Give Me Twentysix Soldiers Of Lead

This saying is attributed to Johannes Gutenberg but is definitively apocryphal: the earliest traceable source is a French booklet published in 1904 — more than 400 years after Gutenberg's death around 1468. Scholars have found the metaphor of type as soldiers in a 17th-century German Latin poem about printing, but no connection to Gutenberg himself. The phrase is also attributed in various sources to Benjamin Franklin and other printers, suggesting it was a general printers' maxim that became retroactively attached to the inventor of the press.