Printer's Error

by Rebecca Romney

  Within a generation of its invention, the details of the earliest printing press had fallen into confused obscurity. Some said printing was invented in Italy by the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson. Some said it was invented in Strasbourg, where Gutenberg lived for a time. Others suggested that the inventor was a man named Procopius Waldvogel, in Avignon, France. During Leipzig’s bicentenary (1640) and tercentenary (1740) celebrations of the invention of print, the city praised Mainz businessman Johannes Fust and his partner Peter Schöffer as the inventors. Gutenberg was remembered only as their “assistant.”

  There simply wasn’t enough early documentation to link Gutenberg indisputably to the greatest invention of the modern world. The earliest printed reference that unambiguously calls him the inventor didn’t appear until 1472, almost two decades after the first printed books were sold. But with so many other candidates vying for the title, Gutenberg seemed no more attractive than anyone else. It wasn’t until 1741, more than two hundred fifty years after Gutenberg’s death, that a German history professor named David Köhler published a book entitled The Vindication of Johann Gutenberg. After decades of digging through archives in Germany, Köhler discovered several documents related to Gutenberg’s life. In his pivotal work, Köhler printed a number of crucial manuscript records—at least one of which appeared to connect Gutenberg to the invention of the printing press.

  Even with newly printed records, though, studies like these served only to thrust Gutenberg to the top of the contender’s list, not to settle his claim once and for all. This is mostly because only two documents from his life reference printing explicitly—and one of those documents went missing for more than a hundred fifty years after its discovery in the eighteenth century. The documents people could find provided precious little detail. The story of who Gutenberg was and what he accomplished had to be inferred through the keyholes of a few surviving handwritten manuscripts.

  Because the creator of Western printing didn’t print anything about himself, we know almost nothing about Gutenberg’s birth and early years. Trithemius, on the other hand, who made no secret of his criticisms about printing, wrote—and printed—extensively on his own life.

  THE MAN who would be called Johannes Trithemius was born in 1462, six years before Gutenberg died, in the tiny village of Trittenheim, which sits about eighty miles from Mainz. The family into which Trithemius was born suffered from devastating poverty, and worse, Johannes’s father died when his son was just a year old.

  Being a single mother sucks, no matter what time period you live in. But being a single Mütter in fifteenth-century Germany, with no welfare, day care, or even women’s education, had to have been near the top of the solo-parenting suck list. Johannes’s mother, Elizabeth, walked the road of mother and widow for seven trying years before finally breaking down and remarrying. Why did she hold out so long? “[S]o that the tender babe would not be exposed, as was often the case, to the abuses of a stepfather.” Elizabeth knew what every Grimm fairy tale teaches us: German stepparents are the absolute worst.

  To exactly no one’s surprise, it turned out Elizabeth was right. Her second marriage made her life more financially stable, but the cost was a father figure who hated learnin’ like the pope hated Satan himself. Reading books was nonsense, and if young Johannes persisted in filling his head with letters and diagrams and whatever else was going on in those goddanged things, well, someone needed to pick up a leather lash and whip the persistence right out of him. But the constant physical abuse had the opposite effect on Trithemius, making him even more determined to study in secret and then get the hell out of Dodge (i.e., Trittenheim, Germany).

  A particularly life-changing moment occurred when Johannes was fifteen years old. He had a dream that he would later interpret as a vision from God. In it, a young messenger approached him holding two stone tablets. On one tablet was written a collection of letters. On the other, a collection of drawings. Johannes was instructed to choose. Which do you like better? Words or pictures? Most people would have chosen the pictures, because most people back then couldn’t read. But Johannes chose the words. Translated to a modern equivalent, it’s like someone appearing in your dreams and asking you to choose between an article from The New Yorker and a viral video of a baby panda sneezing. You know you should pick The New Yorker, but this is an angel of God and it already knows you’d rather see that baby panda sneeze.

