44 Fun Facts About Johannes Gutenberg

Which reformer's 1517 challenge to the Church did Gutenberg's invention spread through the German lands within weeks?

Martin Luther. He had raised his Ninety-five Theses as points for scholars to debate, but printers in Nuremberg, Leipzig and Basel reissued them, and soon they were the talk of the German lands.

Which metalworking craft is Gutenberg usually said to have practised before he turned to printing?

Goldsmithing. He was attached to a goldsmiths' guild and taught gem polishing, and cutting steel punches to cast metal was exactly the skill that making type demanded.

The Gutenberg Bible is sometimes named after which French cardinal, in whose Paris library a copy was identified?

Mazarin. He had been dead a century: the copy in the library he founded was the first that bibliographers described, in a Paris bookseller's catalogue of 1763, and the name stuck.

What three metals made up Gutenberg's type-metal alloy?

Lead, tin and antimony. The mix melts at a low heat and casts cleanly, while the tin and antimony make soft lead hard enough to survive thousands of pulls of the press.

What kind of ink did Gutenberg introduce for printing books?

Oil-based ink. The watery ink that scribes used simply ran off metal type, so Gutenberg made something closer to a varnish, sticky enough to cling and still glossy on the page today.

Why do reference books usually give 1400 as the year of Gutenberg's birth?

It is a convenient round guess. No record of his birth survives and estimates run from 1393 to 1406, but the round number let Mainz celebrate his 500th birthday in 1900.

On which feast day is Gutenberg traditionally said to have been born?

Saint John the Baptist, 24 June. Children were often named for the saint of their birthday, though Johannes was too common a name to prove it; Mainz holds its Gutenberg festival, the Johannisnacht, around that date.

What are books printed in the half-century after Gutenberg's Bible, before 1501, called?

Incunabula. The word is Latin for swaddling clothes or a cradle, since these are books from the infancy of printing; the cut-off at 1500 is only a cataloguer's convenience.

The oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, 78 years before Gutenberg's Bible, comes from which country?

Korea. The Buddhist text called Jikji was printed at a temple in 1377; its one surviving volume left the country in a French diplomat's collection and is now in France's national library.

What was added by hand to copies of the Gutenberg Bible after the text had been printed?

Coloured initials. Gutenberg left gaps for them and for red headings, and a rubricator and an illuminator filled them in for each buyer, just as in a handwritten Bible.

In which city, now in France, did Gutenberg spend about ten years working on a secret invention?

Strasbourg. Almost everything known of those years comes from a lawsuit, in which witnesses spoke of partners sworn to keep a new craft secret and of a carpenter who had built a press.

What was Gutenberg taken to court over in 1436-37?

A broken promise of marriage. The woman was named Ennelin and no verdict survives; lawsuits like this one are almost the only record of his life, since he never put his name on a book.

What did Gutenberg plan to sell to pilgrims travelling to Aachen in 1439?

Polished metal mirrors. Pilgrims held them up to catch the power of Aachen's relics and carry it home, but the pilgrimage was put off for a year and the partners' money was tied up.

In which German city were sample pages of Gutenberg's Bible shown to prospective buyers in the autumn of 1454?

Frankfurt. An imperial diet had drawn visitors from across Europe, the ideal audience for a book meant to sell far beyond Mainz; today the city hosts the world's largest book fair.

Which Mainz financier lent Gutenberg 800 guilders around 1450 and a further 800 for the Bible?

Johann Fust. When the loans went unpaid he sued in 1455 for 2,026 guilders with interest, won, and went on to run the first printing firm that made real money.

Which former Paris scribe worked for Gutenberg and later married his financial backer's daughter?

Peter Schoffer. Gutenberg's own workman testified for the backer in the lawsuit that ended the partnership, then ran the printing shop with him and outlasted them both by decades.

What lucrative church documents did Gutenberg's press print by the thousand in 1454-55?

Indulgences. Sold to pay for the defence of Cyprus against the Turks, they were forms with a blank for the buyer's name, and one of them is the earliest piece of his printing that can be firmly dated.

What does the Gutenberg Bible's nickname 'B42' count?

Lines per column. The first pages printed had only 40, and Gutenberg is thought to have filed down his type to squeeze in two more and save paper.

Roughly how many copies of the Gutenberg Bible were printed?

About 180. A visitor in 1455 heard figures of 158 and 180, and studies of the paper stock back the higher one; Gutenberg had raised the print run once work was under way.

Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who wrote in 1455 that Gutenberg's Bible could be read without glasses, later became what?

Pope, as Pius II, three years later. His letter to a cardinal is the earliest eyewitness report of the Bible and the firmest evidence for when it was printed.

Of which Latin text is the Gutenberg Bible an edition?

The Vulgate, the translation St Jerome made in the 4th century. Gutenberg printed it in two columns with no page numbers, presumably so that it looked like the manuscripts his buyers knew.

From which country was the paper for Gutenberg's Bible imported?

