Paper, Books and the Not-so-Original Gutenberg Printing Press
Not long ago I was wandering through the exhibits at Hamburg’s Museum der Arbeit, or Museum of Work – the second most quintessentially German thing to have ever existed, right ahead of Lübeck’s annual Kartoffeltage (potato days festival) and just behind a giant statue of David Hasselhoff smashing a wall with a musical sledgehammer.
This museum has everything related to “the industries,” from exhibits on textile manufacturing to metalworking to shipping and numerous other industries including, as the title of this piece may have given away, printing.
The machines at the museum are complex, large, and extremely “mechanical”, for lack of a better term. The printing technology on display is not nearly as old as Gutenberg’s original movable type presses as its exhibits date primarily from the past two centuries and Gutenberg was active well over 500 years ago, but it was enough to get me thinking.
The Museum of Work is a real place you can actually visit, and if you’re in Hamburg, despite its rather mundane name, it’s a pretty cool place to spend a rainy afternoon.1
This led me to look deeper into the original Gutenberg printing press with its movable type and double-page printing capabilities. I found myself thinking about how strange and disappointing it was that a machine, that to me seemed like a relatively simple concept, took such an innovative species as ours so long to invent.
The Gutenberg printing press was hardly the first of its kind. It wasn’t even the first to implement movable type like your middle school history teacher insisted. That honor, as it so often does, goes to the Chinese.
So while you’ve probably heard of Johannes Gutenberg, you probably haven’t heard of the guys who came way earlier than him, and I thought they deserved some credit.
The grand history of writing stuff down
Books are fun. They smell nice whether they’re brand new or very old. They look great on a shelf, they feel good in your hands, and they represent some of the truest expressions of sapience. These vessels of human knowledge and entertainment are one of the best ways to communicate vast amounts of thought from mind to mind in a nicely constructed, easily digested format.
But books haven’t been around forever. While they may not seem today as though they have an awful lot of complexity in their creation, in the grand scheme of history, the ability to walk into a grocery store and snag a steamy bargain rack romance novel off the shelf has been severely limited by the time and literacy proficiency required to produce them and a considerable lack of Stephenies Meyer.
This process was revolutionized, in Europe, at least, by our man Johannes Gutenberg, yet another early Renaissance personality, consistently depicted with a vacant expression and a luxurious and utterly inexplicable forked beard, fortunate enough to get a posthumous painting of himself.
Or maybe more than one.
And so on and so forth….
Other than his outstanding Dumbledore cosplay, Johannes is famous for pretty much one thing – his fancy, movable type Gutenberg printing press and the impact that it had in convincing the Western world that his methods were meaningful, efficient, and economic.
And Bibles. Really big Bibles.
But first, before any sort of printing made books a thing normal Europeans could actually have, how did we get to books in the first place? How and why did we begin writing, and why does any of this actually matter?
Let’s start at the super beginning. If you’re a smarty-pants student who stumbled across this article because you just need a citation for that paper you’re writing on Gutenberg, you can scroll down a bit to the part where it says “Johannes Gutenberg.” Or you can click this link.
The history of life and communication – the abridged version
The history of thought and the way it has been conveyed from one person or critter to another person or critter is very long and pretty intense. It has been discussed and debated for thousands of years by people way smarter than me, and it’s an epic and twisty topic to stop and think about, so I’m going to devote about two minutes to explaining it.
A couple billion years ago, life started. Kinda.
Could have been abiogenesis (primordial soup), could have been panspermia (asteroid herpes).
Could have been some other wild shit:
After a long period of blah, early critters began floating and later wiggling around. However, they lived without any brain power, just kind of chilling there, doing nothing. They were bacteria nom-nomming smaller bacteria and becoming bigger bacteria like the opening chapter of Spore.
Nobody did much reading. Or talking. Or thinking. Or anything.
Everything was lame and everyone was bored.
