Johannes Gutenberg

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1455, Johannes Gutenberg completed a Bible with 42 lines on each page, and about 180 copies came off his press in Mainz. Three quarters were printed on paper, the rest on vellum. A single copy sold for 30 florins, roughly three years' wages for a clerk. Yet a handwritten Bible could take a lone scribe more than a year to prepare, so even at that price the printed book was a bargain. The man behind it was a German inventor and craftsman who built a wooden press resembling the agricultural screw presses of his day. His full name was Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, and he was born in a wealthy city on the Rhine. How does a patrician's son with no surviving record of his youth end up sued into bankruptcy by his own financier? Why do scholars still argue about how he actually made his letters? And how did a craft secret he called enterprise and art reshape the centuries that followed?

• 2. A Patrician Childhood

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  Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden, Gutenberg's father, was a patrician and merchant likely in the cloth trade, who later served among the master of the accounts for the city of Mainz. In 1386 he married his second wife, Else Wyrich, the daughter of a shopkeeper. Johannes was probably the youngest of their three children, after a brother named Friele and a sister named Else. Because Else Wyrich was not of patrician lineage, scholars commonly assume the marriage complicated Gutenberg's future. His mother's commoner status meant he could never succeed his father at the mint, where Friele held a place in the Münzerhausgenossenschaft. One historian suggests this disconnect may have disillusioned him from high society and encouraged his unusual career as an inventor. The Gutenbergs belonged to the patrician class of Mainz, and their efforts to preserve their privileged status put them in frequent conflict with younger generations of guild craftsmen. A violent dispute over an election broke out in February 1411, and at least 117 patricians fled in August. Friele left too, probably with the family, and likely stayed in nearby Eltville, where Else had inherited a house on the town walls. The archbishop brokered a peace that let them return that autumn. The calm did not hold. Hunger riots forced the family out again in January 1413, back to Eltville.

• 3. The Missing Years

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  No documents survive concerning Gutenberg's childhood or youth, and one biographer noted that most books on him pass over this period with the remark that not a single fact is known. As a patrician's son, he would have been expected to learn reading and arithmetic, and a knowledge of Latin was probable since it opened the door to universities. Whether he attended a Mainz parish school, was taught in Eltville, or had a private tutor is unknown. He may have first pursued a religious career, common for the youngest sons of patricians given the safety of the many nearby churches and monasteries. A record at the University of Erfurt notes the 1418 enrollment of a student called Johannes de Altavilla, and Altavilla is the Latin form of Eltville am Rhein. After that, the trail goes cold for about fifteen years. Then in March 1434, a letter places him in Strasbourg, where he had relatives on his mother's side and appears to have served in the militia as a goldsmith. By 1437 he was instructing a wealthy tradesman in polishing gems, though where he learned the skill is a mystery. That same stretch, in 1436 or 1437, his name surfaced in court over a broken promise of marriage to a Strasbourg woman named Ennelin. The records never say whether the wedding took place.

• 4. Enterprise And Art

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  Around 1439, Gutenberg got tangled in a financial misadventure in Strasbourg, making polished metal mirrors for pilgrims bound for Aachen. The mirrors were believed to capture holy light from religious relics, and the city planned to exhibit its collection of relics from Emperor Charlemagne. A severe flood delayed the event by a year, the invested capital could not be repaid, and the scheme soured. In 1440, by tradition, he perfected and unveiled a secret of printing drawn from his research, mysteriously titled Aventur und Kunst, meaning enterprise and art. What exactly he was building, or whether he ran early trials of movable type there, is not clear. After a four-year gap, he was back in Mainz by 1448, taking out a loan from his brother-in-law Arnold Gelthus, possibly for a press. He may by then have known intaglio printing, and he is said to have worked on copper engravings with an artist called the Master of Playing Cards. His contributions to printing run deep. He devised a process for mass-producing movable type, used oil-based ink for books, built adjustable molds, and made mechanical movable type. His method for casting letters traditionally relied on a type metal alloy and a hand mould. That alloy mixed lead, tin, and antimony, melting at a relatively low temperature so casting was faster and cheaper, while still casting well and producing durable type.

