“WRITING BOOKS BY HAND MUST not be stopped because of printing!” Thus opens the seventh chapter of De laude scriptorum manualium (In Praise of Scribes) printed in 1492. That’s right, printed. One of the most important critical arguments we have against the newfangled technology of the printing press was spread by the self-same technology it crusaded against. This is not entirely unlike a modern blogger who bemoans the encroaching digital age, slamming the Post button over and over again while pining for the good old days when people communicated using artisanal stationery and fountain pens. Okay, we might have done that once or twice. As it turns out, even after five hundred years, people haven’t changed that much.
The author of In Praise of Scribes was a Benedictine monk named Trithemius. (That mouthful of a name is pronounced Tre-TAY-mee-us.) This monk’s objections to the fledgling printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg about forty years before, focused on arguments such as the superior durability and craftsmanship of hand-copied manuscripts. “Who may not perceive how great are the differences between handwriting and printing?” Trithemius declared.
Each technological breakthrough hits resistance somewhere. Undoubtedly someone, somewhere, has said, “Automobile carriages can never match the dignity and maneuverability of the penny-farthing bicycle.” Granted, that someone was your handlebar-mustachioed barista from last Tuesday, but historically speaking, technological advancement always picks up naysayers, and the printing press was no exception. Trithemius is the most infamous of those printing naysayers. Yet the main reason the world knows his name is because of the preservative power of print.
Consider, on the other hand, that the name Johannes Gutenberg appears in exactly zero printed books attributed to him. Zero. For almost three hundred years, there was no concrete evidence that Gutenberg was even the inventor of Western printing. In a grand twist of fate, the printing press preserved the life of one its greatest critics and all but erased the life of its creator.
Any schoolchild today can answer the question “Who invented the printing press?,” but behind the answer so easily given lies centuries of scholarship, sometimes ingenious, sometimes not, in order to match Johannes Gutenberg with one of the most important technological innovations in human history.
WHAT DO we know of Gutenberg’s birth? We know the place. He was born in Mainz, in what is now western Germany. As for his birthday . . . or birth year . . . or birth decade for that matter, we can only guess. Estimates place the date at sometime between 1396 and 1406. This means we don’t know how old Gutenberg was when he invented the printing press, or even how old he was when he died. As for his death, we can only guess at those details as well. Given that this was the fifteenth century, we’re just going to assume that it was painful and involved a shocking amount of bloodletting.
We do know his full name: Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, but even this behemoth took considerable effort to sort out. “Gensfleisch,” “Laden,” and “Gutenberg” refer to German households, with the Gensfleisch family owning the houses Laden and Gutenberg. This patrician system would fall apart by 1428, but by then it was too late, young Johnny Gutenberg already had an absurdly long last name. Even the name Johannes is not so simple in the historical record. Other common medieval derivations of “Johannes” that have been applied to Gutenberg include “Henchen,” “Hengin,” “Henne,” “Henn,” “Hans,” and “Hansse.”
Not understanding the intricacies of fifteenth-century German social structures, some later scholars thought Johannes G. zur L. zum Gutenberg was in fact two separate people: the brothers Johannes Gensfleisch (literally translated as “Jonathan Gooseflesh”) and Johannes Gutenberg (or “Jonathan Goodmountain”). Of the many confused stories told about these two “brothers,” it was said that not only were they responsible for the introduction of European printing, but they were also extremely shady dudes. The older brother was reportedly a thief who stole the secret of movable type from a master to whom he was apprenticed, and the younger brother was a heartless hound who broke off his engagement with a German maiden from Strasbourg. Amazingly, this dually libelous opinion of Gutenberg persisted even into the nineteenth century. It’s one of those unfortunate quirks of history that for four hundred years, scholars knew very little about the inventor of the printing press, but they were pretty sure he was a scoundrel.
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 already 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.
Trithemius took his monastic vows when he was twenty-one years old. The next year, the head of St. Martin’s had been transferred and the abbacy was offered to the young and ambitious Trithemius. For the next two and a half decades, he helmed the Sponheim Abbey. And life was good. There weren’t any terrible stepfathers around, so Trithemius could spend his time studying and reading. Sure, there weren’t a lot of books to read per se—besides a few copies of the Vulgate Bible, there were only eight volumes at the abbey when he first arrived—but as the new abbot, he could trade and purchase books to his heart’s content—which he did, eventually accumulating a library of two thousand volumes, one of the most impressive and enviable of its day. Is there a better job on earth than creating a library? (That’s a rhetorical question. We know the answer is no.)