Skip ahead a [big] bit, and we see that flagellum-flailing pond scum folks have turned into jellyfish, which were super cool because they had nerves. This allowed parts of their body to speak to other parts of their body. Very basic, but kind of a big deal. The beginnings of a brain. These were your ancestors. Kinda surreal to think about.
Regardless, still no books.
As the eons dragged by like the opening credits of a movie made in the 70s, or the backstory of an LATG article, we eventually got our dinosaurs, birds, then cognitively much more advanced mammals, primates, and around 150-200,000 years or so2 anatomically modern humans started running around the savanna.
After a while, between 12,000-10,000 BCE, people realized that growing their own food was a lot comfier than running around in the woods all day trying to find nuts and berries, and throwing pointy sticks at enormous, dangerous animals, and just basically being exhausted and hungry all the time. This didn’t happen over night, but over the course of the next few thousand years, little settlements grew into bigger settlements, and eventually into city states and kingdoms.
Unfortunately, still no books, but we’re getting there.
The wedge is mightier than the sword – except when that sword is Roman and you can’t find your reed
Around 3,200ish BCE, the earliest attestation of what we consider to be true writing arose in the ancient Near East among the Sumerian people as what we call cuneiform.
Cuneiform is a technique of imprinting or inscribing wedge-shaped characters into a clay tablet using a blunted reed stylus or by chiseling them into stone.
We can’t be 100% certain, but evidence and logic suggest that the the use of even older forms of markers etched into stone or some other medium would have arisen from the need for accounting or trade. There is evidence of potential notation systems that may predate the Sumerian cuneiform, but they have not been definitively proven to actually encode language, and are thus not “true writing”. This could change, and I hope it does because discovering older stuff is always cool, but for now we’re not considering it writing.
Here’s how that might have worked:
Let’s say that your friendly neighborhood goatherd wants to “sell” you ten goats in exchange for monthly payments of a bucket of goat milk over the next two years.
Mr. Goatherd has a lot of goats and needs to exchange them with a lot of people other than you as well. Since nobody can accurately keep track of all the goats and all the milk and grain and daughters being exchanged, he needed to use something like circles or tally marks or little stones to make sure he knows how many goats went where and whether he was getting his payments on time.
So, after a bit of critical thinking, he grabs his chisel and some clay and gets to work on his finances in what looks a lot like a child writing in Play-Doh with a toothpick.
And here’s a copy of the famous Code of Hammurabi.3
We really don’t know how this would have played out, exactly, but I believe that a “writer” would have needed to mark down the names of his customers somehow, maybe add some notes, “That dick Agadazhmi the cart-maker ran over my foot with his cart last week, charge him one extra daughter“, etc., and obviously it caught on.
Our friend Mr. Goatherd wouldn’t have been writing prose or love letters to the stone cutter’s sister, and the first “writing” would likely have been somewhat limited to simple stuff. We’re still nowhere near needing books yet.
Unfortunately, cuneiform is a bitch to write.
You needed to press wedgie things into softened clay tablets or draw in it with a stylus or chisel or something before baking it in an oven or leaving it out in the desert sun to harden the clay. Then, of course, it was heavy as hell and nobody wanted to lug these things around.
Postmen were the sexy firefighters and lifeguards of the 33rd century BCE.
Despite the back pain, Mesopotamian cultures continued lugging these big rocks around for about 3,000 years, right up until the Romans came, saw and conquered, taking with them a bunch of slaves and properly inventoried beer.
From there on out, Greek and/or Latin alphabets, were the scripts of choice in the region, followed later by Arabic script and some other stuff. Today, the world uses a wide variety of scripts, but none of them are cuneiform.
Ancient chiropractors everywhere were very sad.
The paper revolution
You probably don’t fully appreciate just how monumental the invention of paper or parchment would have been to our ancient Near East friends with their chisels and wedges and early-onset arthritis, or how it would go on to impact global society over the course of the next several thousand years.
But first, let’s get some basic terminology straight. While technically inaccurate, in this piece I’m going to use “paper” as a catchall word for different light, flat, organic writing media because it’s easier than getting really pedantic about every single kind of paper-like material.
