ize of an entire page; but because the labor and
cost of that way was so great, they devised movable wooden type,
perforated and joined one to another by a thread.

Bibliander does not say that he had ever seen such type himself, but
Dan Speckle or Specklin (d. 1589) who ascribed the invention to
Mentelin, asserts that he saw some of these wooden type at
Straussburg; and Angelo Roccho asserted in 1591 that he had seen at
Venice type perforated and joined one to another by a thread, but he
does not state whether they were of wood or of metal.

There is a theory also that between block-printing and printing with
movable cast-metal type there was an intermediate stage of printing
with "sculpto-fusi" type; that is, a type of which the shank had to be
cast in a quadrilateral mold and the characters or letters engraved
afterwards by hand. This theory was suggested by some one who could
not believe in wooden type and yet wished to account for the marked
irregularities of the type used to print the earliest books.

Granting that all the earlier works of typography preserved to us are
impressions of cast-metal type, there are still differences of
opinion, especially among practical printers and type-founders, as to
the probable methods employed to cast them. It is considered unlikely,
although not impossible, that the invention of printing passed all at
once from xylography to the perfect typography of the punch, matrix,
and mold.

The types that Coster made and used were supposed to have been
manufactured in one of three or four probable ways.

Bernard believed that the first movable cast-metal type were molded in
sand, since that method of casting was known to the silversmiths and
trinket-makers of the fifteenth century. In substantiation of his
theory he exhibits a specimen of a word cast as a unit for him by this
process, roughly similar to a modern linotype slug.

A second suggested mode was that of casting in clay molds, by a method
very similar to that used in the sand process, and resulting in like
peculiarities and variations in the type.

Ottley, in his "Invention of Printing," was the chief exponent of this
theory. He believed that type were made by pouring molten lead into
molds of clay or plaster, after the ordinary manner used from time
immemorial in casting statues and other articles of metal.

The imperfections in the type cast by the sand and clay processes--the
difficulty of uneven heights in the vario