Let me start with a well known one, at the early stages of typography:
This is the story about Laurens Janszoon Koster sailor and innkeeper from the city of Harleem (Netherlands). A sunny day around 1430 he was going for a stroll with his grandchildren in the Haarlemmerhout woods (near the city), where he started to play a game by cutting letters from pieces of old beech trees, just for the amusement of his siblings. After a while he started making the game more interesting by using ink and printing the letters, and that was when he realized about the real possibilities of this process...
Koster begun by improving the ink, then he mounted a small printing workshop. While doing his first job (Speculum Humanae Salvationis) he changed the wood type by a stronger metal type (made of lead & tin), and his business started to grow and grow, so he hired more people.
On Christmas eve, 1941 while Koster was at church with his family, one of his employees called Johannes went to the printing workshop and stole all of his metal type, then fled to Mainz. A year after that, Johannes Gutenberg printed his first jobs in Mainz.
This story was written by Hadrianus Junius in 1568, he also wrote that another employee of Koster 's printing workshop told him about Johannes being the thief of the metal type... somthing like the bad Santa Claus that made Koster miserable. Some say that there are still metal wine cups forged with Koster's metal type...
Here is the first portrait of Koster holding a type piece, with a very interesting look...
There is a statue of him in the city of Harleem:
Source (mainly): "Type: the secret history of letters" by Simon Loxley