Still, even the Garden of Eden had a problem with snakes. Trithemius’s snakes were lazy, blockheaded monks who’d rather take the easy road than engage in God’s true work: making books by hand. That’s right, God wants you to make books. Using only your hands. Within the pages of In Praise of Scribes, Trithemius writes about the infuriating monks at the abbey, who made excuses such as (and this is in Trithemius’s own words), “I cannot write, I am unable to remain in the cell for the entire day, I will gladly go to labors outside, I will not in the least refuse to dig or carry stones, but I pray only that I may not need to suffer distress in those things which are completely against my nature.”
Oh, boo hoo. You can’t sit in a dark cell and copy books by hand? Well, too bad! Life isn’t supposed to be a picnic where you carry stones around all day! Trithemius wrote In Praise of Scribes in order to put his wimpy, whiny monks in their proper place—and this, forty-plus years after Gutenberg should have made hand-copying extinct.
For Trithemius, handwriting a text was a deeply spiritual, meditative act. There’s a compelling point here. Writing cements the words in a copyist’s mind. “[T]he printed work is a thing made of paper . . . but the writer who commends his writings to membranes [parchment or vellum] extends both himself and those things he writes far into the future.”
Handwriting was a means of purifying one’s soul toward Christ and preventing that most pernicious of monastic sins: idleness. By righteously keeping his hands busy in a dim cell each day, the Benedictine monk was said to reap the following rewards: “his most precious time [will be] employed fruitfully,” “while he is writing, his intellect [will be] illuminated,” his “affections [will be] enkindled on behalf of devotion,” and “he will be endowed in the afterlife with a singular reward.”
Then along came the printing press and screwed everything up. Now, sweaty, drunken craftsmen could do in hours what pious, meditative monks used to take weeks to accomplish. How is that the correct order of things? Serving God is supposed to be way harder than normal life. More gratifying, sure, but harder. Without copying books by hand, what would monks do all day? Lounge around on their luxurious rocks? No! By God, no!
The seventh and eighth chapters of In Praise of Scribes (out of sixteen total) do actually contain some notable criticisms about the emerging technology of print. “Handwriting placed on parchment [animal skin] will be able to endure a thousand years. But how long, forsooth, will printing last, which is dependent on paper? For if in its paper volume it lasts for two hundred years that is a long time.” Forsooth, indeed. While this is a bit of an exaggeration, point taken: paper is a weaker material and, therefore, all else being equal, not likely to last as long as parchment. Yet paper’s greatest vice is also its greatest virtue: relative to animal skin, it’s cheap. Because books printed on paper were more cost-effective than parchment, they could be produced on a significantly larger scale. So, yes, a single book printed on paper might not last as long as a book handwritten on parchment, but the “Collective” of printed books has outlasted its animal skin counterparts at a rate of nearly two to one. We are printed books. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.
Very similar arguments have been made regarding the evolution from physical books to digital books in the twenty-first century. Trithemius would be appalled that fragile paper books would seem like mighty redwoods next to the immaterial ones and zeros of virtual space. You actually have to burn a physical book to destroy it, but a digital book can be obliterated with a high-powered magnet or a stumble over an electrical cord. It can even be remotely deleted against your will, as happened when Amazon erased illegal editions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from every one of its Kindles in 2009. (The actual term for deleting digital books in this way is “dropping them into the memory hole”—a phrase ironically lifted right from the pages of 1984.)
The poor availability of printed books in the fifteenth century was another point of criticism for Trithemius. Unlike manuscripts that had been in demand for three centuries, printing was still in its infancy. There were notably fewer printed books in circulation than hand-copied books. While this seemed like a big deal to Trithemius in 1492 (just like the limited availability of digital books might have seemed to someone in 2008), history has shown that after the initial start-up, the new technology will quickly surpass its predecessors. (Except for laserdiscs. And Betamax. And PDAs and Zip drives and QR codes. Okay, most innovative technology outpaces its predecessors.)
