‘Johannes Gutenberg' Review: Print the Legend

Wall Street Journal

3 days ago

The Gutenberg Bible ranks among the most prized of rare books, but within three centuries of its printing around 1455, its version of Scripture was considered obsolete and its creator, Johannes Gutenberg, was largely forgotten. Some 15 Gutenberg Bibles were even cut into pieces, their leaves recycled as wrappers for newer titles.
According to Eric Marshall White's 'Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books,' not until the 18th century did scholars rediscover the German printer's pre-eminent role in creating Europe's first movable-type printing press. From there, his reputation soared. In 1900, in a letter commemorating the opening of a museum named for Gutenberg in his hometown of Mainz, Mark Twain wrote that 'Gutenberg's invention is incomparably the mightiest event that has ever happened in profane history.' One hundred years later, Gutenberg was declared the 'Man of the Millennium' by a number of media outlets.
Mr. White, the Scheide librarian at Princeton University, suggests that the pendulum swung too far. For one thing, it's well established that printing innovations in China and Korea long predated Gutenberg. Moreover, given that only a couple hundred different books had likely been published in Europe by the time of Gutenberg's 1468 death, the author is uncomfortable crediting him, as if he were more prophet than printer, with the media revolution that followed. Mr. White wryly notes that in Gutenberg's time the plague spread a lot faster than the printing press.
In this slim, authoritative volume, Mr. White centers his narrative on the works Gutenberg is known to have printed, including broadsides and indulgences that were used, in the author's words, to 'broadcast religious intolerance' and 'underwrite sectarian warfare.' Hagiography this is not.