The Invention of printing

This podcast is now well into its fourth year and I have established my process for research, script writing and recording. As for research, that usually means going to the London Library and bend down to the lowest shelf to dig up some age-old copy of a German language book that happens to be the one and only works that goes into the kind of detail on the topic at hand you guys have gotten used to.

Imagine my confusion when I started looking into Johannes Gutenberg and found not just a few books, but whole shelves of books in English, German, French, Italian and dozens more talking about even the most intricate details of the life and works of the inventor of the printing press.

Drowning in this avalanche of material, I realized that at a minimum this story requires two episodes, one about how Gutenberg came to achieve this breakthrough and then the impact his invention had on the world and on the Germans in particular.  

Hence today’s episode is about the man and his invention, though about the man we know so very little….

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 187 – Gutenberg’s Pressing Matters, which is also episode 3 of Season 10 – the Empire in the 15^th century.

This podcast is now well into its fourth year and I have established my process for research, script writing and recording. As for research, that usually means going to the London Library and bend down to the lowest shelf to dig up some age-old copy of a German language book that happens to be the one and only works that goes into the kind of detail on the topic at hand you guys have gotten used to.

Imagine my confusion when I started looking into Johannes Gutenberg and found not just a few books, but whole shelves of books in English, German, French, Italian and dozens more talking about even the most intricate details of the life and works of the inventor of the printing press.

Drowning in this avalanche of material, I realized that at a minimum this story requires two episodes, one about how Gutenberg came to achieve this breakthrough and then the impact his invention had on the world and on the Germans in particular.  

Hence today’s episode is about the man and his invention, though about the man we know so very little….

But before we start just another reminder that the History of the Germans is advertising free and for good reason. It does not take a genius to notice that the way we communicate as a society has changed. We do spend a lot of time on electronic media of all kinds, not just social media, but podcasts, streaming, youtube etc. Most of this content is paid for by advertising. Advertisers, in the absence of better metrics, pay the platforms and creators on the basis of eyeballs or ear canals. And since our crocodile brains are still dominating the cerebellum, our eyeballs and ear canals  always turn to the loudest and most eye catching. But that is not aways the information our frontal cortex wants and should feed on.  We need stuff that may be less exciting, but more thoughtful. And that is not what advertisers can pay for. So we need at least a part of our information world that is funded by its users. That is why I have subscriptions to newspapers and libraries, am happy to pay for the BBC and for Netflix. And for some podcasts and Substacks too. And if you want to do the same and for some reason feel the History of the Germans is deserving your support, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up as a patron.  And thanks a lot to Marko P., James Zapf, Kenneth H., MarkV, Mark Young, Swin Purple and Jeff N. who have already done that.

And with that, back to the show

Johannes Gutenberg was born sometime between 1393 and 1400 in Mainz. His family was comparatively well off, part of the 100 ancient families of the city, what we call today a patrician. The family lived mainly off annuities, financial instruments issued by the city that generated a solid and predictable income. We also know that his father was a companion of the mint, meaning he was on some sort of supervisory board of the archepiscopal mint  that struck the Rhenisch Gulden, the most common currency in the Holy Roman Empire.

His name, Gutenberg, derived -as was customary – from his family home, the Hof zum Gutenberg in the city centre, next to St. Christopherus church.  Gutenberg translates as “hill of the good people” but that was not its origin. Where it stood had once been the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in europe. That community had been subjected to pogroms ever since 1096, as we discussed in episode 38, but the great expulsion had come in 1349 when the Black Death struck. Allegedly 6,000 men, women and children chose to commit suicide by setting light to their synagogue rather than convert. Where they once lived, the Judenberg, was given to the city council and a patrician family built a house on the site. As memory of the atrocities faded, that house turned from Judenberg to Gutenberg, which in 1419 the family adopted as their family name.

And that is all we know about his first 30 plus years. He may have gone to university, he may have trained as a goldsmith, or he may have just hung out in in bars and nightclubs for all we know.

In 1434 he moved to Strasbourg, a city that at that time was much larger and much richer than Mainz. Mainz had been going downhill due to mismanagement by the city council, internal conflicts, the endless fighting between the archbishops and their neighbours and the regular schisms between two contenders for the archepiscopal throne. It had not recovered its population from before the Black Death. Strasbourg on the other hand was thriving, reaching 25,000 inhabitants, a major hub in the wine trade that stretched all the way to Norway and Scotland. Its cathedral, one of the greatest achievements of gothic art was still rising up and the streets were lined with impressive stone houses of prosperous merchants and artisans.

