Any biography of Johannes Gutenberg must confront the large gap between the historic and the historical. His invention of the process of printing from moveable type created a new medium that fundamentally changed western culture. But the scant surviving details of his life offer little insight into the circumstances that led to this extraordinary discovery.
Gutenberg was probably born c.1400 to a merchant-class family in Mainz. Nothing is known of his life until 1430. By the late 1430s, he was in Aachen, manufacturing mirrors that pilgrims could use to capture images of relics. He was engaged in some form of business in Strasbourg by the early 1440s. By the end of that decade, he was back in Mainz, at work on his new invention. His earliest surviving book is probably from around 1452. He died in early 1468. The few other details of his life that survive resist clear interpretation.
Eric Marshall White’s new biography, faced with this dearth of documentary evidence, offers a bibliographical biography, presenting a detailed analysis of the books that Gutenberg printed. He was not prolific. White attributes no more than fifteen works to his press, some of them brief. They include several indulgences and small pamphlets, some of which survive only in fragmentary form. Their chronology is uncertain: none is dated. None carries the name of its printer.
Gutenberg’s outstanding achievement – a two- volume Bible, running to more than 1,200 pages, that he printed in the mid-1450s – stands in contrast to the rest of his output. White stresses the extraordinary technical, logistical and economic issues involved in its production: the varieties of type that had to be created, the acquisition of paper and parchment on a huge scale, the labour costs of multiple compositors working collaboratively on different presses. To these challenges was later added an additional ironic expense, as some copies were decorated elaborately by hand to make them look more like illuminated manuscripts, sometimes with remarkable success.
White offers illuminating analysis of Gutenberg’s books – particularly of their typography – with a wealth of well-chosen illustrations, as he traces the development of his subject’s invention. This book is also informative about Gutenberg’s better- documented collaborators: the entrepreneur Johann Fust, who saw the commercial potential of the enterprise and underwrote it; and Peter Schoeffer, a professional scribe who seems to have improved Gutenberg’s rather clunky initial type designs. White chronicles…
