Gutenberg

This, I am told, is the spot where the book geeks come to share their bookworm ways. You cannot be a bookworm (at least one with any measure of certification) until you have read about Johannes Gutenberg. Jeff Jarvis, an American Journalist has written a biography titled “Gutenberg The Geek” which is an absolute delight to read.

Johannes Gutenberg is important to book lovers the world over because he is the inventor of the printing press. I needn’t explain that without printing technology you would probably never have had the opportunity to read a single book. But I may need to run you through the kind of person you would have become if you did not have the opportunity to read books. You’d have become a goat-herd, at best. Education would have been oral, as it had been throughout the time, with only a few scholars writing things on papyrus, clay tablets, leather, even paper – but without the capacity to replicate their writings across a hundred scrolls, except through a lifetime. The printing press ranks up there with other extraordinary inventions like the steam engine, electricity, the internet and gunpowder in terms of the influence it had on mankind.

Read on. Gutenberg’s year of birth is not precisely known, but it was sometime between the years of 1394 and 1404. In the 1890s the city of Mainz declared his official and symbolic date of birth to be June 24, 1400. The key things about the father of the pages you turn every time you peruse a book can be summarized thus; Poverty, Bible, Treachery, Perseverance. Poverty because Gutenberg was resident in Mainz, Germany, which was drowning in so much debt that creditors had placed a spending embargo on the whole town.

We call them austerity measures today. Bible, because all Gutenberg wanted was to make the Latin Bible available to many more people than just the Father of Mainz (his ambition was to print an initial 180 bibles). Treachery because artists and thinkers never have money, and they rely on banks and rich backers, and Gutenberg financial backer bankrupted him and by court order carted away all his work and equipment before he could sell a single bible. Perseverance because it took Gutenberg 20 years to develop his technology to completion, and even after being bankrupted, still found a way to propagate his invention to the world.

During his time, the handwritten manuscript and wood block printing were the prevailing technology of book production in Europe. This limited the spread of knowledge, for obvious reasons. Slow. Cumbersome. One book per print. Gutenberg invented mass production. A single foundry worker having the capacity to cast 3,000 pages a day. Up from one. Jarvis records that Gutenberg’s greatest problem, having figured out the foundry technology, the press and the right ink, was financial. He had to hire twenty workers, buy 230,000 pages of paper, hire premises and all other incidental overheads. He needed roughly 2,000 gulden (roughly 300,000 USD today) to start.

A venture capitalist named Johann Fust lent him the seed money. The equivalent of USD 300,000/= (today’s), which was sufficient for his needs – to print, at first, 180 bibles. They were so pricey back then that he would have broken even. Can you fathom breaking even at Kshs 30 million by selling 180 bibles? These same bibles we get for free. The ones on your phone.

Treachery

Right when the books were nearing completion, Fust struck with his lawyers’ fine print. He sued Gutenberg for the principle loan, interest and all the other things banks and shylocks impose in their loan (dis)agreements. Is it not William Shakespeare that wrote the timeless classic of “The Merchant of Venice?” Gutenberg did not end up as well as Antonio ended up against Shylock, but the point is this; The treachery of the lender is as old as the art of lending. Anyway, seeing Gutenberg had yet to sell a single bible, he couldn’t pay. and therefore, Fust took over Gutenberg’s business. This was Fust’s plan all along. It often is, even now.

How do you respond to such treachery?

Gutenberg forgot about patents and exclusivity and went The Full Monty. He started training every printer he could find on his methods, thereby bursting open the entire trade secret and spreading it across Europe. For us therefore, Fust’s treachery was important, because it cracked open the lid of exclusivity, and spread the technology of printing like a wild weed across Europe. Ironic, isn’t it?

Influence

Apart from the influence upon the nuts and bolts of printing, there was another, even greater influence that Gutenberg exerted on mankind. One, his press was used to print Martin Luther’s famed Ninety Five Theses and spread them far and wide across Europe, far out of the censorship of the church and its affiliate Kings (weren’t all the leaders of Europe small fiefdoms of the Pope then?). I bring up the protestant reformation because it was the single most important milestone event in the history of Europe. We can debate that, but the outcome will be as stated.

Almost immediately, over the next century, and to this day, Gutenberg’s invention fostered the era of mass communication. That era, which has now come to fruition with the coming of the internet, permanently altered the structure of society. The capacity to produce and therefore spread information on a mass scale spread ideas (especially revolutionary ones), science, art and religion across borders, beyond institutions and out of reach of authority. It captured the imagination of the masses and broke the monopoly of the elite class on education and learning. That in turn bolstered the emerging capitalist middle class in Europe, and ultimately killed Latin as the Lingua Franca of the learned. In a nutshell, Gutenberg had a key role to play in The Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, The Age of Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution, Knowledge-Based economies, and the spread of learning to the masses (you and me).

Gutenberg and the Internet

If you look keenly, you will see that the internet is completing a circle that Gutenberg began. The fast spread of information. The influence of the internet on social, political and cultural issues (remember the Arab Spring, anyone?). The sheer power of a tweet from the right thumb, at the right time (Donald Trump comes to mind). The mind boggling 6.3 billion YouTube views of the song Despacito. The largest, richest global supermarket, Amazon being a purely online business (it is worth over USD 1 trillion). We are in the information age. It began in Mainz in the fifteenth century and is bursting open in the 21st Century. Every time you buy your child a book, or read one, or look around your company registry, or think education and the human progress it represents, think of Johannes Gutenberg, and bless his soul