• 5. The Press And The Bankruptcy

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  By 1450 the press was running, and a German poem may have been the first thing it printed. To fund the work, Gutenberg convinced the wealthy moneylender Johann Fust to lend him 800 guilders. Peter Schöffer, who became Fust's son-in-law, joined the enterprise too; he had worked as a scribe in Paris and is believed to have designed some of the first typefaces. The workshop was set up at the Humbrechthof, a property belonging to a distant relative. For the Bible project, Gutenberg borrowed another 800 guilders from Fust, and work began in 1452. The press also turned out more lucrative texts, possibly Latin grammars, and there is speculation that two presses ran at once, one for pedestrian work and one for the Bible. Among the profit-making jobs was the printing of thousands of indulgences for the church, documented from 1454 to 1455. Some time in 1456, the partnership collapsed. Fust demanded his money back and accused Gutenberg of misusing the funds. The two rounds of financing, totaling 1,600 guilders at 6 percent interest, had grown to 2,026 guilders. Fust sued at the archbishop's court, which ruled in his favor and handed him control of the Bible printing workshop. Gutenberg was effectively bankrupt. The Fust and Schöffer shop went on to produce the Mainz Psalter of August 1457, the first book in Europe to carry a printer's name and date. It proclaimed the mechanical process behind it, yet made no mention of Gutenberg at all.

• 6. The Letters Themselves

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  Some estimates suggest Gutenberg's later Bibles required as many as 100,000 individual sorts, the small metal pieces that each carried one character. Setting a single page might take half a day, and with inking, pulling impressions, hanging sheets, and distributing the type, the Gutenberg and Fust shop may have employed many craftsmen. The standard way to make type uses a hard metal punch, carved back to front, hammered into a softer copper bar to create a matrix. The matrix goes into a hand-held mould, molten type-metal is poured in, and the casting cools almost at once. One matrix can yield thousands of identical sorts, which is why the same letter looks uniform across a book and why distinct typefaces eventually emerged. Whether Gutenberg used this refined punch-and-matrix method or something cruder has long been debated, because his earliest type shows variations that nearly identical castings should not have. In 2001, the physicist Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Princeton librarian Paul Needham used digital scans of a papal bull in the Scheide Library at Princeton to compare the same letters across the printed text. Even simple characters like the hyphen carried irregularities that ink smears or metal wear could not explain. They proposed that Gutenberg pressed simple shapes in a cuneiform style onto a matrix of soft material such as sand, a mould destroyed with each casting and remade for every sort. By their account, the reusable punch-made mould did not arrive until about the 1470s. Others have read the evidence differently, and the truth remains uncertain. A rival origin story comes from a 1568 book, Batavia by Hadrianus Junius, which claims the idea reached Gutenberg from Laurens Janszoon Coster by way of Fust. Today the Coster connection is regarded as mere legend.

• 7. What The Press Unleashed

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  In 1455, copies of Gutenberg's 42-line folio Bible sold for 30 florins each, yet every copy was identical, a sharp break from handwritten manuscripts that left room for human error. Some copies were afterward rubricated or hand-illuminated in the elegant manner of the period, and the text lacked page numbers, indentations, and paragraph breaks. Today 48 substantially complete copies are known to survive, including two at the British Library that can be viewed and compared online. The wider invention reshaped human history on cultural and social fronts. The scholar Venzke calls the Renaissance, Reformation, and humanist movement unthinkable without Gutenberg's influence. The craft also drove its own dispersal, since the sacking of Mainz in 1462 sent many printers into exile. The capital of European printing shifted to Venice, where printers like Aldus Manutius spread the major Greek and Latin texts, helped by Italy's growing economy and rising literacy. Christopher Columbus owned a geography book printed with movable type, bought by his father, now held in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville. Printing fed the Reformation as well. Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses circulated widely, and his broadsheets against indulgences spread fast, an irony given that indulgence certificates were among the first things Gutenberg printed. Those broadsheets helped give rise to the newspaper, and Gutenberg came to be viewed as a proto-Protestant.

• 8. A Name That Outlasted Him

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  On the 18th of January 1465, Archbishop Adolph von Nassau recognized Gutenberg's achievements and gave him the title Hofmann, gentleman of the court. The honor carried a stipend, an annual court outfit, and tax-free allotments of 2,180 litres of grain and 2,000 litres of wine. He died in 1468 and was buried, likely as a tertiary, in the Franciscan church at Mainz; that church and its cemetery were later destroyed, and his grave is now lost. Not until 1504 was he named as the inventor of typography, in a book by Professor Ivo Wittig. The first portrait of him, almost certainly an imaginary reconstruction, appeared in 1567 in Heinrich Pantaleon's biography of famous Germans. Honors kept arriving across the centuries. Bertel Thorvaldsen sculpted a statue of him at Gutenbergplatz in Mainz in 1837, the same city that hosts the Johannes Gutenberg University and the Gutenberg Museum. In 1952 the United States Postal Service issued a five hundredth anniversary stamp for his movable-type press. In 1997, Time-Life picked his invention as the most important of the second millennium, and in 1999 the A&E Network ranked him the number one most influential person of that millennium. His name also reaches beyond Earth, attached to the asteroid 777 Gutemberga, and lives on in Project Gutenberg, the oldest digital library. Since 1968, his native city has honored him each year at the Mainz Johannisnacht, St. John's Night, a fitting nod to the saint whose feast day tradition once tied to his birth.