The history of paper is shockingly interesting and full of unknowns and major breakthroughs that changed the world in some huge ways. It may seem like an obvious invention to you and I, and in a way it is a bit disappointing that nobody figured out some of this whole writing and paper thing way earlier, but the fact that they invented it at all is certainly worth celebrating.4
Papers have been made with a ton of different products including banana fibers, tree bark and human skin, and by a bunch of different methods, such as Japanese washi paper, but these ones are the most “important” to our story:
Papyrus -The following act to cuneiform tablets; the Egyptians used the fibers of the stems of the Cyperus papyrus plant, which grows all over the place along the Nile and in other moist-er areas in the Near East, to create a relatively thick writing surface. They started doing this during the 3rd millennium BC, maybe around a thousand years after cuneiform began.
To make papyrus, the manufacturer would shuck off the outside layer of the papyrus reed, then use the sticky fibers inside to create a sort of mat on a flat surface with the strands overlapping slightly. These fibers may have been soaked in water (we’re not 100% sure) before being smashed into a flat mush, then dried.
The reason we don’t use papyrus anymore is because it’s inefficient to produce, the reeds don’t grow as commonly around the world as the trees we use to make paper, and it’s much more fragile and rough than other types of writing surface, such as parchment.
Parchment – Animal hide. Stretch it thin, dry it out, doodle all over it. Just make sure you do it right or it starts to smell. Parchment was most commonly made from the skins of goats and sheep and baby cows.5
Before modern paper became a thing we used, parchment ruled the writing world. It was much more convenient, durable, and flexible than its papyri predecessors or bulky stone or clay tablets.
Do you use parchment paper to bake? Don’t worry. Baking sheets, sometimes referred to as parchment paper, are a different kind of “parchment” made from plant material. No animals were harmed in the baking of your roast.
Except the roast…
Paper – The vegan alternative to parchment; paper is macerated (squished) plant pulp, generally from the wood of trees. They take hardwood, they make it wet, they smash it good, then presto, they have paper.
Paper as we know it was (unsurprisingly) invented by the Chinese during the first two centuries CE. An inventor and aristocrat named Cai Lun is generally given credit as the mind behind the madness. From there, its manufacture spread westward through the Middle East and we know that it was in use in Europe by at least the 11th century, when its production was improved by the advent of paper mills.
Paper was a seriously big deal. It was light, easy to produce, easy to transport, highly foldable and made for an extremely even surface, unlike papyrus, which was always on the rough side, or parchment, which is kinda icky if you think about it and takes a much longer time to make.
Johannes Gutenberg
Johannes Gutenberg – born the unnecessarily complicated Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg – was brought kicking and screaming into the world in or around 1,400 CE in the Mainz area of what was then the Holy Roman Empire and is now Germany. He came from an upper-middle class family of patricians in the goldsmithing and fabrics industries who were well connected, if not necessarily prominent in the conventional sense of the word.
Because Gutenberg had the misfortune of being born before accomplishing his own accomplishments, so often a tragedy of great accomplishers, accurate records of his life are scarce and none of the paintings or woodblock prints of his big fork-bearded face are contemporary with his lifetime. Generally, at this time, reliable records of peoples’ lives outside those of the clergy or upper nobility and royalty didn’t usually exist.
There’s a reason there’re no surviving records of Ted the turnip farmer from Turniptown. Ted didn’t have the money to pay for, nor the interest in having his biography written over the course of a full year by a scribe. He was busy digging up turnips, being poor and watching 7 of his 12 children die before the age of 3. Ted’s life was terrible and you already probably don’t want to read more about it anyway.
When Gutenberg was around 11, he and his family may have been removed from Mainz during one of those little political spats when the peasants get it into their heads that they could have better lives. As lesser nobility, his family may have been evicted by these same ungrateful, meddlesome upstarts. Following these events – if they are true – the family is believed to have moved to Eltville am Rhein. Beyond that, not an awful lot is known about young Gutenberg. After relatively little known activity, he appears to resurface around 1430 in Strasbourg.
