This is a scosh off-topic (big surprise around these parts, right?) but there is a headline over at MSNBC.com today that caught my attention: “Religious pilgrimages: a billion-dollar industry.” Now, this caught my eye not because I have any particular interest in making a religious pilgrimage (although a couple of weeks ago I did visit Graceland which, for someone of my generation, surely qualifies). Rather, the first thing that came to my mind was the role that the religious pilgrimage business played in the advent of the printing industry. (One of my earliest intellectual heroes, ever since catching the original series Connections on PBS when I was 11, was science historian James Burke. His second series, 1985’s The Day the Universe Changed, featured this story.) In the Middle Ages, by around, say, the 15th century, religious pilgrimages had already been major events. If you’ve read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, you know that people used to trek for hundreds of miles to the shrine of Thomas Beckett, martyred Archbishop of Canterbury. (Or, as I once saw on a network news closed-captioning, “The Archbishop of Can’t Bury.”) Anyway, throughout Europe, pilgrims were inevitably trekking hither and thither, usually because it was at these various shrines that they could get indulgences, official forgiveness for some sin or other. One popular destination—then and now—is The Shrine of the Black Madonna at Rocamadour in France. There, to get your indulgence, you were required to climb the 216 stone steps on your knees (kind of a Medieval CrossFit workout, by the sound of it), although today they advise that you can simply take a walking tour. Wimps. As anyone who has ever toured any museum, historical, or cultural site (like, say, Graceland) knows, you inevitably have to exit through the gift shop—no fools they—and even back in the Middle Ages, any respectable (or especially non-respectable) pilgrimage site had the ecclesiastic equivalent of the gift shop, with all manner of holy relics or other tchotchkes for sale. It was an extremely lucrative market, then as now. But there was one little object that was vitally important, however. Once at the top of places like Rocamadour, you were supposed to buy a special holy mirror, in which you caught the reflection of the shrine or the holy relics on display and thus capture the “miraculous power” of the shrine which the pilgrims could then take home with them. (This was before smartphone cameras, after all. I don’t know how Facebook tagging would have worked.) So the “pilgrim’s mirror” market was a big one, and their manufacture was often undertaken by goldsmiths. The German city of Aachen also had a holy site and every seven years, pilgrims came from all over Europe for a special fair to view the holy relics. Trinket makers were also gearing up for this major event, including a group of German businessmen, one of whom (whose name I’ll withhold for a moment, but you’re probably way ahead of me) borrowed money from the others (Hans Riffe, Andreas Dritzehn, and Andreas Heilmann) to invest in making these “pilgrim’s mirrors” to sell at the fair. So, in 1439, they invested quite a hefty sum to manufacture 32,000 mirrors. They expected to clean up. Unfortunately, upon reflection (as it were), they realized to their horror that they had got the date of the fair wrong—it actually wasn’t until 1440, a year later, which meant all their working capital was tied up in stuff they couldn’t unload for another year. One of these guys, the one whose name I withheld, was the one who had got the date wrong and was now in hock to the others. So he had to scramble to come up with another idea that he could present to them, some kind of moneymaking proposition that would make up for his bad timing. This poor guy was Johann Gutenberg, and his “plan B” was the printing press. Next week, Billy, I’ll tell you how the fashion for fancy underwear in the Middle Ages created the modern paper industry.   Additional info: Albert Kapr, Johann Gutenberg: The Man and His Invention, Hants, Germany: Scolar Press, 1996, pp. 71–73.