SENTIDO ESPACIAL
2.2.2 Definiciones: Marco teórico
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ou wouldn’t think there could be much question about an event that was almost immediately recognized as one of the major turning points of world history. Who could question the primacy of Johann Gutenberg? His title as inventor of printing has been so universally accepted that Marshall McLuhan didn’t hesi-tate to refer to the culture he spawned as the “Gutenberg galaxy.”Yet questions abound. For a figure of such historic import, Gutenberg has always been somewhat shadowy. And even in his own times, Gutenberg was by no means the only name put forward as the inventor of printing.
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The earliest reference to the invention of printing comes in a letter dated 1472, just four years after Gutenberg died. It’s from a Sorbonne professor named Guillaume Fichet.
Writing to a friend, Fichet mentioned that not far from the city of Mainz, “there was a certain Johann who bore the surname Gutenberg, who first of all men thought out the art of printing, by which books are made, not written with a reed . . . nor by pen . . . but by metal letters.”
Other early references place the invention in Strassburg, sometimes crediting Guten-berg but at other times another printer, named Johann Mentelin. Claims were also made on behalf of printers in Venice and Milan. Many of these claims seem motivated by little more than local pride.
Something more than that seems to be operating in Avignon, in France, judging from two court documents there. According to two contracts dated 1446, a Prague silversmith named Procopius Waldvogel agreed to teach the secret of “artificial writing” to some local citizens. One of the contracts refers, tantalizingly, to “two alphabets of steel and forty-eight forms of tin, and other forms as well.” Could these letters be types for print-ing, a la Gutenberg’s? Waldvogel was undoubtedly working toward a comparable inven-tion, but most scholars have concluded that he had a way to go. The likeliest scenario is that Waldvogel’s letters were used for some sort of variation of the traditional woodcut technique—closer perhaps to a manual typewriter than to true typography.
More persistent was the claim on behalf of Laurens Coster of Haarlem, first put forth by a Dutch scholar in 1588. Coster came up with the idea for printing in 1440, according to Hadrian Junius, while Coster was cutting some letters for his grandchildren from the bark of a beech tree. Later Coster exchanged the beechwood characters for lead and then tin. His printing business soon flourished.
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Alas, Junius wrote, the growth of Coster’s business led him to take on assistants, one of whom—“a certain Johann”—turned out to be unscrupulous. After learning the se-crets of the trade, Johann waited until Christmas Eve, when everyone else was at church.
Then he stole all the type and equipment and headed off to Mainz, where he set up his own operation.
The Coster story spread beyond the Netherlands, with support coming over the years from French, English, and American scholars. Partly this was because of a substantial body of early though undated Dutch printed works, some from metal type and some from wood blocks. In Haarlem’s market square a statue of Coster, “inventor of the art of printing,” still stands.
In the past few decades, however, the story has been largely discredited. More precise analyses of the type, inscriptions, and paper have shown that most of the evidence of early Dutch printing dated from after 1465—and ten years after the earliest books known to have been printed at Gutenberg’s hometown of Mainz.
The storybook quality of the Coster tale is also suspicious. It’s a bit hard to buy that Coster so easily jumped from the idea of cutting letters for his grandchildren to printing books and establishing a flourishing business—all within the six months prior to the Christmas Eve theft.
One reason the Coster legend lasted so long was that it named the villain, “Johann,”
thus directly answering the claims on behalf of Gutenberg. Waldvogel, too, had some al-leged links to Gutenberg: Walter Riffe, who was at one point an acquaintance of Guten-berg, visited Avignon while Waldvogel lived there.
These connections are at best tenuous and serve mostly to indicate that even in the fifteenth century most people associated the invention of printing with Gutenberg. Yet until the eighteenth century, very little was known about Gutenberg’s own activities.
That changed between 1727 and 1770 as a series of documents pertaining to lawsuits in-volving Gutenberg surfaced in a variety of archives.
From these emerged a much clearer picture of Gutenberg, as well as a new and by far the most serious threat to Gutenberg’s claim to be the inventor of printing.