Not that the new technology necessarily kills the older ones. If print was supposed to kill manuscripts, it did a sadistically slow job of it. For hundreds of years after the invention of the printing press, works such as the poems of John Donne were produced specifically for circulation in manuscript form. Manuscripts didn’t (and for that matter, printed books won’t) suffer the quick and painless demise that many assumed.
There were copyists, Trithemius boldly declared, “who applied such a precise diligence to copying that they wrote not only correctly but also artfully, distinguishing their beautiful volumes by variation in notations, punctuation, and figures.” In other words, manuscripts are prettier than print. Oh yes, there are some gorgeous hand-copied books out there. We fully agree on that. We’re trying very hard not to begin rhapsodizing about the Book of Kells. But to use the aesthetic qualities of one technology to discount the value of another is where our roads fork.
The same argument could be made (and absolutely is) by people who mourn the transition to digital books. There’s a different sensory quality to a printed book than a digital one: the feel of the pages, the sound of the spine cracking upon being opened, the smell of the paper. These are truly joyful—and addictive—pleasures of a printed book. Still, those sensations are not enough to wholly discount the virtues of the digital book. One of those unique virtues, for example, is discretion. No longer do you have to sit on a train, bending your book covers to prevent anyone from seeing your copy of Twilight or The Da Vinci Code or Fifty Shades of Grey. Now you can sit back and, with reckless abandon, enjoy some of the most embarrassing books humanity has to offer.
One literary scholar has summed up this knee-jerk resistance to technology by stating, “As we rationalize our resistance to digitalization, we reveal the fetishism of our relationship to the book. We are all too much like a toddler with a favorite, old blanket; the book comforts us because it feels good and we can carry it around.” This is not to say that a physical book shouldn’t be treasured, or isn’t ineffably beautiful. A few favorites spring to mind right away. (We have a whole chapter on some of those.) But digital books can be beautiful in their way, too. There are coders, for example, who find algorithms “sexy.” To quote Seinfeld, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Sexiness, of the leather, paper, or digital variety, is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.
But of one thing we can be certain: resistance to technology is futile. For those who define themselves as against the tide, know that your struggle is centuries old. The objects to which you (and we) cling were once vilified by those who came before. Surely there’s an ancient Egyptian out there somewhere turning up his nose at the thought of replacing his clean and elegant papyrus with processed animal carcasses. As the old saying goes, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—“the more things change, the more things stay the same.”
Trithemius knew that his resistance to print was unpopular and, truthfully, impractical. Outside this conflict with the literarily lethargic monks of St. Martin’s, Trithemius’s regard for print was a “highly favorable one.” Of the two thousand volumes in the Sponheim Abbey collection, twelve hundred were printed books. That means for every two spiritually endowed and lovingly created manuscripts in Trithemius’s collection, he owned three that had been printed. He was able to create such an enormous medieval library because printed books made copies cheaper and more accessible. Very few book lovers would turn that deal down.
Thirteen years after he wrote In Praise of Scribes, the conflict with his monks became so contentious that Trithemius left St. Martin’s and took up the abbacy of St. Jacob in Würzburg. It was the loss of his books from that move that affected him the most, the “library of two-thousand books which I assembled . . . and without which it sometimes seemed that I could not live.” We feel for you, sir. Despite his tribulations, Trithemius found comfort in the printing press for its ability to restore at least a portion of his lost books. “The world today is abounding with volumes . . . For the art which they call printing . . . daily produces an almost countless number of texts by old and recent authors alike.” It is human nature to hold on to your ideals with fists clenched, at least until the object of your indignation can benefit you personally. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
IT’S FAIRLY easy to track Trithemius, who wrote, and printed, dozens of treatises, from his “anti-printing” days at the Sponheim Abbey through to St. Jacob in Würzburg where he spent the remainder of his life. Gutenberg, on the other hand, is an entirely different can of kerscheblotzer. Gutenberg never wrote anything that survived. Not a description of his work, not a letter to a friend, not even a passing note throwing shade at Fust and Schöffer for the lawsuit. For hundreds of years we weren’t even sure what the first printed book was.
