12/27/2023 0 Comments Guytenberg printpressA plaque marks the place where he was born on corner of Christofsstraße, but the original house is long gone. Within a few years 300,000 copies of it had been printed and circulated, leading to the Reformation and a permanent split in the Church.īut despite the far-reaching consequences of Gutenburg’s press, much about the man remains a mystery, buried deep beneath layers of Mainz history. Luther is said to have nailed his text to a Wittenberg church door on 31 October 1517. With the rapid spread of printing technology – by the 1470s, every European city had printing companies, and by the 1500s, an estimated four million books had been printed and sold - came the spread of new and often contradictory ideas, such as Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, in which he criticised the Church’s sale of indulgences. However, the disruptive power of the printed word soon became apparent. Printing enabled the Church to spread the Christian message and raise cash in the form of ‘indulgences’ – printed documents that forgave people’s sins. Gutenberg’s Bibles turned out to be bestsellers.Īt first, the Church welcomed the new availability of printed bibles and other religious texts. Both are slightly different, because after printing, the pages would be taken to a rubricator (specialised scriber) who would paint in certain letters according to the tastes of their customers. Of his original print run of about 150 to 180 Bibles, only 48 remain in the world today. It is the first page of St John’s Gospel, in the Bible, which begins: “In the beginning was the word…” The page that is always printed at the Gutenberg Museum replicates the original style and font (Gothic Textura) of the 42-line Gutenberg Bible, the first major book ever to be printed using movable type in the Western world. Since the Romans introduced winemaking to the region, the area around Mainz has been one of Germany’s main wine-producing areas, with famous grape varieties such as riesling, dornfelder and silvaner. This is no coincidence: Gutenberg’s printing press is thought to be a modification of the wine press. Finally, paper was placed on top of the form and a heavy plate was pressed upon it, similar to how a wine press works. Once the alloy cooled, the small metal letters were arranged into words and sentences in a form and inked. First, a metal alloy was heated and poured into a matrix (a mould used to cast a letter). Gutenberg’s press amplified the power of a monk by 200 times.Īt the Gutenberg Museum, I watched a demonstration of a page being printed on a replica of the press. In his book, Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age, Dr Bill Kovarik, professor of communication at Radford University in the US state of Virginia, describes this capacity in terms of ‘monk power’, where ‘one monk’ equals a day’s work – about one page – for a manuscript copier. This was an incredibly slow and laborious process one that could not keep up with the growing demand for books at the time. Gutenberg, as an educated and entrepreneurial patrician, would have recognised the Church’s need to update the method of replicating manuscripts, which were hand-copied by monks. In the Middle Ages, Mainz was one of the most important cathedral cities in the Holy Roman Empire, in which the Church and the archbishop of Mainz were the centre of influence and political power. The island that forever changed science.
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