What Gutenberg did in Strasbourg for the following 10 years is shrouded in mystery. Some argue he did already begin printing there in 1440, but no proof of such activity can be found. All we do know about this time is from court records, according to which he was engaged in the production of mirrors and some “adventure and art” that was kept secret.

He left Strasbourg in 1444, then disappears from the records before he returned to Mainz in 1448. Seemingly flush with cash he buys out his siblings and moves in the old family home. And that is where he starts his printing business for real. In 1454 he published his masterpiece, the Gutenberg bible.

That is it. He never wrote down what inspired him, how he developed the technology or what he wanted to achieve with it. All these books that have been written about Gutenberg’s life, and there are at least three available in English, are all conjecture. Well-argued and meticulously researched, but in the end more suitable for a true crime than for a history podcast.

But what we have is his magnificent innovation, according to Luther, “Gods ultimate and greatest gift”.

Johannes Gutenberg stands in a line with the world’s great inventors, the James Watts, the Thomas Alva Edisons, the Carl Benz and Louis Pasteurs. But as much as we would all love to read the story of the lone genius  who had that one brilliant idea that propelled the world forward, we have to acknowledge that boring academic research has proven again and again, that there are very few if any instances where innovation happened that way. All these great advances were usually the culmination of multiple strands of developments that came together at a particular time and a particular place to be picked up by some determined individual who happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Let’s see whether printing with moveable letter was the same..

First up, Gutenberg did not invent printing. People have been printing things for hundreds if not thousands of years using wooden stamps. And since the late 14^th century the art of the woodcut was spreading cross europe, a technique that allowed to print images or a page of text multiple times.

Gutenberg’s technology deviated from this technique first by using metal rather than wood. Metal is much more durable, allowing the production of a much larger number of copies before the stamps wear out.

The second downside of the woodcut was that to create a whole book would require to carve every single page first in wood, as a mirror image and then making an imprint. That was not only time consuming, but also left no room for error. If say only one letter was wrong, the whole woodcut had to be made from scratch again. Which is why nobody did that.

Gutenberg’s press used moveable type. So there would be a stamp for each letter and they would be assembled to form the respective words and sentences. If there was an error, all you need to do, was replace the letter and restart the printing.

That’s it. Genius! That is the invention. Let’s just go and start printing.

But hold on. Let’s think about that. If you want to print a book, you will need a lot of these individual letter stamps, called punches. And I mean a lot. For example in my scripts I use about 3,500 characters per page. The Gutenberg bible was a bit more generous with space and used only 2,400. But then he printed at least two pages on the same sheet of paper. That is 4,800  punches minimum per print run.

So, let’s take a look at how these punches could be made. Punches were originally created in coin making. Up until the modern days coins were made by creating a metal disk usually containing some gold, silver or copper. This disk is then struck with a punch to imprint the desired image, say heads or tails on to the disk. The punch consists of a handle like that of a chisel, a steel shank of a few centimetres’ length into which the punch maker had engraved an image. The coin maker would then carefully place this punch over the metal disk and strike it with a hammer. In a sophisticated mint, such as the mint in Mainz, there would be another die underneath the disk, called an anvil, so that both sides of the coin would be struck at the same time.

Now here is the rub. The anvil lasted about 36,000 strikes and the punch only about 20,000 strikes, A very large mint like Venice would produce about 20,000 coins a day, meaning the punch needed to be replaced every day. Mainz was certainly smaller, but still, the punches only functioned for a limited period of time.

So every day or every couple of days a punch maker needed to engrave a new punch. And this punch had to look exactly the same as the previous punch to make sure the coins looked identical. Then the coins were quite small the images however quite intricate. These minute images had to be engraved into a steel punch that had to be heated and cooled several times to harden it, but without becoming brittle. Then the engraving had to be done into the steel, with steel. There was no way you could get hold of a diamond cutter. So steel was used on steel to scrape off some minuscule curls of steel. I have no way of checking this, but according to John Man’s book The Gutenberg Revolution, a good punch maker could create letter on a scale of 0.01 millimetres, which is 6 times the resolution of a modern laser printer.

