or FAUST, JOHN, was a goldsmith of Mentz, and one of the three artists to whom the valuable invention of printing has been usually ascribed. The names of the other two were Guttenberg and Schoeffer. It seems impossible, however, to determine with certainty, whether Fust had any other merit in the business than that of supplying Guttenberg with money, who had been making some attempts with carved blocks at Strasburgh, before he visited Mentz. To Schoeffer, the son-in-law of Fust, we are indebted for the invention of punches and matrices, by means of which this noble art was afterwards carried to perfection. That work which may be regarded as the origin of the true typographic art, was the "Durandi Rationale Divinorum Officiorum," published in 1459, by Fust and Schoeffer, which was soon followed by a copy of the bible, both executed in a very masterly manner.

We are informed that Fust went to Paris in 1462, in order to dispose of a part of the second edition of his bible, which he was enabled to sell considerably lower than bibles in manuscript, yet some reckoned themselves overcharged by him, and some pretend that he was even accused of magic, but for the belief of this there appears to be no rational foundation. It seems certain that Fust was never in Paris after the year 1466; but that he was in that metropolis then, is proved by a note at the end of a copy of Cicero's Offices, intimating that the first profler received it from John Fust at Paris, in 1466. It is extremely probable that he died that year of the plague, to which 40,000 of the inhabitants fell a sacrifice in the months of August and September. This opinion is farther corroborated by this circumstance, that the name of Schoeffer alone was prefixed to the books which were published at Mentz after that period.

This man has been frequently confounded with John Faust, better known by the name of Dr Faustus, a pretender to the art of magic, who was first a theologian, then a student of medicine, and last of all sold himself to the devil for 24 years, at the expiration of which period it seems the devil came to carry off his purchase, and dashed out the doctor's brains against the wall about mid-night. This wretched romance has no doubt been invented by the monks, to blacken the reputation of the great Fust, whose art deprived them of the emoluments arising from the copying of manuscripts. See (History of) PRINTING.

in Architecture, the shaft of a column, or the part comprehended between the base and the capital, called also the naked.