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Johann
Gutenberg: Genuine Inventor and Benefactor of Mankind
May 7, 2008 In
a previous essay, NASA,
the Aerospace Welfare Queen, we explored what happens when technology
is grafted onto big-government militarism and the bread-and-circuses
mentality of the state. The result? The kind of scientific
“achievement” described by Ayn Rand as Project
X in her novel Atlas Shrugged.
Not very inspiring. But to avoid being as negative as Annie
Wilkes in the Steven King film, Misery,
this essay will be uplifting. It will focus on a true benefactor of
mankind, Johann
Gutenberg, the inventor of printing with moveable metal type. Better
yet, it will show that his innovative application of printing technologies
was not only a showcase example of market anarchism, but a greater source
of benefit to mankind than state-sponsored technologies can ever hope to
be. It is a story not only of innovation, but of immigration, opposition
to politically connected interests, and freedom of information. Remember
the Millennium? Nearly
ten years ago—in time for the millennium celebrations—Johann Gutenberg
(ca. 1400-1468) was singled out as the greatest inventor of the past 1,000
years by the British Broadcasting Company ( Fact
and Fiction: The Discovery of Printing First,
let’s look at what Gutenberg did and didn’t do. He did not invent
either book printing or moveable type. In The
Gutenberg Bible, James Thorpe, former director of the Huntington
Library, points out that the earliest known wood-block printing of a book
took place in 9th century Copying
Books by Hand In
Europe until the time of Gutenberg, books were copied by hand, usually on
some type of parchment (the skin of an adult sheep, goat, or cow) or on
vellum (skin from a newborn calf). During the early Middle Ages, most of
this copying took place at monasteries in a scriptorium,
but by the 13th century, busy manuscript-copying establishments
were located in major cities—usually near the early universities where
books were in demand. Wherever manuscript copies were made, however, they
contained errors. The quill pens used by copyists—usually made of goose
feathers—required frequent refills from ink pots, and the tedium of
copying led to errors consisting of repeated or omitted portions of text.
Even the introduction of wood-block printing in The
Printing Press in Action The
idea of printing with reusable pieces of durable, moveable type held
definite advantages for Europeans. Since the Latin alphabet had only 20
basic letters (not counting rarely used letters and those of Greek
origin), only a limited range of metal pieces of type had to be cast and
replicated. Once created, these pieces of type could be arranged into
orderly rows and pages of text on a printing forme.
The letters were inked up, and damp paper or parchment was lowered onto
them to receive the ink impression. The result was hundreds of nearly
identical copies of books. Once a set of pages were printed, the pieces of
type could be reassembled again and again to print other pages and books
until they finally wore out after many uses. All things considered,
printing with re-usable, metal type yielded savings in labor and cost,
greater accuracy and consistency in the final product, and a remarkable
increase in the volume of books available. A
Market-Driven Process The
invention of printing, however, did not occur in a vacuum. Like any other
product, it was subject to market conditions to which Gutenberg responded
in an entrepreneurial way. We already have seen how the Western
alphabet—with its limited set of letters—played a supporting role in
the success of European printing. To this, we can add the availability of paper
in 15th century Gutenberg
was responsible for the print process itself, and his story has been
outlined by Christopher de Hamel in The
Book: A History of the Bible. As a stepping stone to the invention of
printing, however, Gutenberg may have developed a mechanical-stamping
process in the late 1430s. Details of his metal-stamping process, however,
are unclear, and what little we know is based on the much-debated record
of a lawsuit that was filed after the death of one of his business
partners. Nonetheless, it appears that while living in Strassburg,
Gutenberg and his partners intended to mass-produce small, inexpensive
convex mirrors by using Gutenberg’s metal-stamping process. They planned
to sell the mirrors to pilgrims visiting the holy relics in the city of
Aachen. The relics were displayed every seven years, and pilgrims would
pin the expensive mirrors to their hats, or they would hold them up as
they viewed the holy objects. The mirrors would reflect—and thus
capture—some of the spiritual presence of the relics. Unfortunately,
Gutenberg and his partners miscalculated the date of the pilgrimage (or
perhaps it was changed); the pilgrimage took place in 1440 instead of
1439. This delay and the partner’s death led to the failure of the
enterprise. Nonetheless, this business venture may have contributed to
Gutenberg’s later innovations when he moved to the city of Mainz in
1448. Note, however, that this was an entirely private
endeavor. No risk was forced upon taxpayers. Gutenberg’s
Test Projects In
Mainz, where Gutenberg
eventually established his printing operation, a legal document once again
provides the few reliable details that have been passed down to us. The
document (called the “Helmasperger Instrument” after the notary who
signed it on November 6, 1455) describes the attempted recovery of two
loans taken out by Gutenberg in 1450 and 1452. It also mentions
Gutenberg’s project as “the work of the books,” and it is described
in Johann Gutenberg and His Bible,
by Janet Ing. Despite a settlement that obligated Gutenberg to repay with
interest any money not used on the project, the settlement may have
favored Gutenberg—despite a legend that he was bankrupted as a result.