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The first crucial documents to surface record a lawsuit brought against Gutenberg in 1439, when he lived in Strassburg. Gutenberg, whose inventing ambitions extended be-yond printing, had apparently invented some new method of manufacturing mirrors.
He’d entered into a partnership with one Andreas Dritzehn to produce and sell them to pilgrims on the way to Aachen, but the deal fell apart. Apparently the partners got wrong the date of the pilgrimage, which was due to take place not in 1439 but a year later. They decided they didn’t want to wait a year for the mirror sales, so Dritzehn suggested that Gutenberg should instead teach him another—and unspecified—art. Gutenberg and Dritzehn drew up a new contract to cover Gutenberg’s “art and adventure.”
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Was this the art and adventure of printing? The documents are very vague; clearly both parties in the lawsuit intentionally avoided giving away the secret. The documents offer only glimpses, but these include the mention of the purchase of lead and other met-als, and of a press and certain “forms.”
Whatever Gutenberg was up to, others were convinced it could pay off big. Accord-ing to testimony from the trial, a woman had visited Andreas Dritzehn one night, and she expressed some reservations about how much he’d invested. Dritzehn conceded he’d mortgaged his inheritance, but he confidently told the woman: “We shan’t fail. Before a year is out we shall have recovered our capital and then we shall be in bliss.”
Dritzehn’s brothers also thought the invention was worth a lot of money, and that’s what led to the lawsuit. The contract contained a clause that in the event of the death of one of the parties, his heirs would not take his place. Still, when Dritzehn died in 1438, his brothers wanted in on the deal. Gutenberg refused, and the court found in his favor. As a result, Dritzehn’s brothers never learned the secret art his brother was learning from Gutenberg, nor can we know for sure what it was.
The Gutenberg Bible contains no printer's name, no place of printing, no date. (Library of Congress)
The next crucial document is more explicitly about printing. It dates from October 1455, by which time Gutenberg had returned from Strassburg to his hometown of Mainz.
Again, Gutenberg faced a lawsuit. (He faced many, perhaps inevitably for an inventor in a prepatent era.) The record of this one has become known as the Helmasperger Instru-ment, after the notary who signed it, Ulrich Helmasperger.
The plaintiff was Johann Fust, another partner of Gutenberg’s and in the minds of some historians, the true inventor of printing.
This much is clear from the Helmasperger Instrument: Fust loaned Gutenberg a large sum of money for what was described as “the work of the books.” Later Fust sued for the principal and interest, most of which the court awarded him. The Helmasperger Instru-ment doesn’t say exactly how much, nor whether Gutenberg could pay. Nonetheless, many historians concluded that the decision bankrupted Gutenberg and enriched Fust, who may have taken over the former’s printing shop.
Whether in Gutenberg’s shop or in one he set up for himself, Fust then went on to be-come a successful printer. Fust’s name, along with that of a new partner, Peter Schaffer, appears on the Mainz Psalter of 1457, of which ten copies still exist. The Psalter is the first printed book whose place, date, and printer is unquestioned, and Fust’s supporters cite it as evidence that their man, not Gutenberg, completed the press and first put it to use.
But did Fust actually contribute to the invention of the press, or did he merely capi-talize on Gutenberg’s invention? Was the Psalter the first book printed, or merely the first book printed with a place, date, and printer?
And what about the Gutenberg Bible? It’s the Bible and not the Psalter that many still view as not just the first printed book but also as one of the most beautiful. Who printed that? And when?
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About the Bible the Helmasperger Instrument offers no definitive answers. Nor do the extant copies of the book itself, which contain no printer’s name, no place of print-ing, no date. But other clues point to Gutenberg as the printer—and with an earlier date than that of the Psalter.
A note in a copy now at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris informs us that the binder and the tinter finished work in August 1456. Working backward, that makes it likely the sheets were printed in 1454 or 1455—before Fust could have taken over Gutenberg’s press.