  Trithemius, however, chose correctly. “Behold,” the messenger announced, “God has heard your prayers and will grant you whatever you have asked.” Within a couple of years, Trithemius officially declared his independence, waved good-bye to his stepfather with the appropriate, Thanks for everything, Arschgesicht, and openly pursued his studies at the renowned Heidelberg University.

  IN CONTRAST to the numerous details of Trithemius’s early life, Johannes Gutenberg doesn’t even show up in the surviving historical record until sometime in his mid-thirties (probably). Between 1434 and 1444, his name appears in a few documents relating to taxes, loans, military eligibility, and lawsuits (especially lawsuits), but nothing that gives us a solid portrait of the inventor of the printing press.

  For centuries we’ve been suing each other with obsessive fervor, and that constant barrage of litigation has created a steady fossil record of our civilization. Some of these cases have shaken the very foundations of society, such as the English Case of Prohibitions [1607] or the American Brown v. Board of Education [1954]. Others have provided some of the only clues to a certain fifteenth-century inventor’s character and, without further context, have made him look like kind of an asshole. As Paul Needham points out, Gutenberg “referred to one of the [legal] witnesses against him, a shoemaker, as a sorry good-for-nothing who lived a miserable life of lies and deceit. One scholar who spent his entire professional life investigating Gutenberg questions wrote that this revealed the ‘proud and temperamental’ character of a Mainz patrician.”

  In 1436 a breach-of-promise suit was brought against Johannes Gutenberg by a Strasbourg woman named “Anne of the Iron Door.” Gutenberg had allegedly entered into an agreement to marry this aristocrat, but reneged before the ceremony. Even though the exact outcome of the suit is unknown (except that Gutenberg never did marry Ms. Iron Door), his breach of promise provided the backbone for his being painted as a tomcat for centuries to come.

  Whether we like it or not, lawsuits are miniature snapshots of society, and sometimes the surviving remnants are not conclusive, representative, or fair. Mark Twain poked fun at these kinds of spotty historical records with his “A.D. 5868” prediction of an encyclopedia entry for Civil War general and eighteenth president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant:

  URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT—popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it.

  It’s only too easy for us to read more into the historical record than is actually there. The realm of Gutenberg studies, with so much passionate devotion and so little surviving evidence, is notorious for this. Even the most celebrated document connecting Gutenberg to the invention of the printing press (a lawsuit, of course) has been misunderstood for centuries.

  Twenty years after the breach-of-promise suit, Gutenberg was hauled into court again. We’re not prone to utter this phrase often, but thank god for lawsuits. The outline of the evidence for and against Gutenberg, which would become the most important manuscript in the history of print, is called the Helmasperger Instrument. Helmasperger was the name of the signing notary, thus granting him the unimpressive title of history’s most famous notary public. This 1455 suit addressed a sizable loan made by Johann Fust to Gutenberg to help cover the costs of his printing press. As with most historical documents, the parties involved weren’t trying to explain details that were alread
y obvious to them—such as how Gutenberg had invented the press, or how the press actually worked. The lack of detail is agonizing. Print historians today would trade every elbow-patched tweed blazer in the world for just one doodle in Gutenberg’s hand.

  Here’s what we do know: between 1450 and 1455, Fust, a money broker from Mainz, lent Gutenberg 1,600 gulden. (A gulden was roughly equivalent to an ounce of silver.) Eight hundred of these gulden went toward the construction of a printing press. The other eight hundred were invested in various printing projects. For some reason, Fust wanted all this money back, plus interest, totaling 2,020 gulden. The court ruled that Gutenberg had to repay the printing press loan and anything else that wasn’t considered a “joint project.”

  That’s it. We don’t know how much money Gutenberg was ordered to repay, or how capable he was of making payment. In fact, we don’t even know the details of the printing press in question. The first surviving image of the printing press was published almost fifty years after this lawsuit, and it depicts a two-pull wooden screw press. (For some inexplicable reason, it also shows a bunch of zombies hanging around being jerks to everyone. Ah, the Middle Ages.) Gutenberg’s press would have been a single-pull mechanism, and of such a press, “we know nearly nothing.”