Italy. Watermarks of an ox head and a bunch of grapes trace the sheets to mills at Caselle in Piedmont, one of the great papermaking centres of the day.

The Gutenberg Bible's typeface copies which style of medieval handwriting?

Gothic blackletter. To pass for a scribe's best work the type needed some 290 different characters, with joined letters and abbreviations as well as the plain alphabet.

Which 1457 book, printed by Gutenberg's former partners, was Europe's first to carry its printers' names and a date?

The Mainz Psalter. Its closing note boasts that the book was made 'without use of a pen' and names both men, but not the inventor whose type they were using.

What became of Gutenberg's grave in Mainz?

It was lost with its church. He was buried among the Franciscans, their church was pulled down in the 18th century, and only a relative's note printed in 1499 records that he lay there.

What is true of every known portrait of Gutenberg?

All were imagined after his death. The first appeared in a book of famous Germans about a century later, and nothing reliable is recorded of how he really looked.

Who brought Gutenberg's invention to England, setting up a press at Westminster in 1476?

William Caxton. A merchant who learned the craft in Cologne, he printed mostly in his own language, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales included, and so helped to fix written English.

What did a 2001 computer study of Gutenberg's early type find about copies of each letter?

Too varied for one mould. The study argued that each piece may have been cast in a temporary mould of sand, so the reusable mould long credited to Gutenberg perhaps came later; not all scholars agree.

Which encyclopedia's 1911 edition credited the Dutchman Laurens Coster, rather than Gutenberg, with inventing printing?

Encyclopaedia Britannica. Its typography article held that printing began in Haarlem in the 1440s, on the strength of a tale first printed in 1588; later editions handed the honour back to Gutenberg.

In which country was movable type first invented, about four centuries before Gutenberg?

China. Around the 1040s an artisan named Bi Sheng made type from baked clay, but it never displaced woodblocks there, probably because a script of thousands of characters needed so many pieces.

The 'Donatus', a medieval schoolbook that Gutenberg probably printed before his Bible, taught pupils which subject?

Latin grammar. The little book wore out in schoolboys' hands and always needed replacing, so it brought in ready cash while the huge Bible was still being set.

Which country holds more surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible than any other?

Germany, narrowly ahead of the United States. As far as is known every copy stayed in Europe for four centuries, until a New York collector bought one in 1847.

Which US state's university paid a record $2.4 million for a complete Gutenberg Bible in 1978?

Texas. Three Gutenberg Bibles changed hands in 1978 and this was the dearest; the university in Austin has kept it on permanent display ever since.

Where is the only Gutenberg Bible volume held outside Europe and North America?

Keio University, Tokyo. Its scholars turned one volume into a research tool: their HUMI project photographed the Bibles of other libraries, the British Library's two among them, and put them online.

Which Canadian media thinker called the age of print 'the Gutenberg Galaxy' in a 1962 book?

Marshall McLuhan. The same book gave the world the phrase 'global village': he argued that print had reshaped how people think, and expected electronic media to push the printed book aside.

What is Project Gutenberg?

The oldest digital library. It began in 1971 when Michael Hart typed the US Declaration of Independence into a university computer to give away, and volunteers have been adding books ever since.

Which website-building platform launched a block editor named 'Gutenberg' in 2018?

WordPress. Its co-founder said the name was chosen 'for a reason': he hoped the new editor would open up online publishing the way the press had opened up books.

Who wrote in 1900 that the world owes what it is, 'good and bad', to Gutenberg?

Mark Twain. He sent the tribute for the opening of the Gutenberg Museum and knew the craft at first hand: apprenticed to a printer as a boy, he had set type for years before he ever wrote a book.

Which British actor and presenter set about building a copy of Gutenberg's press for a 2008 BBC documentary?

Stephen Fry. The film followed him across Europe on the inventor's trail and then into the workshop to help build the press, and it was nominated for a BAFTA the following year.

The costliest copies of Gutenberg's Bible were printed on what, instead of paper?

Vellum. It is fine calfskin, and a Bible this size took the hides of a whole herd, so roughly three copies in four were printed on paper instead.

What did the Archbishop of Mainz grant the ageing Gutenberg in 1465?

A pension as a courtier. Paid each year in court clothes and in food and drink by the cartload, free of tax, it kept out of want a man whose invention had made others rich but never him.

What did astronomers name around 1800 in honour of Gutenberg's invention?

A constellation. Officina Typographica, the Printing Office, showed a case of type and inking pads beside Canis Major; it appeared on maps for decades, but astronomers never formally adopted it.

Which explorer's printed copy of Marco Polo's travels, its margins full of his own notes, is kept in Seville?

Christopher Columbus. His son Fernando inherited the book and went on to buy printed books by the thousand, and what survives of his library is kept at Seville Cathedral.

The son of Gutenberg's foreman issued the first printed English New Testament in the 1520s; who translated it?

William Tyndale. His translation was printed at Worms and smuggled into England in 1526, where it was promptly banned; Tyndale himself was executed for heresy ten years later.