Johannes Gutenberg has been called the most influential figure of the last millennium, yet he stands as one of the great question marks of history. Almost all the information about Gutenberg comes from legal and financial papers, and these indicate that the printing of his Bibles was a particularly tumultuous affair. Gutenberg was driven into financial ruin.
That may seem miniscule, but at the time there were probably only around 30, books in all of Europe. Some copies supposedly went for around 30 Florins—an enormous sum at the time.
Most Gutenberg Bibles contained 1, pages bound in two volumes, yet almost no two are exactly alike. Of the copies, some were printed on paper, while the rest were made using vellum, a parchment made from calfskin. The books also vary in their typography and degree of decoration. Gutenberg originally used red ink to print title headings, or rubrics, before each of the books of the Bible. When this process proved too time consuming, he abandoned it in favor of simply leaving a blank space in the margins.
Professional scribes later added unique title and chapter headings by hand, and many owners also hired artists to add lavish illustrations and written characters into their copies. The Goryeo dynasty immediately recreated the book. This was important; attacks by Mongols would continue for the next 28 years. The Tripitaka reboot was scheduled to take Korean monks until AD to complete, and, meanwhile, the rulers began expanding into printing other books.
But the lengthy book would have required an impossibly large number of woodblocks, so Choe came up with an alternative. Building on earlier Chinese attempts to create movable type, he adapted a method that had been used for minting bronze coins to cast 3-dimensional characters in metal. Then he arranged these pieces in a frame, coated them with ink, and used them to press sheets of paper. When he was done, he could reorganize the metal characters, eliminating the need to persistently chisel blocks.
It was faster—to a certain extent. He completed the project in AD. It is important to recognize what this means. The innovation that Johannes Gutenberg is said to have created was small metal pieces with raised backwards letters, arranged in a frame, coated with ink, and pressed to a piece of paper, which allowed books to be printed more quickly. But Choe Yun-ui did that—and he did it years before Gutenberg was even born.
Notably, Korea was under invasion, which hampered their ability to disseminate their innovation. In addition, Korean writing, then based closely on Chinese, used a large number of different characters, which made creating the metal pieces and assembling them into pages a slow process.
Most importantly, Goryeo rulers intended most of its printing projects for the use of the nobility alone. Nonetheless, it is possible that printing technology spread from East to West. Kublai Khan had access to Korean and Chinese printing technology, and he may have shared this knowledge with another grandson of Genghis Khan, Hulegu, who was then ruling the Persian part of the Mongol empire.
This could have moved printing technologies from East Asia westward by thousands of miles. In the middle of that route lay the homeland of the Uyghur people, a Turkic ethnic group that had been recruited into the Mongol army long before.
This is because, in the 13th century, Uyghurs were considered distinguished, learned people—the sort for whom printing might be a welcome innovation. They had also something no one else in printing had had up till then: an alphabet, a simple group of relatively few letters for writing every word one wished to say.
There was no explosion of printing in the Western Mongol empire. Over 10 rare Bibles and replicas of Gutenberg Bible pages will be exhibited, as well as other materials. Three 1-hour presentations will be given at 10 am, Noon and 2 pm. Gutenberg chose the Bible as the first product of his marvelous invention of movable type in Martin Luther was the first to translate the Bible into the vernacular, in his case, German.
For two centuries it was punishable by death to print the Bible in any language other than Latin, although the Old Testament existed in Hebrew and Greek. But under King James, a major effort created the translation known to most of the world, and a virtual war broke out over who would print it. This very special presentation by Professor Emeritus Frank Romano will trace the fascinating history of the Bible.
He has personally seen most of the 48 Gutenberg Bible sets that remain on this planet.
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