On the Laurens Jz. Coster Project

The Project L. Jz. Coster is an idealistic project, carried out by volunteers only. Nobody is making any money out of it. For this reason we have confined ourselves to those texts which are out of copyright. All texts have been converted into a hypertext format and will be annotated with glosses and links to sources.

In the 19th century some Dutch scholars believed that Laurens Janszoon Coster was the real inventor of book printing and that Johannes Gutenberg had stolen the idea from him. Coster's home town, Haarlem, still has his statue standing on the central square. Today we think that the craft of printing books was really invented in China. In spite of this we thought naming our project after Coster was the right thing to do, when one of our main examples if the American Project Gutenberg.