In the three centuries after Gutenberg died, there was only one trustworthy near-contemporary description of the first book printed in Europe. In the Cologne Chronicle of 1499, the printer Ulrich Zell named Gutenberg the inventor of the printing press and claimed to have seen his first book: a Latin Bible with an abnormally large font. (A 1455 document, one discovered only in the twentieth century, described it as possible to read “without effort, and indeed without glasses.”) So all someone had to do to discover the first book was to follow Zell’s description and look through all the known books from the fifteenth century, setting aside any unattributed Bibles printed with unusually large type.
That should have been easy enough. How many books could Europe really print in fifty years? Well, it turns out about twenty-nine thousand editions have been documented. And that’s twenty-nine thousand distinct editions on record. The number actually printed is probably much higher: recent scholarship suggests, not without significant pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth, that around 30 percent of editions from this period have been lost entirely. Even taking only the number of documented editions and using a very conservative estimate for each print run (say, around one hundred fifty individual books per edition), you’re looking at a number of single volumes that reaches well into the millions. It’s kind of like someone from 2041 asking, “C’mon, how many Web pages could realistically have been created in the first fifty years of the Internet?”
Books printed before 1501, within the first fifty years(ish) of Gutenberg’s invention, are called “incunabula.” This comes from a Latin term coined in 1640 meaning “in the cradle.” In other words, the babies of print. Incunabula are essentially the only books considered rare and collectible simply because of their age. A book from 1830 might seem old from our modern perspective, but in the collecting world, it’s not. Books have been printed for hundreds of years, and the nineteenth century was hardly that long ago in comparison.
Incunabula (and its singular, incunabulum) is a bit difficult to say, so these days many specialists refers to such books in conversation as “incunables.” If you think that doesn’t sound quite fancy enough, you’re not alone. This Anglicizing of Latin is relatively new, and has been frowned upon by the more snobbish of the rare book community. Here’s a delightful statement from a book on collecting published in 1982: “The Englished forms ‘incunable’ and ‘incunables,’ though a century old, are to be spat at.” I guess we all have our silly lines to draw in the sand. For example, it is an irrefutable fact that the term fifteeners, another modern coinage for incunabula, is an inexcusable abomination before all that is holy and good in this world. That’s just a fact.
Naturally, some of our earliest sources about the first printed book are incunables themselves, and they can be spotty, garbled, and contradictory. The aforementioned Ulrich Zell had been printing since at least the early 1460s, and was probably trained in Mainz. As far as patchy historical records go, his mention of Gutenberg’s Bible was one of the firmest leads a historian could ask for. Scholars delved into their stacks of surviving printed books, triangulating requirements: Bible, large type, no printer information. Eventually, in the 1760s, the thousands of incunabula candidates were reduced to just two. Two unattributed fifteenth-century Latin Bibles with large type, each seemingly excellent candidates for the title of first printed book. One of these Bibles was nicknamed B42 (the font size allowed forty-two lines of text to be printed on each page), and the other was B36 (obviously for a similar reason).
With these two Bibles in hand, it still took the world’s best print scholars more than a century to determine which had come first. Not until 1890 did Karl Dziatzko demonstrate in a cool bit of biblio-sleuthing that certain textual elements in B36 could have come only from a compositor who made copyediting errors while using B42. This definitively proved that B42 was older, and the rightful heir to the title: the Gutenberg Bible.
To think, until the end of the nineteenth century, scholars (or any Johann Doe, really) could have been reading the B42 Bible completely unaware that he was holding one of the first books ever printed in the Western world. Yet even if a reader never realized the importance of the book in front of him, he still would have been struck by the absolute beauty of it.
The first time you see a Gutenberg Bible is a spellbinding experience. Yes, you know you’re going to be impressed because you know how historically important it is. That doesn’t prepare you, however, for the impact of actually standing in front of the thing. This is one of those moments in life you’ll always remember.
Why is Gutenberg’s Bible so beautiful? Part of the answer can be traced to the competition he was facing. He had to compete with a manuscript book market that was already well established and thriving. If his new product were to succeed, it had to spring into life fully formed and flawless, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Gutenberg was trying to cut into the robust market of handwritten books, many of which were richly decorated and illuminated in an aesthetic tradition developed over a thousand years.