Furthermore, it is possible that Gutenberg continued to print books in
Mainz during the 1450s even though his moneylender (Johann Fust) and his
assistant (Peter Schöffer) became partners in their own printing business
there. In
1454, the year before he printed his Bible, Gutenberg completed a few
smaller projects, and they testify to his entrepreneurial spirit. They
included a pamphlet warning of the danger posed by the Turks, who had just
captured the ancient capital of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. In addition,
there were four printings of indulgences,
which were sold to raise funds for a war against the Turks. He also
printed a New Year’s greeting in German and a small Latin grammar. These
small projects indicate a businessman who was “ramping up” his
operation for a bigger undertaking, such as the printing of the Bible.
Once again, Gutenberg’s projects were entirely for
profit. Marketing
the Bible In
the case of the Bible, Gutenberg was targeting a specific group of
customers: religious institutions such as monasteries. They were his best
potential customers because they needed large Bibles for public readings.
Only a limited number of wealthy individuals could afford the other
copies. Providing a glimpse into Gutenberg’s sales effort, we have a
letter written by Aeneas Silvius, who subsequently became Pope
Pius II in 1458. He personally witnessed Gutenberg displaying several
sections of his not-yet-completed Bible in October 1454 at a conference of
nobles in Frankfurt. The purpose of the conference was to rally public
support for war against the Turks. Gutenberg clearly perceived the
anti-Turk hysteria as a boon to his sales effort—a kind of
rally-round-the-Bible marketing opportunity that exploited Christian fears
of Turks and their faith—Islam. From the letter of Aeneas Silvius, we
also learned that Gutenberg had
pre-sold every copy of his Bible before its completion. Furthermore,
there is undisputed evidence that Gutenberg had to increase the size of
his print-run by about 33% to meet the high demand. This required him to
re-set (with type) and re-print additional pages of some early sections of
his Bible and purchase additional paper and parchment. The re-printed
sections of his Bible contain subtle differences that can be seen today in
the surviving copies. Short-Term
Benefits of Printing The
scale of the Gutenberg Bible project was astonishing for its time. Each
printed Bible
consists of two volumes totaling 1,286 pages and measuring 11-½ by 16
inches. They are set in two columns of large, Gothic, black-letter type
with 40 to 42 lines per page, and they can be read at a distance of three
feet. Approximately 160 to 180 copies were printed—75% on paper and the
rest on parchment. Paper copies weigh 30 pounds each, and parchment copies
weigh 50 pounds—each requiring the skins of about 160 animals (over
6,000 skins for all of the copies). Although the Latin alphabet has only
20 letters, a complete set of metal upper- and lowercase type used to
create the Bible—including abbreviations, diphthongs, and punctuation
marks—consisted of 290 characters. Four to six employees were busy
setting type, and the print office held 100,000 printed pages stacked up
for binding at the conclusion of the project. Today, only 48 copies
survive—36 on paper, 12 on parchment. Only two parchment and four paper
copies are in the The
influence of Gutenberg’s Latin Bible was tremendous, and by the end of
the 15th century, 80 more Bible editions were printed in Long-Term
Benefits of Printing The
creation of large numbers of books was not the only spin-off benefit of
Gutenberg’s invention. The abundance of books was reflected in the
growing size and number of libraries as well. Before the advent of
printing, libraries existed only in a few centers of learning and were
very small. In While
the literacy rate rose, there also was a shift from oral
learning to learning through reading—which
made self-education even more widespread. There also was greater access to
ideas and an increase in knowledge on the part of literate men and women.