And a punch maker needs about a day to make one punch. So to make our 4,800 punches needed to print two pages would take, well 4,800 days, which given feast days and holidays meant it would take one punch maker 20 years to make all the punches  needed for these 2 pages, or 20 punch makers a year. And Gutenberg did neither have 20 years nor the funds to employ 20 punch makers. Plus each letter would end up being just that tiny bit different.

So he needed a more efficient solution to make metal punches. And that solution was the hand mould. Now I have been warned to try to describe the hand mould. Someone called Joseph Moxton tried 200 years ago and when his 13 page description was reprinted, the editors wrote in the comments that “nobody should try to understand the hand mould by reference to this description”.

Printing Like Gutenberg and Hand Casting Type

But the idea is the following. You create one punch for each letter. Then you use the punch to create an imprint, called the matrix. The matrix is then inserted and fixed at the bottom of the hand mould. And then you pour metal into the mould which then creates a little rectangular stick with the letter at the top. Repeat again and again and hey presto one punch is turned into lots and lots of cloned punches. But there is still a problem, if you were to make these from say steel, it would take a few hours to cool naturally or you could cool it down rapidly using water or oil, which would add another step in the process.

Which gets us to the next bit of alchemy, the metal he used for these cloned punches. It was an amalgam of lead, tin and antimony. This alloy is not only liquid but has a habit of cooling extremely quickly. So, you can pour in the molten metal that was heated to 327 degrees Celsius and take out the new punch almost immediately, already cool enough to be handled. And bang, you take out the letter punch and you can use the hand mould again to make the next, and the next and the next.

Ok, great. Now you can make lots and lots of the 24 or 26 letters of the alphabet. But there is another problem. Gutenberg wanted to create a print that looked like a handwritten manuscript, just better. And that meant he needed a lot more than 26 types. There were various special signs that were used as abbreviations in the handwritten manuscripts around at the time. He needed these. And he wanted the flow from one letter to the next – again – like in a handwritten manuscript, which meant having to create multiple versions of each letter with different attachment points. In the end, his typefaces had between 220 and 290 different characters. All of which had to be cut into a punch and then moulded dozens, if not hundreds of times.

Great, now you have a pile of letters, but how do you turn this into a page of text? You need to fix them into something. Gutenberg’s solution was to create a frame into which the type setter would place the individual letters. To stop them from wiggling about they were placed into a frame. Sounds straightforward, but let’s think again. First up, not all sentences are the same length, whilst the frame is rectangular. Well, you can fill in the gaps with punch that have no letter, effectively creating a void. Or, you could create various versions of the same letters with just marginally larger or smaller width to end up with a perfectly justified edge to the text. And finally you could play around with little fillers to widen the gap between different letters. And all that has to be done in a way that does not make the text jerky, but flowing naturally, easy to read.

Then you have to make sure that all the letters are absolutely, 100% the same height. If not, you end up with one letter being bold and the next one faint. And we are talking of precision levels in the sub millimetre level.

So now you got your frame with all the letters firmly held in place, something called a “Forme”.  The next question is what material you want to print on. The traditional material to write on in the Middle ages was vellum, made from calf skin. One calf skin produced about 3 pages of the highest quality or 6 pages if stretched out. Hugely expensive. It was a fairly easy to print on material, but if printing was to become as wide spread as it did, it needed another, a cheaper material.

Willkommen | Gutenberg-Museum

Paper had been around in Western Europe since the 11^th century as it spread from China via the Islamic world. But in europe large scale production only began in the 14^th century. One reason was that Chinese paper was fairly soft and absorbent, perfectly suited for Chinese calligraphy, but not ideal for illuminated manuscripts. The Europeans added animal glue to the mix, which hardened it, so it could take ink and paint. The first German papermill opened in 1390 in Nurnberg, but the most desirable paper came from Italy.

The next question was what ink to use. Handwritten manuscripts were written using Iron-gall ink, a black or brown mixture made from iron sulphate, tannic acid and gum arabicum. This ink was too watery, it ran off the types and smeared all over the pages. It was also acidic, so often faded through the paper to the opposite side.

