Another picture of Laurens Janszoon Coster. Two angels hold lines on which the printed paper is drying. In this rather stylized picture one may notice the rather big bar and the way the inking balls are kept with the inking sides towards each other. The open books show musical notes: a specialism that a printer might want to advertise in this way.

A printer is pulling the handle while his colleague rubs the inking balls. Gaskell thinks that one page was printed in 14 or 15 seconds, but that is certainly not possible with the heavy machines of the seventeenth century - perhaps that it could be done with a well-oiled and light going Stanhope press in the early nineteenth century, when a page was printed in one pull and when the better quality ink was applied with a roller instead of the far more difficult inking balls with their thick and sticky ink. A speed of 250-300 sheets a day, as Michael Pollak suggests, seems rather low. A speed of about 80 sheets in one hour might be possible. The working spirit being what it was, in those happy days before Puritanism made us work really hard, a total output of about 600-700 sheets for one press a day would be a good guess. A figure that is roughly the same as the supposed size of an edition in the seventeenth century. Thus making the arithmetic for the printer simpler. Mercury and Minerva symbolize the printing press, bringing forth news and wisdom, while making money. The man on the right is Laurens Janszoon Coster in what was imagined to be the costume of a fifteenth century man of learning. He is holding a piece of movable type.