DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

¢ 2% daubed them with colour and stamped them on paper, but of course the letters came out backwards. He therefore cut out the letters backwards from the bark, so that the impression came right on the paper. It struck him that if he could thus print his grandchildren’s names, he might go a step further and print the letters of books, and by that means he gradually arrived at the formation of wooden types. Coster died in 1440 of the plague, but, as patents did not exist in the fifteenth century, much to his annoyance a dishonest workman, named John, had pilfered his seeret one Christmas Eve. ‘Cursed be my fate,’ he is said to have exclaimed, ‘ that I should have shared my bread with sueh a wretch!’ The identity of the thief has remained a mystery. It has been fastened, though with no show of reason, on John Gutenberg, the real father of the art of printing. Gutenberg was born in 1410, of noble parents, at Mayence on the Rhine. His father was Frielo of Giinsfleisch (or gooseflesh), and his mother, whose name John adopted, was Elsa of Gudenberg (or Goodmount). Comparatively little is known of the private life of the man to whom we are so largely in- debted. But so much is known, that at the age of twenty-seven he was sued for a breach of pro- mise of marriage by a well-favoured maiden, Em-