Gutenberg therefore had to develop a new kind of ink, that, since he wanted his books to look like manuscripts, had to have a similar colour to Iron-Gall ink but was more viscous and sticky. Printer’s ink was based on oil paint a material only recently made popular by the early Netherlandish painters, the Jan van Eycks, Rogier van the Weyden and Robert Campin. During the 1440 and 1450s this technique was gradually coming up the Rhine river, finding an important centre in Alsace. In all likelihood it was there, in the workshops of one of these pioneers of oil painting in the Rhineland that Gutenberg first encountered oil-based paint, without which printing with moveable type was simply impossible.

Then we get to the last major technological component, the actual printing press. Woodcuts and other prints had been made by rubbing the paper onto the carved piece. That did work to a  degree, but often left smudges of paint on the page. And Gutenberg needed to print both sides of the page, which meant he needed to fix the paper in exactly the same place twice. Which means we needed a way to fix both the frame with the letter and the paper into place and then apply the exactly accurate level of force on to it.

The solution for that was – the wine press. Mainz is in the midst of a wine growing region. The Gutenberg family owned a farm near Eltville, right in the centre of the Rheingau, source of some of Germany’s finest white wines. Wine presses work with screws and are calibrated to exert exactly the right amount of pressure to squeeze the liquid out of the grapes, but not smash them into pulp. Ideal for printing, where again precision was key.

That is the hardware, the letter types moulded in the hand mould, the frame they are fixed in, called the forme, the ink and the printing press. But that still does not make a book. We also need a process.

The first step is to carve the type, a job usually done by a gold or silversmith, ideally one with experience working in making coin punches. Then we have someone making the types by punching the matrix, fixing it inside the hand mould, first creating the special alloy and then pouring it into the mould.

Once we have the typefaces, they go to the setter who puts together the actual text by placing the respective letters inside the frame. He or she would usually have arranged the punches in two cases, one for the larger and one for the smaller letters, where we got our terms upper case and lower case from. This is a truly sophisticated job. For one, all the letters the setter sees are mirror image. And then he or she has to work out all the gaps and widths to fit the text on to the frame.

The frame is then taken to make a first simple imprint which is given to the corrector. That person will read through the first imprint and check for errors. This is again hugely important because the advantage of printing over handwritten manuscripts was not only cost, but even more, accuracy. Copyists made mistakes and these mistakes then compounded through the line of distribution, from one writer to the next. A printed copy was exactly the same as the next one, making sure only the accurate information is transmitted. But for that the information had to be accurate to start with.

Once approved, the forme then goes to the actual printer. Each printing press is operated by two people. One handles the formes and applies the ink. Application was done with two large leather balls which are covered with a film of oil paint and then banged vertically on to the forme. You do not want to rub it side to side because it would seep in between the letters and smear across the page. Doing that meant the banger often got the sticky oil paint on his fingers that was difficult to wash off. Hence you needed another person to handle the clean sheets of paper. The paper needed to be a bit moist to better absorb the paint, which was one part of the job. Then he had to fix it in place on the paper holder, then lower it over the forme. And finally he slid the forme and paper under the press, turned the screw, released it and slid everything back out. I put a link in the show notes for a video where you can see how that worked.

How a Gutenberg Printing Press Works

Then the paper and paint needed to dry, which meant it was brought up to the loft where it was hung up like washing.

Then the whole process was repeated, to print the back of the page. To make sure that the back and front aligned perfectly, the paper frame had two little pins that pricked the paper. When it came back down having dried in the loft, you put the paper through the same pricks when fixing it, and hey presto, perfection.

I hope you get what I am telling you here. The invention of printing was not some eureka moment where Gutenberg jumped up in his bathtub and went – that is how it works.

This was likely a decades long process of trial and error, developing each one of these specific instruments, the hand mould, the forme, the ink, the paper, the printing press and then going through hundreds or thousands of iterations to figure out which combination of materials and pressure worked best. Since Gutenberg left no records of his life apart from legal documents, we do not know how many iterations he went through. But to give you an idea, James Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before he finally released DC01, the product that would make him a billionaire. Elon Musk, not my favourite person, took 6 years before his rockets first reached orbit, after several exploded, and that was based on a technology that had already existed since the 1940s. The first reusable rocket, his true innovation, took another 7 years to develop. In other words, innovation is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, that was the case in the 15^th century and it still is the case today.

