If you heard one book called “universally acknowledged as the most
important of all printed books,” which do you expect it would be?
If you were Margaret Leslie Davis, the answer would be obvious. Davis’s The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book’s Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey,
released this March, begins with just that descriptor. It recounts the
saga of a single copy of the Gutenberg Bible—one of the several
surviving copies of the 450-year-old Bible printed by Johannes
Gutenberg, the putative inventor of the printing press, in one of his
earliest projects—through a 20th-century journey from auction house to
collector to laboratory to archive.
Davis quotes Mark Twain, who wrote, in 1900, a letter celebrating the
opening of the Gutenberg Museum. For Davis, Twain’s words were
“particularly apt.” “What the world is to-day,” Twain wrote, “good and
bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source. . .
.” Indeed, Gutenberg’s innovation has long been regarded an inflection
point in human history—an innovation that opened the door to the
Protestant Reformation, Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the
advent of widespread education, and a thousand more changes that touch
nearly everything we now know.
The only problem?
The universal acclaim is, in fact, not so universal—and Gutenberg himself is a, but not the,
source of printing. Rather, key innovations in what would become
revolutionary printing technology began in east Asia, with work done by
Chinese nobles, Korean Buddhists, and the descendants of Genghis
Khan—and, in a truth Davis acknowledges briefly, their work began
several centuries before Johannes Gutenberg was even born.
*
In a traditional printing press, small metal pieces with raised
backwards letters, known as movable type, are arranged in a frame,
coated with ink, and applied to a piece of paper. Take the paper away,
and it’s a printed page. Do this with however many pages make up a book,
and there’s a printed copy. Do this many times, and swiftly printed,
mass-produced books appear.
The printing press is often said to have been created by Gutenberg in
Mainz, Germany, around 1440 AD, and it began taking root in Europe in
the 1450s with the printing of the aforementioned Bible. Books
themselves had been present in Europe long before then, of course, but
only in hand-copied volumes that were accessible mainly to members of
the clergy. Access to mass-produced books revolutionized Europe in the
late 1400s, with advancing literacy altering religion, politics, and
lifestyles worldwide.
“What the world is to-day,” Twain wrote, “good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source.”
At least, this is how the story is rendered in most books, including, for the most part, The Lost Gutenberg.
But a single sentence late in the book nods to a much longer story
before that: “Movable type was an 11th-century Chinese invention,
refined in Korea in 1230, before meeting conditions in Europe that would
allow it to flourish—in Europe, in Gutenberg’s time.”
That sentence downplays and misstates what occurred.
The first overtures towards printing that began around roughly 800
AD, in China, where early printing techniques involving chiseling an
entire page of text into a wood block backwards, applying ink, and
printing pages by pressing them against the block. Around 971 AD,
printers in Zhejiang, China, produced a print of a vast Buddhist canon
called the Tripitaka with these carved woodblocks, using
130,000 blocks (one for each page). Later efforts would create early
movable type—including the successful but inefficient use of ideograms
chiseled in wood and a brief, abortive effort to create ceramic
characters. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/so-gutenberg-didnt-actually-invent-the-printing-press/
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