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Updated: June 13, 2025
On these great occasions I used to visit Koster & Bial's on Twenty-third Street, a long, low building, very dark and very smoky, and which on those nights was blocked with excited mobs of students, wearing different colored ribbons and shouting the cries of their different colleges. I envied and admired these young gentlemen, and thought them very fine fellows indeed.
For from Greely Square to Eighth Street, from the cork room of Koster & Bial's to the purlieus of old Clinton Place, all the "off color" men and women of New York's "fly" circles knew and feared the steady eyes gleaming through the cerulean lenses. "He's a deep one, the Professor," grunted the Hanoverian barkeeper. "Vat a lot 'e knows!"
One thing seems pretty clear, which is, that, whether or not Koster was the printer, the first block-books were produced somewhere in Holland, as several are in Dutch, a language seldom, if ever, printed out of its own country.
The Princess was a music-hall artist who imagined she was a dead and gone Egyptian Princess; and the queerest of all, 'Arry Axes was also a music-hall singer who imagined himself Chevalier you know, the great Koster artist and that's how we took him for a Frenchman.
About the year 1430 the invention of typography is ascribed to Laurence Koster, of Haarlem; and whether or not he is entitled to this honorable distinction, certain it is that the Dutch were among the first to engraft this useful art among them; and fate ordained that a century later it should reward its country with liberty.
And then for another tit-bit I explained to him how I had discovered Sally at Koster and Bial's, in New York, five years ago, and made her my sister for stage purposes because I was lonely, and liked her American simplicity and twang. He departed full of tea and satisfaction. It was our last night at the Aquarium. The place was crammed. The houses where I performed were always crammed.
Both agree in ascribing the invention of book-printing from wooden blocks, as well as the first germ of movable wood and metallic type printing, to Haarlem; and Junius adds the name of Laurence Koster. His surname of Koster is derived from his office, which was that of custodian, sexton, or warden of the Cathedral Church of Haarlem.
The reception which this opera met with at the hands of the public when it was produced in October was also due to him; but in consequence of the fairly good rendering of a few brilliant passages, and more especially on account of the enthusiastic recognition of Frau Koster in the part of Adriano, it might have been concluded from all the external signs that the opera had been fairly successful.
The pretensions of Haarlem and Koster have for more than a century been a matter of fierce controversy; and there have been upward of one hundred and fifty volumes written for or against, without any approach to a satisfactory decision.
He, dressed as a Dutch pastor, and calling himself Pastor van Meuwen, and I, calling myself Koster, arrived at a small quiet hotel called the Westfälischer-Hof, in the Neustadische-strasse, on the north of the Linden.
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