And it is also most unlikely Gutenberg did develop each of these tools and processes all by himself. Even if he had some goldsmith skills, for which there is no evidence, it is unlikely he could operate at the level of precision required to make the punches. We know he hired a goldsmith, Hans Dunne in Strasburg and kept him on when he moved to Mainz. As for all the other tools, let’s remember that from his days in Strasburg onwards, he had a team of 6 to 8 people working with him, many great artisans in their own right and staying with him throughout.

And then we have the time and place. Mainz and Strasburg in the first half of the 15^th century. Both cities lay on the Rhine river, at the time the trading super highway connecting north and south. There was a mint in Mainz and with it the specialists skills to make high precision punches. And Gutenberg knew about those given his father had been one of the board members of the Mint. It was right around that time that oil painting spread southwards along the rhine from Flanders to Alsace and then Italy.  Paper had gained popularity and was making the same journey in the opposite direction. And Mainz lay in a wine making region with wine presses galore.

It is unlikely that Mainz in 1450 was the only place in the world where printing with moveable type could be invented, in large part because it was invented a few decades earlier in Korea and other forms of printing had been used in China for centuries.

But what moveable type printing did in the 1450s in Mainz was to catch on, which is something it did not do in Korea. And that had to do with two crucial elements every innovation needs, funding and willing customers.

If you look back at the history of Silicon Valley, it is quite obvious that this outburst of innovation and creativity did not come out of nothing. It was a combination of pentagon, mainly navy funded research in Northern California, Stanford university, and then starting in 1972, venture capital firms providing the funding for all that makes up our modern world, including the pinnacle of technological and creative achievement, podcasts.

Gutenberg too was dependent upon financial backers.

He found a first group of them when he moved to Strasbourg in 1434. He himself had about 350 gulden, enough to buy a substantial house, but not enough to create a business on the scale we are talking about here. So he invited three partners to join him.

And at that point he did not invite them to join them in a decades long chase to develop the printing press. The idea he brought them was to make mirrors. 

Not posh glass mirrors, but small handheld mirrors. How do you get rich with mirrors? Well, that is something that could only have worked in the madness of the 15^th century. The black death and the recurring outbreaks of the Plague, the huge uncertainty caused by endless feuds, the absence of a central authority, the split of the church during the schism, the Hussite revolt, the threat of a Turkish invasion, all that left people utterly unsettled. They sought refuge in their faith, and in particular in the support they hoped saintly interventions could bring. This is a century of enormous pilgrimages, and one of the most significant ones was the pilgrimage to Aachen. Aachen cathedral does not only hold the bones of Charlemagne, a saint at least in the eyes of many, but some of the most revered of relics, relics that had touched Jesus himself and members of his family. These include the robe of the Virgin Mary, the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus, the cloth in which the head of John the Baptist was wrapped, and the loincloth worn by Christ on the cross. Touching these sacred relics would transfer so much holiness, any illness, sadness or affliction would instantly dissolve.

Every 7 years these saintly objects would be taken outside the cathedral and shown to the people. Each of these 10 days would see 10,000 pilgrims descending on Aachen trying to catch a glimpse of Jesus’ loincloth. No way the canons would allow anyone to touch the precious objects, but they were so imbued with sanctity, they radiated goodness. So simply being in the presence and catching some of these rays would bring salvation from troubles.

But even though Aachen may see a 100,000 visitors over the 10 days of the festival, this was not enough to satisfy the demand. All those who stayed home, be it due to lack of funds or illness, were in dire need of deliverance. And there was a way to collect these rays of holiness and bring them back home to your loved ones. All you needed was a hand mirror that would capture the  rays emanating from the sacred relics and contain them.

And these were the kinds of mirrors that Johannes Gutenberg intended to produce. And now take a breath, guess how many mirrors he intended to make? 500? A 1000? 10,000? No, 32,000 was the intended production run. Selling those at half a guilder each that would bring in revenues of 16,000 guilders. Production cost were – hold on – 600 guilders. A gross profit margin of 96% or a profit of 26x. That is more than say Facebook or Google Search, albeit not by much. Just to put all this into perspective. Gutenberg’s income was about 30 guilders and his net worth was about 300 guilders.

We do not know how Gutenberg intended to make these magic mirrors, in particular we do not know how he would produce them in such quantities. What he did find though was investors who were willing to support this venture with what turned out to be a lot more than 600 guilders.

