is yet wrapped more or less in impenetrable mystery. The very name of the man to whom the world owes the art of printing cannot be decided with absolute certainty. It is generally agreed that the weight of evidence is in favour of Gutenberg as the inventor, and Mentz as the city in which he laboured to so good a purpose. This, the view most often accepted by the typographical students, is the one which I have taken in this small volume.
The book, however, does not pretend to be in any sense a full record of the work which has developed from the discovery of the mid-fifteenth century; such full record would manifestly be impossible within the limits of a small volume, despite the scantiness of materials about some of the more interesting periods in the growth of the Printing Press. For, although printing has not troubled properly and connectedly to record its own development, there is yet a great wealth of varied materials concerned with its "triumphs." From among these I have chosen such portions as shall show the growth of the art, from the simple types and plain wooden press of the time of Gutenberg, up to the present day, when steam machinery works many thousand times as quickly as did the old hand-presses; when, indeed, the very art of printing from movable types appears likely to give way to a later development, in which the printing is almost directly done from the matrices themselves.
It will be noticed by the reader of the following chapters how few are the details which have come down to us of the lives of those men who are most intimately connected with the "triumphs" dealt with - Gutenberg, Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, Aldus, Elzevir. Of these men and several others we would gladly learn much; we would like to know what manner of men they were, what lives they led, and what their contemporaries thought of them. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not, however egotistical as the nineteenth, and no "memoirs," "reminiscences," "recollections," and such-like books, were issued either by notable men themselves, or, as nowadays, by those who had merely known the notable men. But if details of how these men lived are wanting, the evidence that they did live, and lived to good purpose, is plentiful. They are known to us by their works.
To deal at all fully with the developments of the printing press would require several volumes of this size, and all that has been attempted is to present, so far as is possible, sketches of the lives of some of those most prominently concerned in that development, along with brief mention of the kind of work to which they owe their fame; and also briefly to indicate the extraordinary progress which has been made during the present century, since the invention of the steam printing press. So great has been this progress, that printing is now carried on in quarters of the globe which, within comparatively recent years, were quite untouched by Western Civilization.
Today, indeed, the printing press may be said to have carried its triumphs into every corner of the world, and to be employed in the service of nearly all languages. Indeed, in some countries, native compositors are employed in setting up the type for English newspapers, although wholly unacquainted with the English tongue - and such compositors do their work too, I am told, with extraordinary accuracy.