Customer Reviews

Johann Gutenberg: The Man and His Invention

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Kapr's book is the result of his life's research on Gutenberg and a summary of all that was known on the subject by the late 20th century. Some readers might find the book slightly dry and scholarly, but it gives all the familiar and obscure, bizarre and quirky tales about the inventor of printing, and it patiently distinguishes which parts of the legend are speculative and apocryphal from those that deserve to be considered historical fact. Kapr's narrative paints a vivid picture of fifteenth-century southwestern Germany, its social structure and politics and the conditions that set the stage for Gutenberg's achievment. We see Gutenberg's childhood as the son of a wealthy businessman and wine producer and how this could have given him the ideas he later put into practice in his inventions. One of the more interesting and illustrative stories is Gutenberg's invention of metal stamping to manufacture mirrors for the pilgrims at Aachen, a brilliant piece of imaginative work that was blunted by his miscalculation by a year of the date of the Aachen pilgrimmage. Throughout the book we see repeated instances of Gutenberg's restless inventive powers and his benighted (or astonishingly unlucky) career as a businessperson. In the end, Kapr shows how Gutenberg fell afoul of the Pope and was driven out of his home town by the Pope's allies and left to die in obscurity. In addition, the book shows to a small degree the contribution of Peter Schoeffer to the invention and explains why the world's first printing firm was Fust und Schoeffer rather than Gutenberg und Gesellschaft. As a reader with a personal interest in printing and typography and an amateur historian's thirst for more fine details to round out my knowledge of the early Renaissance, I found this book to be unputdownable.

It gives printers a sense of pride in there fast paced sometimes unappreciated work. It helps people realize that it was a printer who single handedly raised mankind out of the dark ages.