Johann Gutenberg: The Man and his Invention

Does it matter who invented the printing press? In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Elizabeth L. Eisenstein wrote that she regarded “certain master printers as being the unsung heroes of the early-modern era” and the “true protagonists” of her book (p. xv). In practice, though, Eisenstein emphasized the “impersonal processes involving transmission and communication” that transformed the West after Gutenberg and paid very little attention to the first master printer himself. Given the scanty and much debated record of Gutenberg’s life and work, that was a sensible decision.

If Albert Kapr’s scholarly biography of Gutenberg (the first German edition in 1986, the second edition in 1988, then further revised in collaboration with the translator for this first English edition) had been available to Eisenstein, however, the printer would surely have been much more prominent in her exploration of the consequences of his invention. The origins of printing do indeed help explain the changes it wrought.

Recognizing that a smooth narrative of Johann Gutenberg’s life would be an impossible goal, Kapr opts for analyzing each stage of Gutenberg’s career in light of both the documentary evidence and the culture of mid-fifteenth-century Germany. He seeks “to reach close to the character of the inventor and his work . . . by moving from his milieu to his commercial motivation, from the enterprise to the person, from the state of technology to the opportunities for discovery, from the known conduct of the master craftsman to his behaviour during the missing years and his upbringing” (p. 12).

The first book to fulfill all the potential of the new typographic art was the Bible that Gutenberg printed at Mainz in the early 1450s, often called the forty-two-line Bible from the number of lines per page. Praise of its perfection is a commonplace in histories of printing and rare books. Kapr, however, convinces us that the Gutenberg Bible really is a miracle. His lifetime of experience in book and typeface design enables him to point out the subtleties of layout, paper, typesetting, inking, and presswork that make it a “work of such sublime beauty and mastery that later generations of up to our own day have rarely matched and never excelled it in quality” (p. 165). The Bible makes an extraordinary leap from the clumsy job-printing of the grammar textbooks that Gutenberg turned out in his first decade of experimentation.

To the post-Reformation world it seems obvious that the Bible should be the text that would inspire Gutenberg’s passionate craftsmanship. Kapr shows us that the choice was not so clear-cut. In Gutenberg’s day, neither clerics nor layfolk routinely read the Bible. Its size meant Gutenberg had to invest in six presses, cast more type, hire twenty-odd workers, and find the space to house the operation. For this much effort, publishing a missal or a psalter might have seemed a safer bet: every church had to own copies to perform mass. But a missal would have required designing several new sizes of type, and the psalter’s text varied from place to place.

Kapr argues persuasively that Gutenberg was deeply influenced by a major fifteenth-century intellectual figure, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, whom he may have encountered on several occasions. In campaigning for ecclesiastical reforms, Nicholas insisted on the importance of a uniform liturgy and missal. In 1451, he told the Benedictine monasteries around Mainz to insure that their libraries possessed a well-edited copy of the Bible. Several surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible were in fact first owned by those monasteries and by Nicholas’s own cathedral in the Tirol.

Thus, new forms of piety and new markets converged to give Gutenberg a compelling motive for applying his invention to the Bible. Eisenstein—whose own work was triggered by her skepticism about claims for a common Western culture founded on...