Gutenberg probably studied at the University of Erfurt, according to enrollment records dated to 1418.6 It is also likely that he spent time under the tutelage of his father in some capacity. This is demonstrated by his knowledge of metalworking, carpentry and smithing, all of which he would use in the process of inventing his press and methods.
Sadly, despite the whole world-changing, era sparking, Renaissance creating, awakening in popular communication and the total revolution of the way people would learn and interact for pretty much ever after, Gutenberg didn’t really receive a lot of the credit he was due for his work during his lifetime.
He died in his late sixties and was buried in the Franciscan church in Mainz, which was later destroyed. His grave was lost.
Well, that sucks.
His invention was great and all, but the fact that it took people about 5,000 years from the beginning of hammering wedge shapes into clay and making a big wooden press doesn’t seem so impressive.
Good job Johannes, not so good a job everyone else.
So, how does a Gutenberg printing press work?
Thanks to its “innovative” movable type, printing with a Gutenberg printing press vastly increased the output of books and print material in Europe. In fact, between 1450 and 1500, as many books were printed as were handwritten in the entire 1,500 years prior. Something around 6 million. That may sound like a lot, but the United States’ Library of Congress contains over 16 million books and the British Library, the largest in the world, contains over 25 million – including an original Gutenberg Bible.
The basic idea of a Gutenberg printing press is pretty straightforward. You set the letters where you want them. You cover them in ink. Put paper over it and then squish it on there using a big wooden press moved by a giant wooden lever.
Well, despite the big leap forward in book production at the beginning of the Renaissance era thanks to Gutenberg’s machine, a lot of preliminary time and effort went into the printing process. Before any books can be printed, Gutenberg had to make his metal punches – called type. And he had to make a hell of a lot of them.
You can see some somewhat more modern punches here. I’m not sure about these ones, but in Gutenberg’s time each of these tiny punches had to be hand carved before being turned into a metal mold and cast individually.
Generally speaking, when an inventor makes something totally new, he also has to fabricate all of the parts. In this case, Gutenberg needed to come up with a way to cast his own metal punches. This meant deciding on the correct alloys and crafting techniques, as well as inventing the machinery that would help optimize and standardize the type.
There’s a lot of metallurgy and other things that I’m not really at all knowledgeable about, so I’ll let this delightful craftsman from the Crandall Historical Printing Museum in Utah explain the typecasting process of punches for a Gutenberg printing press.
This guy makes it look pretty quick for a seasoned metalsmith, and it doesn’t seem to take exceptionally long because once the mold is made, you’re good. But bear in mind that he would have had to have made hundreds of punches. Especially vowels.
Once the type is all made, the printer would then fit them into the press to write out whatever it was he wanted to print.
Really, it’s all very similar to the way that you played with magnetic words on your refrigerator as a child.
This process of arranging the type alone could take half the day for one double-page. Bummer.
When not in use, type was stored in cabinets and sorted according to size – and later, font – much like the one to the right side of this much more modern 19th century press:
After the stamps are arranged, they would have then been inked using these large goose-skin ink balls. Here’s a short video of the inking process by our delightful friend at Crandall:
After the inking is finished, the paper or parchment is placed into a specialized frame that looks more or less like a wedge-shaped artist’s canvas. The paper would be inserted into this frame with a template that covers it, called a “frisket”.
When it is first inserted into the template holder, two pins are used to poke tiny holes in the paper. After printing one side and allowing it to dry, in order to make sure that each and every page was perfectly even, the second page would then be placed back on the pins through the same holes, guaranteeing a uniform fit.
Once the paper is placed where it needs to be, the whole apparatus is slid under the press itself, the handle is pulled, lowering the device and compressing the paper onto the inked punches.
The paper would have then been taken out and hung up on a line to dry.
If you want to see it in action, here’s our friend from Crandall once again:
This sounds kind of slow, and it is. If you were to make a single book this way you might as well just write the whole thing by hand because printing it wouldn’t save you that much time and would probably be a lot more physical work.
