“Printing is an army of 26 soldiers, with which you can conquer the world”, said Johannes Gutenberg, whose invention nearly 600 years ago has enabled you to read these words in print.
Born in Mainz, Germany, around the year 1400, Gutenberg was in his early to mid-50s when he created a hard metal alloy from which he fashioned the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet into individual characters or type. He arranged the letters into straight lines of words, covered them in ink (made from soot, resin and linseed oil) and pressed them against a sheet of paper to invent the technique of printing.
His invention made obsolete the laborious practice of writing books by hand (usually done by monks or nuns using goose quills) and woodblock printing, because wood lacked durability. The words Linotype (line of type) and Letterpress (letter-press) became generic and Gutenberg’s invention endured until the advent of computerised typesetting in the later decades of the last century.
Local clergymen were the angel investors who provided the seed capital for Gutenberg’s work. Scores of them pledged to buy copies of the Bible from him if he could set it in type and print it in Latin, the language of the Roman Catholic Church, universities and international diplomacy.
He printed 30 of his Bibles on parchment (made from dried animal skin) and 150 more on paper (made from old linen rags). Every page had two columns of 42 lines of text printed in black ink. The decorated red initial letters that introduced the books of the Old or New Testaments, or chapters, were added later by illuminators hired by Gutenberg or by the purchasers. His copies of the Bible had no page numbers or list of contents or reference to the printer-publisher.
Most of the Gutenberg Bibles were divided into two volumes making a total of 1,282 pages. As well as the 26 upper case (capitals) and lower case letters of the Latin alphabet, he had to cast punctuation marks, ligatures (double or tied letters such as ae) and abbreviations, requiring a total of 290 different characters. Among the first sentences he set in type was the opening sentence of the Gospel of St John: In principio erat verbum (In the beginning was the word).
A huge facsimile of a page from the Gutenberg Bible hangs from the ceiling over the centre aisle of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Strasbourg, where Gutenberg lived for 10 years. He perfected his craft there before returning home to set up his printing workshop in Mainz, about 320km to the north. The Strasbourg cathedral print is 5m wide and 7.2m in height. It was printed in Mainz and is considered to be the largest printed Bible page ever produced.
Fewer than 50 of the 180 original Gutenberg Bibles, printed between 1452 and 1455, are thought to still exist. Two of them are on display in the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, a city, like Strasbourg, on the banks of the river Rhine. The museum bought one of them in New York in 1978 for €1.85 million.
Legacies of the printing pioneer linger. The terms upper case and lower case, still used today, refer to where the characters were stored in the type case so that typesetters could select them quickly and easily. The right-hand and left-hand pages in books are still called recto and verso respectively; the Latin instruction “stet” (let it stand) tells a printer to cancel an alteration; organised groups of print workers belong to a chapel, headed by a mother or father of the chapel.
Printing in the English language (which, like Latin, has a 26-letter alphabet) was pioneered in London by William Caxton about 20 years after Gutenberg’s Bibles. He studied printing on mainland Europe before setting up his own press at Westminster. He became the first retailer of printed books in England.
Rules for printers in English were first standardised by Horace Hart, printer to the Oxford University Press in the mid-19th century. Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press Oxford was sold to the public from 1904 after he discovered that bootleg copies of what he had previously provided only to in-house compositors and apprentices, and lately to some authors and editors, were being sold in London shops.
He complained of receiving applications for copies “from persons who had no absolute claim to be supplied gratuitously”, including “Officials of the King’s Government at Home, in the Colonies, and in India”.