This helped to unleash an era of innovation and invention that continues
today. Some people even credit the success of the Protestant
revolt to the printing press. If we consider the World Wide Web to be
an outgrowth of the printing process, the number of “publishing”
centers continues to grow. For example, a Netcraft
survey compiled in June 2006 identified 85,541,228 sites. Immigration:
We
already have seen how the art of paper-making had its roots in Special
Interests Oppose Innovation With
its many benefits, one would think that the invention of moveable-type
printing was universally hailed, but vested interests can be counted on to
oppose changes that threaten them. Just ask aerospace engineers how they
would feel if competitors such as Burt
Rutan and SpaceShipOne eliminated their NASA gravy train. In the case
of 15th century printing, calligraphers and illuminators levied
political pressure to restrict its spread. Resistance was strongest in the
city of Printing…or
Imitation Handwriting? To
understand the early opposition of calligraphers, we must remember that
Gutenberg and other early printers did not conceive of printing as a way
to produce a new kind of product. They viewed their technology as a way to
produce handwriting.
Consequently, calligraphers viewed printing as a direct competitor.
Perhaps the greatest authority on early printing, Konrad Haebler (author
of The Study of Incunabula as
well as The German
Incunabula and The Italian
Incunabula), wrote extensively about the goals and practices of early
printers. He explained that early printers—to comply with the aesthetic
demands of their customers—were compelled to use confusing (to us) abbreviations
in their printed products even though they were rendered entirely
unnecessary by the new technology. It is easy to understand why scribes
made use of these labor-saving shortcuts: it reduced the amount of writing
they had to do. But the printing press made it possible—and easy—to
spell out every letter of every word without additional effort. In fact,
the creation of unique pieces of type to imitate abbreviations (and
diphthongs) was an additional burden and expense. As Haebler explained,
however, any attempt to break this rule resulted in products that could
not be sold because they did not comply with the exacting standards of
customers. Book buyers expected to see abbreviations, and printers gave
them what they wanted. It was only in later years that they could depart
from this imitation of manuscript models and take full advantage of the
new technology. In a similar way, modern architects only gradually
understood the new design possibilities made available by building
materials such as steel and glass curtain-wall. The result is the sleek,
geometric, glass-sheathed structures of today’s skyline. The
Customer Is Always Right Haebler
described other characteristics of manuscripts that also were preserved by
early printers. For example, the beginning of new chapters and other
important sections of a book included oversized initial capital letters
that were several lines high and projected into the body of the text and
into the margins as well. Early printers—including Gutenberg—left
large blank spaces in their columns of neat text so that calligraphers and
illustrators could fill them in with large capital letters and decorations
by hand. To this day, many incunabula
contain all of their original blank spaces because rubricators
were never hired to decorate them. In
a similar attempt to replicate the standards of hand-written text, books
on medicine, law, and theology were printed using Gothic
type almost exclusively. Otherwise, they could not be sold.
Furthermore, when the art of printing spread from the German-speaking
world to Italy in 1465 (with the arrival at Subiaco of German printers Conrad
Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz), Roman letters—the ancestor of our
Times Roman font—were used for the first time instead of Gothic letters.
Roman type
became the necessary standard—in Italy—for all printed works of
philosophy, literature, science, art, and authors from classical
antiquity. It suited the aesthetic tastes of the learned men of Italy, who
had imbibed a humanistic Renaissance education and had an appreciation for
ancient Roman inscriptions. Again, the customer always came first. Below
is an example of what is now considered the perfected form of Roman type,
printed in 1478 by Nicolaus Jenson in Venice (from Plutarch’s Lives,
or Vitae illustrium virorum).
Epitaph
for a Genuine Benefactor It
is not surprising that Gutenberg’s name faded from memory shortly after
his invention. His Bible is not dated, and it does not mention him by
name. In fact, Gutenberg’s connection with his Bible was only recovered
many years later and after much research and controversy. Nonetheless, a
rector of the University of Paris, Professor Guillaume Fichet, wrote an
early testimony to Gutenberg on December 31, 1470, just a few years after
Gutenberg’s death. Can anyone say anything remotely similar about NASA
and its pseudo-accomplishments? “Not far from the city of Mainz, there appeared a certain Johann whose surname was Gutenberg, who, first of all men, devised the art of printing, whereby books are made, not by a reed, as did the ancients, nor with a quill pen, as do we, but with metal letters, and that swiftly, neatly, beautifully. Surely this man is worthy to be loaded with divine honors by all the Muses, all the arts, all the tongues of those who delight in books, and is all the more to be preferred to gods and goddesses in that he has put the means of choice within reach…of mortals devoted to culture. That great Gutenberg has discovered things far more pleasing and more divine, in carving out letters in such a fashion that whatever can be said or thought can by them be written down at once and transcribed and committed to the memory of posterity.” (Translation: James Thorpe) |
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