Hi this is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com. Today's episode has absolutely nothing to do with the present day printing industry. It has everything to do with Johannes Gutenberg and it has the title "Gutenberg was an Idiot". Now you all know that Gutenberg invented moveable type. He didn't start out to inventing printable removable type, he really started out to produce or mass-produce Bibles that looked like they were handwritten and this is of course the one that you all know the so called 42-line Bible.
Now it's called the 42-line Bible for a very good reason. There are 42 lines in each column and there are two columns on each page. By the way, he did not do the illumination. All the Bibles that he produced were black and they were provided loose to whoever bought them and they then had to illuminator and illustrator dress them up and then a binder bound them. So there are no two Gutenberg Bibles in the world that are the same. There are 48 existing two-volume sets, there are a few one-volumes available that are out there.
Most tend to be in the United States, next of Europe, and then around the world after that. It has been my goal to see every Gutenberg Bible on earth. I've seen 36 so far. Now what happened was - was that Gutenberg in order to create this look of handwriting had to have a font with many double, triple, and special characters in it. Ligatures were very important because if you then did that it looked like it had been written by hand where the - the scribe took many shortcuts. So when he creates the first font, which consists of 292 glifts because again, many were multiple invariance of certain letters.
He then creates some pages and he discovers that the Bible would be four volumes or something like that. And of course, this will never do. The paper was expensive even then. Your velum, the hyde of animals was even more expensive. It was just not going to work. So he discarded the 36-line note Bible. By the way, one of his workmen took that type and left and went to another city and later on and composed a 36-line Bible. You can see it by the way at the Planta Mauritius Museum in Antwerp where they always have one of the volumes on exhibit.
Historians always thought that - that came first and then came the 42-line Bible and that's not true. It was actually done later when paper prices had come down. So he now starts to work on another font and this font is 40-lines to the column. Well, that's going to be like three volumes and that's also a problem. And so he tries to file down the ascenders and the descenders and what he winds up with then is 41-lines to the column. And that doesn't quite work either. So he has to throw all that out and he starts all over again.
Now he comes up with the 42-line font. Now in the meantime he had to borrow money because it took a year to do all this font work. So as a result he borrowed 800 guilders first from Johann Fust and then he borrowed another 800 guiled and by the time he's done he owns nothing because it's all in hock to Fust And Fust then just as the Bibles are coming out, Fust forecloses on him and Gutenberg loses everything at that point. Fust then takes Peter Schoffer who was Gutenberg's assistant, he now runs the plant. He also marries Fust's daughter. That's another story, by the way. Fust goes off to Paris to sell the Bibles. He sells several of them. The people who buy them compare them and they find exactly the same errors on the same pages and they say, "This must be the work of the Devil."
And so they go after Fust and Fust dies of a heart attack in Paris so Schoffer gets everything, and Gutenberg gets nothing. He disappears. And then next time we hear about him is when he dies and that's about it. All of his materials are being discarded and there's a list of what they are. And he's been dabbling in printing we can tell at that point in time. So why didn't he do a copy cast off? Why didn't he analyze this beforehand, before creating all these fonts? I mean, that's why he was an idiot. He could have planned all this out better than he did.
We give him credit for inventing printing, actually inventing movable type but the 42-line Bible and you have to give him credit, is an absolutely prefect piece of work. At the very beginning of printing, he does it perfectly. That's why it took him so long to do it correctly. For instance, you may notice -- I'm not sure you'll see very well but on the right side of each column you see these two little lines sticking into the margin. Well they were hyphens because they wanted the look to be consistent for the type, so he did hanging punctuation.
I mean, I remember in the '80s when it started to come into use everyone thought that was the greatest idea. Well hey, Gutenberg did it. Ligatures disappeared over time, hanging punctuation disappeared, then it came back when the computer programs came in but he did an absolutely perfect job. The presswork, everything about what he did was perfect. I can see why it took him so long and probably why he had to borrow the money in order to do it. So that is your history lesson of the day. You now know why Gutenberg was an idiot and that's my opinion. Take care.
