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German Culture: A Life in Print - Johannes Gutenberg and the Printing Press

Robert Easton

Johannes Gutenberg is widely credited as being the father of printing in Europe.

Certain printing methods were available long before his time, but they were too slow and it was Gutenberg who made them practically applicable. Prior to his work on the printing press, it took scribes approximately twenty years to transcribe a single copy of the Bible.

Most books were then chained to the shelves, available only to a privileged few. His inventions meant that reading finally became available to a wider audience, a precursor to the Renaissance and the modern scientific age.

In a recent BBC poll he was voted the greatest inventor of the millennium, with one voter commenting 'without the written word being available to all, the world would have stayed in the hands of a small few'.

Of course, you can never please everyone, one Catholic website pointed out that Gutenberg's invention 'unfortunately brought about an internal revolution in the intellectual world in the direction of what is profane and free from restraint'.

The German poet Fredrich Schiller wrote that 'Through a printed organ a single hothead could speak to millions'.

Unfortunately little is known for certain about Gutenberg himself. His full name was Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, a name which derived from his paternal ancestors and the place where they lived.

Gensfleisch literally means gooseflesh, allegedly because someone in the family had pale, pimpled skin. He was born in Mainz around the year 1400, the third of three children.

His family held the hereditary position of 'Hausgenossen', or 'retainers of the household', the master of the archiepiscopal mint. In this capacity he would have acquired considerable skill in metal working. He was born in Mainz but did a lot of his work on the printing press in Strasbourg - possibly in some kind of exile imposed for tax evasion.

Whatever his success as an inventor, he was never a very successful businessman. He borrowed a lot of money from several different people, but mostly from his business partner Johannes Fust. Fust became impatient after many years of successive loans produced no profit.

Finally, just as they were ready to begin printing, Fust sued Gutenberg for 2026 gulden (the local currency), enough to build an entire street in Mainz. Gutenberg was bankrupted, Fust took possession of all the printing equipment, and made himself a fortune.

Fust became the first man to print a book with his name on it, and Gutenberg spent most of his life in poverty.

In 1465 Gutenberg was finally given financial assistance by the city of Mainz which gave him 2,180 litres of grain annually, as well as wine and cloth for 'personal use'. He is thought to have died in 1468, and lies buried beneath the Franziskus church in Mainz.

The first evidence of printing was in first century China, where it was used to produce Buddhist sutras. Movable print (where type could be reused) was first invented in eleventh century China, but not widely used, partly due to the complex nature of the Chinese writing system.

It is not clear whether Gutenberg was aware of the Chinese method, but his printing press spread rapidly across Europe, within thirty years there were functional presses in cities as far away as Britain, Hungary and Spain.

Gutenberg's innovations were to redesign the press, and invent an alloy suitable for printing blocks, oil based inks, and a mould for casting types. Gutenberg's first successful print-run was actually of a section of a Latin textbook, but it was when he began printing Bibles that the impact of his invention was really felt.

He began selling Bibles at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1455. The price was the equivalent of three years wages for the average clerk, but this was still significantly cheaper than a handwritten Bible.

This Bible was known as the 42-line Bible because of the number of lines on each page, and was 1282 pages long. By 1500, 40,000 copies of the Bible had been printed in Europe.

Ironically the mass production of the Bible did a lot to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church, by making knowledge of Christianity available to a wider audience and taking away the Church's monopoly on education.

There are still eleven complete surviving copies of Gutenberg's original print run, and scores of partial copies in existence. The last Gutenberg Bible to come to auction went for $2.4 million.

Some claim the Dutchman Laurens Coster was the true inventor of the printing press, nevertheless few inventions can have had a more crucial role in the course of human history. Mark Twain once said 'The whole world admits unhesitatingly; and there can be no doubt about this, that Gutenberg's invention is the incomparably greatest event in the history of the world'.

Of course you have to bear in mind Mark Twain made his living by writing books.

Other articles by Robert Easton
The Amber Room
The Berlin Wall
Austrian Beer
Austrian Food
German Beer
German Cars
German Food
German Music
German Philosophers
German Politics
German Stereotypes
Hiking in Austria
Johannes Gutenberg
Michael Schumacher
Sex in Germany
Sex in Austria
Sex in Switzerland
Skiing in Switzerland
Swiss Stereotypes
William Tell

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