From the Good Mountain: How Gutenberg Changed the World (review)

Middle-grade children who know absolutely nothing about the titular innovative printer will be the ideal audience for this attractive and inviting picture book. The volume cleverly casts Gutenberg's Europe-rocking incunabula as a riddle-style mystery: "In the city of Mainz in Germany, around the year 1450, there appeared a mysterious thing. It was made of rags and bones, soot and seeds. It wore a dark brown coat and was filled with gold. It took lead and tin, strong oak, and a mountain to make it. What was it?" The answer comes in an ensuing series of double-page-spread riddles, each of which highlights a step in the preparation for the first book to emerge from Gutenberg's movable-type press. The rags and bones become paper and stiffening glue; the "dark coat" was walnut-husk-dyed leather to cover the boards; gold "pounded flat and beaten under layers of strong paper until it was thinner than a blade of grass" became gold leaf, etc. The descriptive text is richly embellished with broad, ornamented borders that suggest how materials were procured and processed, and each text page faces a detailed view, often touched with humor, of the craftsmen at work. The main text concentrates solely on bookmaking, but an epilogue supplements the coverage with some biographical information on Gutenberg and subsequent innovations in printing. In an unusual but effective addendum, Rumford steers children toward further reading by suggesting several thematic groups of keywords that can lead them to online information about various steps in the printing process. Readers who thought they were too old for picture-book riddles will be pleasantly surprised as Rumford leads them on a lyrical investigation of the high tech world of the fifteenth century.