The Gutenberg Bible was printed as a double folio, fairly large by today’s standards—each page measured roughly a foot wide and a foot and a half tall. It’s partially the book’s size that first strikes the viewer, conveying a sense of dignity and splendor. That size wasn’t just for decoration, though. Gutenberg Bibles were characteristically large because they were meant to be used as pulpit or refectory books, practical volumes “that could be produced relatively inexpensively and purchased without great sacrifice by churches or monasteries.” Gutenberg isn’t often given credit as a savvy entrepreneur, but he knew his audience, and he created the perfect product for it. Monasteries were one of the largest consumers of books, and thus, large-format Bibles were the safer bet. Many of the B42 Bibles that exist today have a long history of ownership (called provenance) within monasteries, attesting to Gutenberg’s success in targeting that demographic.
Current estimates suggest that around 180 copies of the Gutenberg Bible were printed, a third of which were printed on vellum—which is impressive when you consider that there are about 1,300 pages in these Bibles. At four printed pages per folio-size sheet, and one animal yielding between two and four sheets, each single copy of a vellum Gutenberg Bible would have required a whopping 170 calves or 300 sheep. For a modern comparison, consider that the largest herd of cattle in the United States exists on a ranch spread out over three counties in central Florida. Deseret Ranch, owned by the Mormon Church, counts 44,000 head of cattle—or roughly enough vellum to make only 250 Gutenberg Bibles. So a tip of the hat to paper. You rock. Europe’s cattle industry never could have supported book production on the scale necessitated by the printing press. But paper could.
Public sales of the Gutenberg Bible have become some of the biggest events in bookselling history. One of the most famous of these sales occurred in London in 1847, resulting in the first Gutenberg Bible brought to the United States, entirely by mistake. James Lenox, a millionaire from New York, had authorized an agent to bid on his behalf at the March 12, 1847, sale of the library of one James Wilks. Because sending letters back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean would have made the auction last forever, Lenox’s agent, the awkwardly named David Davidson, had to use his best judgment when placing bids. It turns out that Davey-squared got a bit excited. It was an auction. It was the Gutenberg Bible. Who are we to judge? This agent fell into a bidding war with the famed bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps and the result was not cheap.
Before the Wilks sale, the record price for a Gutenberg Bible was £215. Sir Thomas planned to bid up to an astounding £300. When Davidson outbid him, Sir Thomas was not pleased. Caught in the urgency of the moment, Sir Thomas started placing bids way beyond his carefully planned limit. Between the two, the price just kept galloping toward the horizon like some gorgeous, financially unconcerned unicorn. The bids ping-ponged back and forth until Sir Thomas’s agent finally stepped in to “arrest [Sir Thomas’s] mad career” at £495. Davidson placed the winning bid at a mind-boggling £500, more than doubling the previous Gutenberg record. This “mad price” became a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic.
When Lenox discovered that he was the lucky owner of America’s first Gutenberg Bible, he was not thrilled. Okay, that’s putting it lightly. Arguing that he hadn’t authorized such an unreasonable and exorbitant price, he initially refused to pay it at all. His agents were left with an enormously expensive book on their hands. They approached the aforementioned Sir Thomas (no doubt sheepishly) and asked if the gentleman might be interested in purchasing the Bible for £475 (a 5 percent discount!). Sir Thomas wrote the following reply, “Sir, as I would not give more than 300 pounds for [the Bible] in cold blood, there is no chance of my having the Book, and it is right that America should boast of having one copy of it. I am therefore willing to let it go, only hoping that it may not be swallowed up by the Deep Sea.” After the public embarrassment at the auction house, Sir Thomas must have felt awfully good about sending that letter. Lenox eventually did recover from the sticker shock and made the reasonable decision to accept the Gutenberg Bible at the unreasonable price of £500. If one of these Bibles appeared on the market today, it would easily fetch tens of millions of dollars.
Yet that’s unlikely. Most modern owners of Gutenberg Bibles are revered institutions that would never trade a cultural icon of human achievement for a measly thirty million dollars. Then again, a single Gutenberg Bible was put up for sale in 2009, albeit to a very select group of consumers. The extraordinary circumstances of that case date back to the Second World War.
