Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words (Hardcover)

As momentous a contribution that Gutenburg gave the world details about his life are few. Even when he had established himself as a printer of some renown, there are many years, and even groups of years that are blank, or filled by only supposition. There are times that the recording of a lawsuit is all that are available to document where he was at a given point in time. And as with many inventions that have changed the course of history, there are the usual arguments over who actually invented what, and then there are the pretenders that history had accepted for centuries.

Those expecting a biography of the inventor will not be satisfied by this book. This is less the fault of the writer than the lack of documentary evidence about the subject. What the reader is given in great detail is a description of history before during and after the printing press became a reality. The Bible that is so routinely associated with the name of Gutenburg has certain volumes that are not only exceptional for the type but also for the decoration that was produced. The fragment of the picture on the cover only hints at the beauty of these books.

And this is the greatest criticism I have of this book. The work of Gutenburg was visual, and in many examples exceptionally beautiful. I cannot reconcile these facts with a book that offers a single black and white photograph of one page of this historic Bible. The invention of the press that Gutenburg created is exceptional, and exceptionally complicated. All the reader is offered is a brief description on how complicated it is, and two pages with a handful of drawings that raise more questions than they answer. The author should have let readers decide how much effort they wished to invest to understand this invention rather than presuming readers would be pleased with the barest of details.

If you have never read anything about this topic, the book will serve you better than if you already have knowledge in excess of the name of the man and what he created. The author also makes note of the idea that someday all books could be in electronic form and stored in, "hyperspace". I hope he meant cyberspace.

Most of the documents we have on Gutenberg come from his business dealings (and court suits), for as Man portrays him, he was nothing if not a determined businessman. His first business venture involved pressing out mirrors, and perhaps there was a spark that inspired his more famous product. Somehow, and we will never know how, Gutenberg had the idea of making multiple cheap copies of the metal punch that stamps out letters. Man can't show the process of invention, but he can show the invention, the "hand held mould" which was not replaced until mechanical typesetting came along. The other revolutionary idea was binding the type produced by the mould into a "forme," which seems a simple procedure, but is full of complexities detailed here. Before tackling the Bible, whose printing for common folks was controversial, Gutenberg wisely printed a standard Latin grammar, astrological and fortune-telling pulp, and forms for selling indulgences, quick tickets to heaven. When it came time to print the Bible, he produced a stunner. Man rhapsodizes over its type, layout, and the invention of right justification. The ones that remain are still as readable as when they were printed, and unlike the ungainly first attempts at such things as automobiles or personal computers, they have a beauty that is still worth aiming for.

Lacking material for a full biography, Man indulges in many fascinating digressions, like why comparable printing was not invented in China, and why the Muslim world did not start printing until the end of the nineteenth century. Especially fascinating here are the immediate results of printing, which could have unified the church but wound up helping to split it. Luther probably did not nail his theses on the door of the Wittenberg church; there is no contemporary account of anything like this legend. But he did write up theses, and as sensitive documents still do today, they got quickly leaked, published, and republished beyond his control. Before Gutenberg, a monk would have taken days to copy a few pages. After Gutenberg, a printer could do hundreds of copies of an entire book in a few days. A dozen years after Gutenberg's death in 1468, there were more than a hundred European towns with printing presses, and by the end of the fifteenth century, there were maybe twenty million books circulating. We are used to the electronic revolution, but Gutenberg's was more fundamental. Man's account of a tenacious inventor, entrepreneur, and artisan is a fine guide to just how far Gutenberg launched us, and how quickly.

As his compatriots have before him, Mr. Man had relatively little hard fact to work with. For all that Gutenberg did for the profusion of the word, he left behind precious few of his own. Little is known about him until the 1440s, by which time he was somewhere in his 40s. He already was renowned for merging the techniques of the coinage trade with the casting of convex mirrorlike buttons, producing thereby countless medallions then in great demand by the trinket trade along pilgrimage routes. One of grander versions of these mirrors is depicted in Jan Van Eyck's "Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini." Think of Gutenberg as having devised the latest thing in 15th century Sai Baba buttons. Frippery perhaps this was, but it led to the development of modern type casting, the key element in the evolution of moveable type.

Neither Gutenberg nor even the Western devotion to practical technique were the first at this. At the other end of the Silk Road, as far on it one could get without walking into the sea, a genius surpassing even Gutenberg, Sejong by name, devised both moveable type *and* a written alphabet where "even the sound of the winds, the cry of the crane and the barking of the dog-all may be written." Fate-blessed Sejong was given not merely his intellect and inventiveness, but also the title "Emperor" before his name. This gave him no end of advantage over the average type founder and alphabet inventor. Nor was he the first: the 28-letter Hangul ("Great Script") that he devised was based in part on a script devised by a Tibetan monk named Phangs-pa as a way of systematizing the many tongues of the Mongol Empire. Alas, although Sejong's efforts resulted in a library of over 160 works printed with moveable type based on Hangul, it did not create an information revolution of the sort inspired by his contemporary colleague in far-off Mainz. Why? Because the Korean elite insisted on sticking with Chinese, in great part because they wanted to preserve their status. Mr. Man's brief outline of events in Korea hint of a great tale to be told by a novelist-or Mr. Man himself-with a gift for creating in the mind's eye what the actual eye of the time would have seen. To say nothing of what the nose smelled and the tongue tasted. The sensuality of history is its least-examined feature.

Korea's triumph of elitism wasn't replicated in the West. The Catholic clergy stuck to Latin, in large part to keep the masses from finding out what they knew and said among themselves. But unlike Korea, the elitism of the Church was underlain by moral and economic corruption so blatant we can scarce imagine it today. Some say that once the words of the Bible became known to anyone who cared to read them, Luther or someone like him was inevitable. Maybe. What was inevitable, though, was the Enlightenment. Nearly everyone today nourishes from the fruits of that tree. Within fifty years of Gutenberg's first Bible circa 1450, the number of books of all kinds in Europe grew from thousands to millions. Science, literature, and the the writing of history as we know it emerged. Church hegemony collapsed. Kings created nation-states. Proof, not faith, became the criterion of truth. As Mr. Man points put, the book, and no less the man behind it, was the vehicle out of the Dark Ages.

It becomes very clear on a second reading of his book, cover to cover and this time looking at the air and light in the room as well as the furnishings, that Mr. Man is no less a scholar to the teeth than the myriads of Ph.D pensters who have made the Middle Ages and Renaissance such a huge section in the Dewey Decimal catalog. The difference is that Mr. Man can write rings around most historians. Pages 60 and 61 are such a recital of the fakery of the relics and pilgrimage trade that you might take it as satire until you reflect on how many Westerners today pilgrimage to Indian ashrams to lap up equally fanciful interpretations of Hindu legends, without much bothering to put into practice in their daily lives the moral and behavioral principles those gods commend.

Maypoles and meanders around the trees of history. If you don't have a love affair going with today's forest of words before Mr. Man, you certainly will after him.