At which point we hit on one of the greatest Gutenberg mysteries. What was it he did during his years in Strasburg. Sure, there were the mirrors, but his partners and he himself poured a lot more than the initially intended 600 guilders into this venture. And then there is the court case. Because, surprise, surprise, the scheme did not work out as planned. There was a court case at the end of it where the son of one of the partners demanded his father’s money back.

And what is weird about this court case is that no one, not the claimant, not the witnesses and certainly not the defendant Gutenberg was prepared to explain what exactly the venture was. They talk about an “aventur und kunst”, best translated as a venture and an art. And then they go on about presses and formes and secret arts. Something else beyond the making of mirrors had been going on.

 Given all we heard about the complexity of printing and all the different technologies and processes that had to be developed, it is fair to assume that much of the money intended to make mirrors went into the R&D of printing. And then there is the fact that when he arrives in Mainz in 1348, he immediately sets out to print things using his printing press.

Having left Strasburg and his old business partners behind what he now needed was financing to scale up his business. And he found this financing from a man called Johann Fust. Fust was an important citizen of Mainz and a very wealthy man. He lent Gutenberg 800 gulden in 1449 to set up a printing workshop and would provide funding over the next five years to the tune of 4,500 gulden, the same as 12 substantial houses in the city.

Everything is now in place. Gutenberg has a technology and a process. He had brought along some members of his old team from Strasbourg and hired more. And he had financing.

All he now needed was customers. Who would want to own a printed book, or any printed material?

What he had going for him was a veritable explosion in literacy during the previous hundred years. Knowledge was no longer confined to within the walls of monasteries. By 1440 the German lands boasted 9 universities, up from none in 1370. Running a trading business had become more and more reliant on writing, on the exchange of letters and the drafting of contracts, hence the sons and sometimes the daughters of the city merchants went to newly opened schools. And even artisans and labourers keen to expand their horizons learned to read.

And what did they read, manuscripts. Along with the growth in literacy a whole industry of scribes had developed. Paper had been the killer application. Costing a10th of vellum and parchment, the material itself had become accessible. Entrepreneurs set up writing businesses where scribes would copy books, pamphlets, missals and breviers by the dozen.

In other words, books were more and more accessible.

But these handwritten books and documents had a serious weakness. They were written in haste and hence prone to errors. And for some books, errors were unacceptable.

A copy of a major theological treatise must not carry mistakes – imagine what happened if you misinterpret St. Augustine. Same goes even more for missals, the books that lay down in detail how each mass throughout the year is supposed to be celebrated. Any error there and the whole of the congregation may find itself falsely instructed.

But even more practical things needed to be accurate, like schoolbooks. The most widely used schoolbook of the 15^th century was the so-called Donatus, a 4^th century Latin grammar, a concise book aimed at young students. Again, it is self-evident that a student buying this book would be very badly served did he pick up a version with lots of errors.

 So, this is how the history of printing begins, with a school book. The Donatus by Gutenberg probably came out in 1450 and remained a mainstay of his workshop throughout.

Another line of business came out of the political situation. The Ottomans kept progressing up the Balkans whilst at the same time threatening Cyprus and Constantinople. Pope Nikolaus V called for a crusade and to fund the endeavour offered full indulgences against pay.

Indulgences were not only spiritual offers, but they were also physical objects. About one page of dense text recording the exact wording of the papal bull granting the indulgence, its conditions and application. It also featured, of course, the name of the sinner, the name of the priest granting the indulgence and his signature on the receipt.

These pieces of paper could be presented at the next confession and led to automatic absolution of sins and reduction of time in purgatory. Again, this was not a document where  spelling mistakes or – worse – the omission of whole lines of text was acceptable.

Coming to the rescue, Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press. Hence the second key output of the printing press were forms for indulgences, faithfully recording the papal bull, leaving space to add the names of sinner and priest and the signature.

Other products were more for daily use. One was the so-called Turk calendar, a calendar for the year with woodcuts and statements encouraging the reader to take up arms against the Turks, or even better, give money to those who wanted to fight. I will not go into another product, the so called sibylline prophecies that he may or may not have printed and what they meant. That is the kind of rabbit whole that has swallowed many a Gutenberg scholar.

