The claims set up on behalf of movable wood types as the means by which the _Speculum_ or any other of the earliest books was printed, are not only historically unsupported, but the whole weight of practical evidence rejects them.
Dismissing them, therefore, from our consideration, a new theory confronts us, which at first blush seems to supply, if not a more probable, certainly a more possible, stepping-stone between Xylography and Typography. We refer to what Meerman, the great champion of this theory, calls the “sculpto-fusi” { 7} characters: types, that is, the shanks of which have been cast in a quadrilateral mould, and the “faces” engraved by hand afterwards.
Meerman and those who agree with him engage a large array of testimony on their side. In the reference of Celtis, in 1502, to Mentz as the city “quæ prima sculpsit solidos ære characteres,” they see a clear confirmation of their theory; as also in the frequent recurrence of the same word “sculptus” in the colophons of the early printers. Meerman, indeed, goes so far as to ingeniously explain the famous account of the invention given by Trithemius in 1514,[14] in the light of his theory, to mean that, after the rejection of the first wooden types, “the inventors found out a method of casting the bodies only (fundendi formas) of all the letters of the Latin alphabet from what they called matrices, on which they cut the face of each letter; and from the same kind of matrices a method was in time discovered of casting the complete letters (æneos sive stanneos characteres) of sufficient hardness for the pressure they had to bear, which letters before—that is, when the bodies only were cast—they were obliged to cut.”[15]
After this bold flight of translation, it is not surprising to find that Meerman claims that the _Speculum_ was printed in “sculpto-fusi” types, although in the one page of which he gives a facsimile there are nearly 1,700 separate types, of which 250 alone are _e_’s.
Schoepflin, claiming the same invention for the Strasburg printers, believes that all the earliest books printed there were produced by this means; and both Meerman and Schoepflin agree that engraved metal types were in use for many years after the invention of the punch and matrix, mentioning, among others so printed, the Mentz _Psalter_, the _Catholicon_ of 1460, the Eggestein _Bible_ of 1468, and even the _Nideri Præceptorium_, printed at Strasburg as late as 1476, as “literis in ære sculptis.”