However, they didn’t just print the whole book right there all at once. Once the type is placed, you can print a limitless number of pages using it.
So, if you’re mass producing a book, you just fill out page 1 (and 2, remember that the Gutenberg printing press could print two pages at once, as is demonstrated in the video above) then print 100 copies. All you have to do is keep the type inked and the paper flowing.
If your book is 100 pages long and you printed 100 copies of 2 pages per day. You’d have 100 books in 50 days – or effectively 2 books per day.
Not bad.
For comparison, depending on how fancy you want your Bible to be, including things like embellishments, images and other stylistic additions, a single handwritten book could take a scribe years7 In fact, in 1999, famed calligrapher Donald Jackson began working on the first hand-written and illuminated Bible commissioned by a Benedictine church since the Gutenberg printing press was invented. Completed in 2011 it took him 12 years and 5 scribes and is known as The Saint John’s Bible.
While this is an extreme example, Gutenberg was able to churn out his own beautiful, illuminated Bibles in very little time at all.
Hans-Jürgen Wolf stated in his 1974 book Geschichte der Druckpressen (History of the Printing Press) that after setting the type, professional printers could produce as many as 240 pages…. per hour, making my 100 copies per day example hilariously underwhelming. For context, if you watched the videos above, realize now that that comes to 4 pages per minute, or once every 15 seconds.
So, now you can see why this might have been a big deal.
Also, remember that it was the 15th century, so you could make your laborers work 14 hour days and shoot them with your crossbow if their garderobe breaks were too long.
That’s all very impressive, except that it’s also not because Gutenberg wasn’t actually first and this whole thing seems like common sense anyway…
That’s all well and good, and Gutenberg’s printing press was undeniably world-altering.
But if you weren’t European, there’s a decent chance that you may have already had one.
The Gutenberg printing press was not even close to being the first movable type printing mechanism, it was just the first one to appear in a place where people cared about the Bible.
The Chinese, as they so frequently seem to do, invented their own pressing techniques considerably earlier.
And the paper to go with it, too.
In fact, China has something called the “Four Great Inventions”, which are a point of cultural pride and heritage to this day. These include printing, paper, gunpowder and the compass.
Did you know the compass was Chinese? I didn’t, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
But when the Chinese first started printing stuff, it wasn’t with the movable type you’re thinking of by now. They used carved blocks of wood that could then be inked and stamped indefinitely, but each time you wanted to say something different, you had to carve a new block.
The earliest known complete, extant woodblock printing is The Pure Light Dharani Sutra, printed in the mid 7th century. The “writer” would have simply carved each segment onto a block, then used those blocks to stamp as many copies as he or she desired.
Fragments and partial prints dating back to the 3rd century CE printed on silk show that the technique was in use then, as well, meaning that the general idea of printing words on stuff using a tool that can be used again was well over a thousand years older than it was in Europe. Further reinforcing my point that the Gutenberg printing press is a bit uninspiring.
Bi Sheng
Medieval inventor Bi Sheng built himself his own movable type printer around 400 years before Gutenberg was a dirty thought in his father’s mind.
Bi simply improved upon the existing woodblock technology by instead using movable wooden punches instead of a large, single carved block.8
In the mid 14th century, another Chinese inventor, Wang Shen, further improved upon Bi’s design by making the punches out of ceramic, which was harder, more durable, and most importantly could, like Gutenberg’s, be molded for more accurate and consistent type, whereas each wooden punch had to be hand-carved, which meant that they would all be at least slightly different.
The oldest printed book in the world that still exists today is this Chinese copy of the Diamond Sutra, which was printed in 868 in Tang Dynasty China using woodblock printing. It is also credited as being the first “license free” work, written for the betterment of all. Here’s the front:
It amazes me that the earlier Chinese printing press never made its way to Europe despite plenty of trade along the Silk Road. Adventurers like Marco Polo in the 13th century, who spent a considerable amount of time in China, would certainly have come into contact with this technology, and it’s disappointing that he never thought to bring back IG pics.9
A lot of it also just feels like common sense to me.