An Admonition to Christendom against the Turks. | Library of Congress

So far , so seriously underwhelming. School books, calendars, indulgences – clearly not the kind of output that propels one to the European Pantheon of greats.

What Gutenberg needed was a best seller, a book that would display the absolute superiority of his innovative production process and that would hopefully make him rich.

Talking about rich, the print runs were going well, but cash flow was still a bit tight. The problem was the same that had felled so many innovative companies – payment terms.

By the time the first little scholar handed over his 2 shillings for the Donatus, Gutenberg had already paid all his suppliers of paper, metal and ink, his employees, his rent and the interest on his loans. And as demand for his print runs went up, so did his upfront expenditure, meaning he had a thriving business but every money that came in went straight out the door to pay from materials for the next print run. And that meant he did not have the money to make that one killer app, the kind of book that would divide world history into before and after.

So he went back to Johann Fust and asked for another loan, a loan needed to set up another, a second print workshop where he would produce that killer app.

And what was this killer app. Initially he had wanted to piggy back on an initiative to issue a new, revised missal for the whole of the enormous archdiocese of Mainz and all its suffragan bishoprics. If that had gone through, it would have been a gold mine. Gutenberg’s printing press was the only device that could guarantee that every single copy of the missal was identical. And every one of the thousands of parishes in the diocese would have needed to buy one.

But it did not come off. Both the archbishop and the Roman curia had sponsored the development of missals and neither could force the other to sanction their product. So no missal was agreed and betting on one winning out in the end would have been utter madness.

Exhausted with waiting for the missal, in 1452, Gutenberg decided to go for the big one, the whole bible. 

To get an idea of the scale of the undertaking, the Gutenberg bible comprised 1,275 pages of text mostly in 42 lines. It was produced in an edition of 180 copies, some of them on vellum, but most on paper. Not any odd paper, but special, expensive Italian paper.

It was not just an accurate copy of the at the time most accurate copy of the vulgate, the Latin bible, it was also and still remains, one of the most beautiful books ever printed. Each letter is printed as sharp and as accurate as humanly possible. The entire text, in two columns is justified on the end, requiring an incredibly fiddly adjustment of individual letters until they all match.

In 1455 probably Fust, not Gutenberg, brought the bible to the Frankfurt fair, then and now the greatest trade fair in the German lands. And already at the time it had a section dedicated to books. And who would come to poke around the latest issues, than our friend, legendary composer of bestselling erotica and future pope Pius II, Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini.

And he got very excited, so excited he wrote back to his then boss, the Spanish cardinal de Caravjal: quote: “I did not see complete bibles, but quinternions [those five sheet, twenty page sections] of different books, written in extremely elegant and correct letter, without error, which your eminence could read with no difficulty and without glasses” end quote.

Piccolomini tried to buy a copy but was told that all copies had been pre-ordered.

Gutenberg had his best seller. He had produced a book that was not cheaper than a manuscript, but infinitely better, its letters sharper, its layout more beautiful and most importantly – error free.

Gutenberg stood on the verge of becoming immensely rich and celebrated as the man who invented the world’s most important new technology for a 1000 years. But as he stood there, Johann Fust pulled the rug from under his feet.

Gutenberg had never paid any of the interest he owed on all the various loans he had taken out. And right now, in 1455, with the bibles almost completed, but not sold for cash, he had no money, just debt. Sure, he knew that as soon as he dispatched the books, the funds, maybe as much as 9,000 gulden would be flooding in, but right now, he did not have a penny. And Johann Fust knew that too.  He sued Gutenberg, Gutenberg was forced to hand over both his workshops with all the presses, the nearly finished bibles, the materials and everything else he had worked on for nearly two decades.

Johann Fust and his son-in-law, Gutenberg’s former assistant, Peter Schoeffer sold the bibles, made a Fortune, continued the workshop, and rapidly became the largest printing business in the Rhineland and publishing books almost as magnificent as the Gutenberg bible. Gutenberg himself kept going on a smaller scale, but would never have the resources to ever produce anything on the scale of the Gutenberg bible.

And that is where we will stop for today. Next week I will try to assess the impact of Gutenberg’s invention, a task that has defeated many a better man, but – like Gutenberg – I have embarked on this path and cannot stop.

And as usual my closing plea to support the show at historyofthegermans.com/support. All your help is very much appreciated.