Gutenberg's press
The Bible printed for the first time
Johannes Gutenberg is a goldsmith in Mainz who has spent years and borrowed money solving a technical problem: how to produce movable metal type that can be set, inked, pressed against paper or vellum, and reset for the next page. The Chinese have had printing technology for centuries. What Gutenberg develops is a system suited to the Latin alphabet, capable of producing large quantities of identical text with unprecedented speed and consistency.
His first major project is a Bible.
The Gutenberg Bible — the 42-line Bible, named for the number of lines per column — is produced around 1455 AD in an edition of approximately 180 copies. It is extraordinarily beautiful: the type is designed to imitate the handwritten manuscripts it replaces, and the initial letters are hand-illuminated in many copies.
Before Gutenberg, producing a Bible required months of a trained scribe's work. A single copy cost what a laborer might earn in a year. There were perhaps a few thousand complete Bibles in all of Europe.
Within decades of Gutenberg's press, Bibles are being produced in the thousands. Within a generation, they are being translated into vernacular languages and distributed across the continent.
The church that has controlled access to the text for centuries suddenly cannot control it. The information revolution of the fifteenth century does exactly what every information revolution does: it distributes power that was previously concentrated, democratizes access that was previously restricted, and makes the existing authorities permanently nervous.
Gutenberg does not know what he has started. Almost nobody does, at first.
“God suffers in the multitude of souls whom His word cannot reach. Religious truth is imprisoned in a small number of manuscript books. Let us break the seal which seals up holy things.”
— Johannes Gutenberg, attributed, c. 1455 AD
“so shall my word be that goes forth out of my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”
The printing press is the first information revolution in Western history and it is triggered by a Bible.
Gutenberg understood that the word of God should not be imprisoned in expensive manuscripts accessible only to the wealthy and the institutional. Religious truth imprisoned in a small number of books is not free — it is controlled.
Every information revolution raises the same question: who controls access to the text? The printing press transferred control from the monastery scriptorium to the printer's shop. The internet has transferred it again — this time to everyone.
The word that goes out from God's mouth will not return empty. It will find the people it is meant for by whatever means are available. The institutions that control its distribution are always temporary. The word is not.
How are you using the unprecedented access to the text that this moment in history gives you? And for whom?