People—and that includes professional historians—like to speculate sometimes on what were the ‘most important events’ or ‘most important rulers’ or ‘most important inventions.’ While none of those questions really have a single answer, it’s hard to imagine that Johannes Gutenberg and his movable-type printing system would be far from the top of any list.
And yet, the museum that honors him in his home town doesn’t focus on the inventor or the invention, but rather on the impact that it, and printed or published words and images have had on our world since.
Perhaps that starts, in part, because despite numerous statues and paintings, we have no idea what he looked like and not a lot more about his life. Born into a relatively wealthy Mainz family around 1400, had some education though it’s not known where, living and working in Strasbourg by 1434 but forced to leave over a broken marriage promise in 1444 and back in Mainz by 1448.
In Strasbourg, he apparently did his research, working out not just movable type, but adapting an agricultural press for printing. By 1452, on borrowed money, he was in the printing business, and by 1455 had begun printing the famous bible. Within a few years, he had fallen out with his partners, and by 1468 he was dead. Plenty of room for embellishment, but few facts!
The museum visit begins with a surprise; while its permanent home is under construction near the Mainz Cathedral, the Gutenberg Museum is sharing space with the city’s Natural History museum and its mammoth. The present exhibits are a selection from the larger collection the museum has amassed since its founding in 1900.
The exhibits on the present site focus on ways in which the printed word has affected society, using the categories of ‘Shaping Opinions,’ ‘Displaying Splendor,’ ‘Describing the World,’ ‘Creating Knowledge,’ and ‘Passing Time.’
Two examples of describing the world, and the difficulty of it. An early atlas, Cosmographia, used maps of the 15th century (not yet including the Americas) and text from the writings of Ptolemy of Alexandria. The model map of Mainz is incomplete; it represents the city in Gutenberg’s time, but with only the details about which there is certainty.
Passing Time implies the existence of leisure time, first for the rich, and by the 19th century widely for at least some of the common folk. Printers made not only sheets that could be cut and assembled to make little theaters like this, but also the texts of plays that could be performed with them.
Shaping Opinions is an obvious effect of the development of printing. Such key documents of the Reformation as Luther’s 95 Theses spread rapidly in printed form in 1517; a hundred years before that wouldn’t have been possible. Above, a polemic pamphlet by Luther.
On the other hand, the press could also produce books like this 1486 “Hammer of Witches,” with instructions on how to identify witches and justifying their persecution. It was, as the museum’s label says, “sadly popular for centuries.”
In this instance, Displaying Splendor is in the instrument rather than the publications it could produce. The 19th-century Columbian Press was a vast technological improvement over previous screw-driven presses, but its sales pitch emphasized its gold-plated ornamentation. Sound a little familiar?
Creating Knowledge is a questionable concept, it seems to me; Expanding might fit better with the widespread distribution of the known spurring interest into delving further. The German ‘General Encyclopedia of Sciences and Arts’ is given as an example, along with fascinating facts. It began publication in 1818, and eventually reached 167 volumes with 80,000 articles. It took 71 years to get to the letter P. But the German-language version of Wikipedia has 2.9 million articles and adds 350 to 400 daily!
And here’s a 16th century version of Tinder, of image cultivation. It’s essentially the dating profile of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian who wrote an epic depicting himself as a valiant knight in search of a bride, and describing all the reasons a woman might want to become his wife.
Books describe the world in other ways than maps; reports and images of travel in different places create dream destinations, even if they are not always as described. The two examples here are the well-known idealized 1849 landscapes by Hokusai that shape many people’s ideas of Japan and the less well-known ‘Romantic Rhinescapes’ of Johann Caspar Scheuren. Magazines such as this carry on the tradition.
Popular reading for pleasure… early and late renditions of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.
But perhaps enough now on the impact of the printed and published word. The museum’s other famous feature is its collection of Gutenberg Bibles and contemporary works. They’re in a special light-controlled room, opened for viewers to see the extraordinarily high quality of both the typography and printing. If feels unexpected for what was then still a new technology!
Gutenberg produced about 180 copies of the work, some on vellum and some on paper. Forty-nine are known to survive, and two are in the museum, along with other rare and unique volumes, including this 1497 Ship of Fools from Basel, a measure of how quickly printing spread.
The movable type method was not the only one used in the 15th century using presses modeled on Gutenberg’s. Block books were made, with each page carved as a single piece and then inked and pressed to paper. It was useful for books with large illustrations, but the blocks took a long time to produce, corrections weren’t possible, and two-sided printing was difficult. They were largely gone within a hundred years.
Color began finding its way into books, often by having a colorist fill in spaces left for the purpose; block woodcuts could also be inserted. Gutenberg’s partners turned competitors Fust & Schöffer were among the first to regularly use color.
On an upper floor of the museum, printing equipment is on display, and is used for demonstrations and classes, a project that will be significantly expanded when the new building opens, but that won’t be until around 2030.