However, there were still certain advantages that the Gutenberg printing press conferred upon its users that the older Asian techniques did not. For one, it could print two pages of a book on a single sheet – a huge time saver over a long period of book production.
There is also the not inconsiderable matter of Western scripts, such as Cyrillic, Latin and Greek, just being a lot easier to work with than East Asian scripts using period technology.
Simply put, Western scripts are made up of a very limited selection of characters that are readily arranged to suit the needs of the writer.
On the other hand, the volume of Chinese symbols and the scripts of other Asian languages tends to be vastly larger, with characters numbering into the thousands. That meant that unlike the comfy cabinets containing sizes and shapes and fonts of different punches used by a Gutenberg printing press, the Chinese “cabinets” looked more like this monstrosity, and naturally wouldn’t contain copies of every single possible character.
It’s not what you ink, but how you ink it
Unless your goal is to press type into softer surfaces such as clay or softer metals, you’re probably working with paper or parchment. This means the printer is going to be using inks of some kind. The Bi Sheng and Wang Shen printing presses and their type used water-based inks, which worked just fine for the materials they used.
However, the metal type used in Gutenberg’s printing press required that the user operate with oil-based inks, which included lead – because of course they did – which tended not to bleed through the paper as much and left the print with a rich blackness that remains virtually unrivaled.
These “modern” European presses would, over time, go on to become the large-scale newspaper printers and book producing factory monstrosities that we see today.
Ok, it’s also what you ink
Books are great, right? And having lots of them is the dream, right? So forgetting the fact that the Chinese were pulling this off ages earlier, the impact that Gutenberg’s press would have on European life would be epoch-heralding.
Some have considered this to have been the most important advancement in human technology ever, perhaps more so than even the wheel, steam engine, harnessed electricity or the Internet. I suppose that with the exception of the wheel, none of these other things likely would have become real when they did without the ability of thinkers and inventors to share their ideas readily and among a broader audience, thanks to the Gutenberg printing press.
Suddenly, even if you weren’t nobility, literacy was a thing you might actually be able to have. While books may still have remained outside the reach of many of the peasant class, as feudalism gradually subsided, a sort of middle class slowly began to emerge in Europe.
Throughout history, we have seen time and time again that large boosts in education and literacy tend to significantly impact a society, and there is no better example than the Gutenberg printing press.
Among the many reasons why the European Renaissance began, the ability for knowledge to become shared much more freely may have been one of the most powerful catalysts. Yes, there were other innovations such as improvements in weaponry, transportation, religious divergence, forms of government, philosophy and science, but all of these things were driven in large part by the presence of the written word – no longer simply the realm of royals and the church.
What did they ink the most, though? Obviously it was the Bible.
In the mid 15th century, almost everyone was religious af, but most people didn’t own a Bible of their own because books were expensive and they were illiterate. Having a convenient Gutenberg printing press around made it easy for normal people to get their hands on a copy of the Good Book, and it would actually be used as a tool for teaching literacy to children for centuries thereafter.
But Gutenberg wasn’t satisfied printing simple hotel room Bibles. No, he had to go all out and make his own very special tomes.
These books, printed by Johannes Gutenberg himself and his team, are now known as the Gutenberg Bibles. It is not known for sure how many were made but estimates suggest that it is between 160 and 180. Their production may have begun in 1454, but the earliest certain attestation we have is from a letter by the future Pope Pius II mentioning one on display in Frankfurt in a letter to a colleague dated to 1455.
Of this number, 49 exist today. They are considered to be among the most valuable books in the world and they are a hell of a thing to look at for any book nerd, fan of history, or Christian, probably. They’re basically holy relics of their own.
The books were decorated and embellished to the point of seeming excessively gaudy. Most of the Bibles were printed on paper, but a selection were also printed on vellum. They were also not the kind of Bible one would generally take back and forth to church on Sunday. They’re quite large and would have served as the official bibles of bishops, prominent clergymen, or as display pieces for royalty or academic institutions.
