Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words

Very well done work. Incorporates the technical aspects of the printing trade. Notes the influence of religion of the day, including the Roman Catholic church as a large first customer, and the Arab culture which closed the door on this printing advance. Very clear and easy read.

Despite the great lack of sources for the modern historian to go upon about the inventor and his invention, Man still does an excellent job. He not only gives some good educated guesses about what was going on behind closed doors but, gives one a feel for just how important this development was to us all. Even if some readers found the ending not to their taste the brevity of the book means a very little investment of time.

One of the most delicate tasks when writing about history is to remain rigorous as to the facts while transporting the reader into scenes that feel like they are happening right now, just outside the door, the two-team oxcarts as real as today's FedEx trucks.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 li

Few people know much about Johann Gutenberg, but everybody profits from the gadget he invented. And the book _Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words_ (John Wiley) by John Man has to concentrate on Gutenberg's printing press. There is not really enough known about his life to make a biography, but Man's readable book makes a stab at summarizing what we do know about Gutenberg's comings and goings; more importantly, it reveals much of the history of his time and place, and explains how very quickly printing took over Europe. 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 accou

This book offers a fascinating look at the life of Johann Gutenberg. While most people are aware of Gutenberg's revolutionary invention- the printing press- many don't know much about the inventor. I thought the author provided an amazing look at the technological ambitions that drove Gutenberg. In this age of Internet and digital breakthroughs, the story of Gutenberg and what propelled him is especially interesting.