Discussion

By Mark Decker on Jan 08, 2021

Thank you for that interesting piece and for lighting a fire under my butt!

While seeing relatives in West Berlin in 1963 (I was all of 10) we visited Gutenberg Museum in Mainz and saw the reproduction press and pressroom and it must have struck a nerve because even as a kid I was fascinated. My parents bought a page printed on that press and it's somewhere in the family today but now I'm determined to find it and perhaps get it back.

By Dick Margulis on Jan 08, 2021

Frank, love your stuff. But I have a nit to pick about the video. I've examined my share of the bibles (nowhere near as many as you have), and I've been to the museum in Mainz. And they have this wrong too, including a locked-up chase for a page of reproduction type.

Gutenberg did not "figure out" hanging punctuation. Look at those hyphens. No two are the same. And on a high-res image, you'll also see that they're not black. The type was justified simply, with furniture for the ditch. Words broke where they broke. The hyphens were added in the correctors' room, with a quill and an inkwell. They've faded to a dark brown over time, as they would.

The other thing to notice about the hyphens is that the proofreader's mark for inserting a hyphen is to this day the same slanted double line.

By Chris Lynn on Jan 11, 2021

Interesting piece, thanks Frank. I visited Trier cathedral back in 2011 and found outside in a display case a robot scribe, writing the Bible on a web. Not the most productive use of technology! Someone posted a video here:
https://youtu.be/50MsHPbHedM