This is why I’m still not impressed
Cool, but why didn’t anyone think of this sooner? It seems like a pretty basic idea and people were building and doing way more difficult shit way before this.
Times were tough for most people during the late medieval and early Renaissance period, and they certainly didn’t just get better overnight. Compared to the advances in technology that we see in the 21st century, innovation seemed to crawl by at a snail’s pace. So, believe me when I say I understand that many people had bigger things on their minds than giving books to the masses.
It is also not correct for us to suggest that no innovation took place between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance – you just don’t hear about it as much. A few of the more important ones were flying buttresses, which allowed the construction of much taller structures, eyeglasses, wheelbarrows, and huge improvements to rudders, plows and furnaces.
It’s a good thing they invented eyeglasses before the printing press, too, don’t you think?
I believe that we tend to live in a certain fog regarding what some still call the “Dark Ages”, in which we were taught that virtually nothing good happened, or was invented, for a thousand years.10
Despite that, and I really may very well be speaking from the perspective of someone born a product of his own time, I think that the idea of a movable type printing press is not very shocking. It seems like a basic idea that any ancient Roman or Egyptian or Aztec or Indian or any other historical society with writing could have come up with. Why, after the better part of 5,000 years of writing, had nobody figured this out sooner?
I am also not-so-impressed by the total lack of recognition and credit given to Bi Sheng and Wang Shen, who were doing basically the same thing hundreds of years prior to Gutenberg. While researching this I came across one or two shoddy articles that said something to the effect of “While it may have appeared first in China, the Gutenberg printing press was the first printing press to make a difference!”
I’m underwhelmed that they were able to share knowledge about a thousand other things, but not this one, relatively basic, monumentally important tool.
I am reminded of Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel, which is an interesting read that outlines the reasons why Europeans, through much of history, became the “haves” while many others were and often remain “have nots”, so to speak. Much of what he has to say has become a little bit outdated since publication in the 90s, but his points remain interesting and it’s a good read if you like history, anthropology and linguistics.
He would probably claim, in this instance, that Europe’s global expansion occurring when it did – very shortly after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press – is likely the reason schools in the Americas and Europe today teach us about him and not Bi.
Then again, 500 years from now there might be some other self-righteous blogger wondering why in 2019 we weren’t already teleporting to work and lifting shit with our brains.
A little something extra:
Conclusion
Gutenberg’s printing press was undeniably game-changing, but the fact that it took Europeans such a long time to figure out how to do something that seems like common sense, and that the Chinese had been doing for centuries,11 makes it all feel a little meh. The human innovation and technologies that go into the construction of a Gutenberg printing press had been there for ages, they just didn’t seem willing or able to put it all together and make it happen.
It’s not that I’m disappointed in Johannes Gutenberg the man. He’s fine. He did well. It’s everyone else’s innovative gumption that I find somewhat lacking.
It is for this reason that I subtract points for effort. I do not live in the high medieval ages or the Renaissance, so I cannot say for certain what should or should not have come as common sense, but I really cannot help but feel as though movable type printing seems somewhat intuitive.
Gutenberg is often toted as a genius. I don’t want to tear the guy down, either, but I think this application of the word is a bit frivolous. However, for obvious reasons, prior to Gutenberg, whenever someone made a groundbreaking discovery or invented an amazing new thing, nobody knows who did it.
Who invented automobiles? Pioneered steam engines? Created light bulbs? Invented the spork?12 You can look all of these things up because someone else wrote them down to be disseminated, because of innovations that likely stemmed from the Gutenberg printing press.
But other key historical inventions such as the stirrup? The plow? The hand axe?
Your guess is as good as mine.
Image credits:
– originally posted to Flickr as Gutenberg Bible, CC BY-SA 2.0
Parchment from Goat Skin (
Apex-editor of Languages Around the Globe, collector of linguists, regaler of history, accidental emmigrant, serial dork and English language mercenary and solutions fabricator. All typos are my own.
