Hi.  This is Frank Romano.  We’re in Mainz, Germany.  We’re at the Gutenberg Museum, if you will, Mecca to anybody in the printing industry.  They’ve got a wonderful exhibit here.  But we’re in this wonderful square and as we pan you can see the great cathedral.  Now this cathedral played a part in Gutenberg’s life because it was this Archbishop that came into Mainz and took over the city that forced the upheaval that changed the social order.  And a lot of his workers left and when they did, they left with the skill of printing.  And that’s how printing spread throughout Europe and then around the world, because Gutenberg had kept it a secret and, therefore, nothing transmitted to almost anybody else.

So here in Mainz, Germany, you not only have a wonderful museum, but the entire area, everywhere you go, you will find something about Johannes Gutenberg.  Behind me you can see probably the rarest building in the world.  It is the last surviving structure of what was Gutenberg’s original printing plant.  It was the staircase that connected the multiple floors within the building.  And if you look way at the top there’s a flag; it’s made out of metal and it has the symbols for Fust and Schoeffer, which most people associate as the Gutenberg symbol.  

But that was the way printers showed who they were.  Instead of putting their names on things, they would put a symbol of some sort; for instance, the oldest minutia symbol was an anchor with a dolphin going around it.  But here, you see the last part.  This was the staircase that connected various parts of the building, and note that they really have seamlessly integrated into the existing structures, but this is all that’s left of what Gutenberg had.

We’re here at the Gutenberg Museum and at the lowest level you can actually take pictures, but here they will not—here and above they will not allow pictures to be taken.  And we’re speaking low so we don’t interrupt anybody who’s printing anything.  But what you will discover on the third floor is a safe and in there are the actual Gutenberg Bibles and some of the artifacts that they printed, like the Indulgences before he printed the Bible.  On the lowest level they have a demonstration of a wooden press, and they have some old linotypes and printing presses, monotypes, etc., which is a very nice exhibition of old typesetting and printing equipment.

There’s a wonderful exhibit here on the Kelmscott, a work by William Morris.  It’s just unbelievable all the stuff that they have.  And as you go through, they have replicas of wooden presses from Gutenberg and from the English Common Period.  There’s a Stanhope Press, the first metal press that was ever done.  So there’s a phenomenal amount of material.  It would take a few hours for you to get through the Gutenberg Museum, but it’s well worth the visit.

This is the Rogers typograph.  This was the first machine to have automatic justification using the space band.  Rogers had the rights to the Schuckers space band and Mergenthaler did not.  Mergenthaler could not solve the problem of justification.  So there were lawsuits between the two companies.  Ultimately, the Mergenthaler Company bought the Rogers Typograph Company, got the rights to this space band, and that gave them dominance in the metal typesetting industry until 1913 or so when intertyping came in when the patents expired.  But this is one of the few Rogers typographs in the world.

This is not actually Gutenberg’s press.  Gutenberg’s press would have had a screw mechanism right in the middle there, so they made one that they could actually demonstrate here.  But they normally demonstrate printing multi-color work.  So they normally have the black material—there’s all your text.  And then they have color ink.  And then they will take the type that’s in color and they will ink it, put it into position, then put paper on it and make a pull.  And you can see up there, by the way, what they’ve been printing, and they do a very nice demonstration.  We happen to be here on a day when they’re not doing this demonstration.

Now, of course, Gutenberg would not have used rollers to put his ink down.  He would have used one of those things over there which is called an ink bowl.  And if you really want to know what Gutenberg invented, it’s actually over there on that little table.  You can see it with a round metal thing on the top.  That is actually his mold.  He would carve a letter, punch a mold, and put it into that device, and then he would make multiple copies of type.  And that’s how he was able to get his type.  And that’s what he really invented, movable type, and that was the key to everything that he did.

We see a bust of Gutenberg with a beard.  You see drawings of him, they all have a beard; statues of him, they all have a beard.  I contend he did not have a beard.  He was a member of the wealthy class.  The wealthy class in those days did not dress with the finery, believe it or not, that you might have imagined.  They dressed simply and they shaved.  It was the emerging merchant class where they dressed in fur and finery, and grew beards to show how wonderful they were and how they had the money to support all of this.  So I contend that Gutenberg really didn’t look like the pictures that we have, but no one’s going to change any of that.  We’re still going to see him with a beard.