Threads of Gutenberg’s Life Woven Into a Tapestry

GUTENBERG

How One Man Remade

the World With Words

by John Man

John Wiley & Sons

312 pages, $24.95

After Johann Gutenberg died and was buried in 1468, a monument was erected on his grave that called him “Inventor of the art of printing” and “Deserver of the best from all nations and tongues.”

No simpler nor more accurate description of the master from Mainz could be devised. In a few short years, beginning in 1450, he had changed the world forever with his printing press and movable type.

When Gutenberg undertook this work, according to John Man, the author of books about the alphabet and Mongolia, he wanted to make a lot of money by supplying the Roman Catholic Church with Bibles and missals. He made the money, but in a hundred years his invention would also rend the church in two.

His invention, which the Church first praised as helpful, was soon denounced as devilish, so destructive to the Church was the release of the quick and easy spread of knowledge and opinion made possible by Gutenberg’s invention.

There are no recent books in English about Gutenberg. That is possibly because the known facts of his life are few. Man generously acknowledges the magisterial account published in German in 1939 by Aloys Ruppel.

Man weaves on the spare warp of what is known of the master printer’s life and work a tapestry of life in the 15th century, centered on the powerful city of Mainz, where Gutenberg was born, perhaps in 1400, and where he did much of his great work. It is a tale of a Europe with a small population, anchored by more or less independent cities and archbishoprics, emerging into modern capitalist life against a background of wars, the plague and the Roman Catholic Church splintered by divisions and deeply corrupt.

What Gutenberg did was dazzling in its simplicity. He put together two well-known existing technologies to form a third that changed mankind forever.

There was the technology of the wine press, in which a screw was turned to force down the cover of a barrel to force the juice from the grapes it contained. There was the technology of the punch, by which a long metal bar imprinted with a pattern on its end was struck against a matrix of softer metal (molten metal could then be poured into this imprint, or mould, to make a coin or medal).

By creating matrices, then cutting them into single blocks, Gutenberg devised movable type. Man emphasizes that the creation of Gutenberg’s first and greatest work, the Bible, required large amounts of money and manpower.

Gutenberg’s Bible appeared in 30 to 45 copies on vellum--dried and stretched animal skin--and 130 to 150 copies on high-quality paper. A paper Bible cost a third of a vellum one.

The new technology spread quickly, first in Germany, then throughout Europe. In Venice the printer Aldus Manutius printed books of the Greek and Latin classics, marked with the sign of a dolphin and an anchor that are to this day objects of imitated but unsurpassed elegance. Gutenberg’s Bible was a thing of beauty, two columns of 42 lines side-by-side on each page set with ample spacing top and bottom, left and right.

By 1500, Man estimates, Europe may have had 1,000 printing works employing between 10,000 and 20,000 men. Before Gutenberg, it took a month or two to produce by manuscript one book; after, one could make 500 copies in a week. By 1500, Man writes, Europe’s presses had produced 15 or 20 million books.

Man takes the reader on various paths through the terrain in which Gutenberg’s invention appeared. In England, printer William Tyndale’s English Bible helped standardize that fluid language. Martin Luther, who rode the new invention to the turbulent Reformation, did the same for German with his Bible.

Curiously, the world of Islam, which had done so much to transmit to the modern age the philosophy and science of the Greeks, was not interested. Man, with the help of other scholars, speculates that since Islam believed the pure word of God was transmitted only by memorizing, then speaking the words of the Koran, printing was of no utility.

Printing has, of course, since conquered the world and has been followed by the exponentially vaster Internet. The difference between them seems to be that books can be beautiful, and you can hold them in your hands.