  For centuries, the general consensus was that this lawsuit bankrupted Gutenberg. Other circumstantial evidence, such as his payments on a separate loan in Strasbourg suddenly ceasing around this time, appear to support this claim. After the suit concluded, Fust and one of the workers at Gutenberg’s press, Peter Schöffer, opened a shop of their own. In just two years’ time they had produced a stunning Psalter, the first printed book to contain a colophon.

  This is a major historical moment. A colophon is a section at the end of a book where the publication information is printed, details that have since migrated to the title page or copyright page. The first colophon read, “[F]ashioned by a mechanical process of printing and producing characters, without use of a pen, and . . . completed . . . by Joachim Fust . . . and Peter Schöffer.” It’s incredible how much world-altering innovation lies just beneath the surface of that phrase “without use of a pen.”

  The 1457 Fust and Schöffer Psalter is a landmark for more reasons than the colophon. Their title page was printed in three colors: red, blue, and black. They also printed decorative initials and used two sizes of type for the first time. Schöffer had worked as a scribe before joining up with Gutenberg, and with his Psalter, it became clear that the physical beauty of books would play a major role in the history of print. Today only ten copies of that Psalter are known to have survived. A trip to the British Library to see one should be on everyone’s bucket list.

  Scholars have traditionally assumed Gutenberg must have been unable to pay his court settlement for two main reasons: Fust and Schöffer continued to print (gorgeous) books after the suit, and no printed works from that time forward claimed Gutenberg as their printer in the colophons. Thus scholars inferred that Gutenberg must have forfeited his printing press to his ex-business sponsor. Fust and Schöffer then cranked up their new press and produced a steady stream of revolutionary books and pamphlets, all prefaced with Nelson Muntz’s catchphrase from The Simpsons: “Ha Ha!”

  The cutthroat businessman taking advantage of the innocent inventor is a trope with a very long history indeed. Over the centuries, Fust was painted as a character so dastardly that he kept getting mistaken for Faust, the German scholar who, as legend has it, made a deal with Satan.

  Scholars such as Paul Needham, however, have argued that Gutenberg kept printing, even after the 1455 lawsuit. It’s likely that Gutenberg was responsible for the great Latin dictionary the Catholicon, first printed in 1460. We also know that, when he died, Gutenberg owned material for printing: a 1468 document describes one Dr. Humery inheriting “forms, letters, instruments, tools, and other things pertaining to the work of printing, which Johannes Gutenberg has left after his death.” This means that the suit might not have impoverished him after all. In fact, it’s possible that the Fust suit may actually have favored Gutenberg by allowing him to dismiss portions of the loan that were seen as “joint projects.”

  But this narrative was a long time coming. One scholar from the 1620s—who just happened to claim Fust as an ancestor—had used selective portions of the Helmasperger Instrument as proof that Johann Fust, with help from Peter Schöffer, was the true inventor of the printing press. According to this creative interpretation, Gutenberg, not Fust, was the wealthy moneylender from Mainz. In fact, Gutenberg was cast as a nosy neighbor who elbowed his way into one of the greatest inventions of Western history. Oh, scheiße, here comes Gutenberg. Mein Gott, that guy is the worst. Pretend that you’re not inventing a single-pull printing press.

  From Fust to random printers in Strasbourg, from Italian and Dutch inventors to thieves pilfering printing shops on Christmas Eve, the question of who invented the printing press has been a long and frustrating debate—and one that probably could have been avoided if Gutenberg had printed anything between 1450 and 1468 that read, I did this! It was me! I’m actually a totally reasonable neighbor with original ideas of my own! But, excruciatingly, we have nothing.

