Page 15 - The Secret Museum

paper in the New York Public Library, but it was behind glass. This civilization-

changing beauty was here in my hands.

I stood up to read it. Gutenberg created the Bibles so they could be read in
monastery refectories, by lots of monks at the same time, so they tend to be enormous.
This one was huge, and the vellum pages were stiff to turn, so I had to be standing
above the Bible to turn a page. Standing up also seemed appropriate. When the first
Gutenberg Bible to come to the United States arrived in New York, the officers at the
Customs House were asked to remove their hats on seeing it, for the privilege of
viewing a Gutenberg Bible is available to so few.

As I turned the pages, I was in a vortex, transported to Johannes Gutenberg’s

workshop in Mainz, Germany, in 1454; to a room in which Gutenberg paced up and
down, watched by his investors, helped by his assistants, combining ink and calf’s
leather and his new invention, a printing press which held 270 type moulds of letters,
to create 180 Bibles, which would begin a revolution in the way we receive and
spread information.

Gutenberg worked hard. In fact, I have reason to believe he slept in his workshop,
or at least came to work in the clothes he slept in at home. When I visited Harvard’s
Natural History Museum’s entomology collection, their curator showed me an ant

collected and preserved in vodka at a dinner party hosted by Stalin. When I asked
him if he had a favourite item in his collection, he said there was one creature he
wished he still had – Gutenberg’s bedbug. He told me how the phone had rung one
day and it was the Boston Library, who said, ‘We’ve found a creature in our
Gutenberg Bible, can you check it out for us?’ They sent the creature over so the
curator could have a good look. He called them back later that day to say, ‘You’ve
got a bedbug belonging to Mr Gutenberg.’ He gave the bug back to the library and

never saw it again.

Even if Gutenberg did lose a lot of sleep while creating movable type and his
Bibles, it was certainly worth it. He invented a new way of communicating,
transformed the rate of literacy throughout the western world and started a revolution
that remained unprecedented in human culture until the arrival of the internet in our
lifetime. Before Gutenberg, the only way to create a book was by hand. In the west,
this was the job of monks, who worked in scriptoriums in chilly monasteries. They
probably had inky hands, sore backs and, by the end of each day, rather tired eyes.

Yet they laboured on, spreading the good word. In the east, a Chinese blacksmith, Pi
Sheng, had invented movable type four centuries earlier, but his invention hadn’t
been adapted for use by a machine. In China, type was imprinted on the page by hand
rubbing, which made the process only slightly more efficient than the copying by a
medieval scribe.

When Gutenberg put all the ingredients together, crucially, with the invention of
his type mould, and began printing his Bibles, a lot of scribes soon found themselves
out of a job. Now, a book could be created more quickly, by machine. This machine