Further evidence surfaced in 1947, in the form of a March 1455 letter from Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (who later became Pope Pius II) to a Spanish cardinal. Piccolomini described seeing sheets from the Bible printed by this “astonishing man” in fall 1454. The letter didn’t say whether the astonishing man was Gutenberg or Fust, but by confirming the earlier print date it made stronger the case that the printer of the Gutenberg Bible was, in fact, Gutenberg.
For most historians, the note and the letter secured Gutenberg’s claim to fame.
That’s not to deny Fust an important place in the history of printing, however. For centuries Fust has been portrayed as the villain of the story, the evil capitalist who took
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advantage of Gutenberg, the classic head-in-the-clouds inventor. Fust, according to this view, waited until Gutenberg had invested all of their funds in the production of the soon-to-be-famous Bible. Then, knowing there was no way Gutenberg could pay him back, he called his loan and seized the assets of the business. Fust’s name didn’t help his reputation, either: it was sometimes spelled Faust, which encouraged some early histori-ans to incorporate elements of the Faust legend into the story.
Modern historians have been kinder to Fust. For one thing, many have noted that Fust grew up in a family of goldsmiths. Even if the invention was Gutenberg’s, therefore, Fust ought not to be dismissed as a mere money-hungry exploiter with no interest in a craft.
Nor is it likely that the Mainz judges would have upheld his claim if it hadn’t had some merit. It’s very possible that, just as Fust claimed, Gutenberg took some of the money that was supposed to go toward their joint Bible project and used it instead to print other works, such as calendars and grammars. Fust had no share in the profits from the other publications, so it’s understandable that he’d be angered by the diversion of his funds.
So Fust was no devil and Gutenberg no saint. Perhaps Fust even made some minor technical improvements to the press. Similarly, Gutenberg may have learned some tech-niques from Waldvogel and Coster, or from others in France or Italy or Germany. He also may have gotten some ideas from the Far East, where some form of metal letters had been in use for centuries and where paper—not to mention silk, gunpowder, and porce-lain—was invented. Increasingly, historians have seen all these places, all these artisans and inventors, as part of a gradual process that led to the invention of the printing press.
In 2000, Princeton librarian Paul Needham went so far as to argue that Gutenberg didn’t even invent movable type, at least as it’s normally understood. By magnifying typefaces, Needham found tiny differences in letters, indicating they may not have come from the same mold.
Still, it was the genius of Johann Gutenberg that synthesized most of the trends and trials of the times. Drawing no doubt on others’ work, he brought together paper of the right quality, ink of the right consistency, a press adapted for both, and some form of re-cyclable and readily available types.
Exactly when it all came together is still a mystery. Some have interpreted the Dritzehn lawsuit to mean Gutenberg pulled it off in Strassburg, perhaps in about 1440.
The consensus among historians, however, is that it was in Mainz during the 1450s, not long before the printing of the Bible that’s rightly remembered by his name.
Whenever it was, Gutenberg created a method of producing more to read in a day than scribes could write in a year. After that, the world was never the same.
To Investigate Further
Schorbach, Karl, ed. The Gutenberg Documents. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941.
The key documents in translation, including the records from the Helmasperger Instrument and the suit brought by Dritzehn’s brothers.
Butler, Pierce. The Origin of Printing in Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940.
The case against Gutenberg.
Scholderer, Victor. Johann Gutenberg. London: British Museum, 1963.
Not much more than a pamphlet, but the closest thing to an English-language biography.
Goff, Frederick. The Permanence of Johann Gutenberg. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970.
A brief summary of some of the controversies surrounding Gutenberg.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1983.
Not much about Gutenberg, but plenty about how he changed the world.
Kapr, Albert. Johann Gutenberg. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996.
Completed in East Germany in 1986 but not translated until ten years later, this is the most recent biography; generally admirable, though it suffers somewhat from having been written prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which deprived the author of access to some articles in En-glish and French journals.
Ing, Janet. Johann Gutenberg and His Bible. New York: Typophiles, 1988.
A clear and concise historiography.
Man, John. Gutenberg. New York: Wiley, 2002.
How Gutenberg set out to make money and preserve Catholicism, and ended losing money and ushering in the Reformation.
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