  Yet there is always a tinge of excitement in the midst of this uncertainty. With so little evidence, a single new discovery could completely upend all we thought we knew about the inventor of the Western printing press. This isn’t as crazy as it seems, either: a previously unknown eyewitness account of a Gutenberg Bible being sold in 1455 wasn’t published until 1947. Even then, no one realized the depth of its implications for the history of print until a historian named Erich Meuthen translated and published the account along with an accompanying article in 1982. There are more stories like this than you might think: slightly earlier in the century, a fragment of a printed indulgence was discovered with the date filled out by hand, “22 October 1454,” making it “the earliest precise date by which we know typographic printing was being carried out in Mainz.” It speeds the pulse to think that more documents like this might be sitting around waiting to be discovered.

  Ironically, because Gutenberg didn’t attach his name to any of his productions, the main evidence we have of the inventor of print is a scattering of handwritten manuscripts. As we’ve seen, even the date for Gutenberg’s now-famous Bible comes partially from a note nonchalantly scribbled onto one of its pages.

  The most crushing problem with these manuscripts, however, is that the majority of the contemporary evidence referencing Gutenberg in any way has disappeared in its original form. Reading a summary of the known Gutenberg documents is like reading a literary casualty list:

  . . . original has not survived . . . last seen in Frankfurt in the mid-nineteenth century . . . original manuscript perished most likely during the revolutionary upheavals at Strasbourg in 1793 . . . has not survived . . . last seen as late as 1830, but has not since been relocated . . . preserved in the old city library of Strasbourg and were lost when that library was destroyed by fire in 1870 . . . perished . . . not survived . . . lost . . .

  WHERE GUTENBERG failed to be remembered, the printed words of an infamously eloquent critic of printing ensured that Trithemius would be. This Benedictine monk stood against the tide of technological innovation. In contrast to the disconnected, unfeeling clutches of the printing press, hand-copied manuscripts, he claimed, “give virtue to words, memory to things, and liveliness to times and circumstances.” We’re not sure what that’s supposed to mean exactly, but at least Trithemius attributed the printing press correctly: “In those days in the city of Mainz, located in Germany on the banks of the Rhine . . . was invented and devised by the Mainz citizen Johannes Gutenberg that marvelous and hitherto unheard of art of printing.”

  Trithemius wrote this in his Annals of Hirsau, a fourteen-hundred-page history tome painstakingly written out by hand between 1509 and 1514 and eventually printed in 1690. Trithemius held a conflicted view of the “hitherto unheard of art of printing.” Taken at
face value, his In Praise of Scribes makes him appear as one of history’s greatest antitechnology curmudgeons. There’s Trithemius, some guy who thought “talkies” would never catch on, your aunt who couldn’t figure out laptops in 2007, and everyone who’s afraid that the Kindle marks the end of “real” books.

  In that same antiprinting tract of 1492, however, Trithemius also wrote, “O blessed art of printing, long to be remembered as belonging to our age! . . . Now that this art has been discovered and you have been made our guide, it is henceforth permitted to any ordinary person to become as learned as he will.” Now that’s a statement we can get behind. In fact, Trithemius came to rely so heavily on one nearby printing shop that a recent biographer nicknamed it “the Sponheim Abbey Press.” To understand how someone could be so for and yet so against printing, we need to dive a bit deeper into Trithemius’s time at the aforementioned Sponheim Abbey.

  After graduating from Heidelberg University, Trithemius and a traveling companion were returning home and stayed the night at St. Martin of Sponheim, a Benedictine monastery seventy-five miles from their destination. The next morning, their gracious hosts saw them off, but the two men were confronted with a sudden snowstorm in a mountain pass not too far from the abbey. Three separate times they tried to push forward, but the storm whipped up so violently that they eventually fell back to Sponheim. While his traveling companion left once the weather cleared, Trithemius interpreted the freak storm as the providential hand of God. The wind and snow and impending frostbite didn’t say it outright—or anything at all—but the subtext was obvious to Trithemius: go back to the monastery, change careers, and become a monk for the rest of your life. Message 100 percent received.