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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