Bibliophiles celebrated an important anniversary
this week. Here's an excerpt from the September 30, 2016
edition of National Public Radio's Writer's Almanac
with Garrison Keillor -Editor
On this day in 1452, the first section of the Gutenberg Bible
was finished in Mainz, Germany, by the printer Johannes
Gutenberg. Little is known of Gutenberg’s early history or his
personal life except that he was born around the year 1400, the
youngest son of a wealthy merchant. But from the time of the
appearance of his beautiful Bibles, he has left an indelible mark
on human culture.
Ancient books had primarily been written on scrolls, though an
innovation in the second century A.D. — that of the codex, a
sheaf of pages bound at one edge — gave us the familiar book form
we recognize today. Early codices were produced by hand by monks
in scriptoriums, working with pen and ink, copying manuscripts
one page at a time so that even a small book would take months to
complete and a book the size of the Bible, rich with color and
illuminations, would take years.
Gutenberg’s genius was to separate each element of the
beautiful, calligraphic blackletter script commonly used by the
scribes into its most basic components — lowercase and capital
letters, punctuation, and the connected ligatures that were
standard in Medieval calligraphy — nearly 300 different shapes
that were then each cast in quantity and assembled to form words,
lines, and full pages of text. He also invented a printing press
to use his type, researching and refining his equipment and
processes over the course of several years. In 1440, Gutenberg
wrote and printed copies of his own mysteriously titled book,
Kunst und Aventur [Art and Enterprise], releasing his printing
ideas to the public, and by 1450 his movable-type printing press
was certainly in operation.
Only four dozen Gutenberg Bibles remain, and of these only 21
are complete, but what Gutenberg created went far beyond the
reach of those volumes. By beginning the European printing
revolution, he forever changed how knowledge was spread,
democratized learning, and allowed for thoughts and ideas to be
widely disseminated throughout the known world. In his time,
Gutenberg’s contemporaries called this “the art of multiplying
books” and it was a major catalyst for the Renaissance, the
Scientific Revolution, and even the Protestant Reformation.
To read the complete article, see:
The
Writer's Almanac September 30, 2016
(http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20160930/)
Pictured is the New York Public Library's
Lenox copy of the Gutenberg bible (Wikipedia). -Editor
The Lenox copy, on paper, is the first Gutenberg Bible to come
to the United States, in 1847. Its arrival is the stuff of
romantic national folklore. James Lenox's European agent
issued Instructions for New York that the officers at the Customs
House were to remove their hats on seeing it: the privilege of
viewing a Gutenberg Bible is vouchsafed to few.
To read the complete Wikipedia entry, see: Printing press
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press)
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Wayne Homren, Editor
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