In May 1945, just after the fall of Nazi Germany, triumphant Soviet forces entered the city of Leipzig and looted it, secretly carrying away two Gutenberg Bibles. Because the Soviet Union was run by cultural sociopaths, they denied the possession of these Bibles well into the 1990s. It’s not like the Russians gave them back, even after admitting the theft. In their view, the Motherland had defended itself against the Nazis, so Germany could, with all due respect, fuck off. Then, in an ironic twist, one of those Gutenberg Bibles disappeared from Moscow State University.
In 2009, three agents working for the Federal Security Service, the modern successor to the KGB, took advantage of their positions and stole one of the stolen Leipzig Bibles. The Bible was eventually recovered in a sting operation set up by the FSS itself after the conspirators attempted to sell the Bible for the shockingly low price of one million dollars. “These people were not art specialists,” commented the court spokeswoman.
The leader of this idiotic band, one Colonel Vedishchev, was sentenced to more than three years’ penal servitude. The reclaimed B42 reportedly had to undergo “repair work after a page was cut out for the buyer to check its authenticity.” That one sentence is enough to cause a seizure in any rare book dealer, but at least we’ve learned that testing the authenticity of a black market book is essentially the same process as testing the quality of a kilo of cocaine.
From the very beginning, it seems the question of who owned Gutenberg’s creations has been disputed. Whatever the verdict of the infamous lawsuit brought against Gutenberg by his ex-partner Johann Fust, current scholars believe that after B42 was completed, the joint “work of books” between the two men officially ceased. Frustratingly, the little we do know about Gutenberg’s work serves to highlight just how much we don’t. For example, we have no idea where Gutenberg’s print shop stood. Because the Fust shop was in Mainz, it seems reasonable that Gutenberg was also printing there, but without a single document containing his business address, it’s hard to say where he was printing, or even if he closed up shop after the lawsuit.
The picture of Gutenberg’s financial endeavors is complicated even further by the recent (if you consider 1889 “recent”) theory that Gutenberg was actually running two separate print shops in the 1450s. One shop would have been printing B42 in association with Fust and Schöffer. The other would have completed “jobbing printing,” that is, fast printing jobs that resulted in immediate cash. You know, your typical moneymakers like indulgences for the Church and calendars for bloodletting. These flotsam-and-jetsam printing contracts are some of the earliest known specimens of print, but many of today’s known fragments survive only because they were used as worthless scrap paper in other books. In the nineteenth century, for example, a printed bloodletting calendar from the 1450s was found inside the binding of an accountant’s book. Yep, that seems about right.
To recap: we don’t know when Gutenberg was born; we don’t know where he worked; two-thirds of the original manuscripts mentioning him are no longer extant; even the church where he was likely buried was demolished three hundred years ago; and we have absolutely nothing printed by him that contains his name. Enough is enough! All this could have been avoided if Gutenberg had just printed his motherfucking name on his motherfucking books. (The authors apologize for using expletives in connection with the Gutenberg Bible. It’s a rather accurate representation of our scholarly frustration. Also, if Samuel L. Jackson had been a Gutenberg historian, it’s what he would have said.)
While unearthing the first printed book in Western history and assigning it correctly to Johannes Gutenberg has been a Herculean achievement, other books and authors have been memorialized by print despite their best efforts to the contrary. And this is how Trithemius, a Benedictine monk from a small abbey in Germany, came to be remembered as one of the foremost dark magicians of the Catholic Church.
SCHOLARS GENERALLY organize Trithemius’s writings into three main categories: monastic issues, histories, and demonology. We’re hoping that last one made you pause. Trithemius was into some strange stuff, and he was eventually outed in a most unfortunate way. In 1499 he wrote a letter to a friend and fellow monk, Arnold Bostius. The two monks had the kind of relationship where Trithemius felt comfortable opening up about his views regarding the true powers of the universe, and man’s ability to control those powers through, well, magical means.
These days, incantations and pictographs aren’t normally associated with Benedictine monks. They weren’t in Trithemius’s day, either. If it had gotten out that Trithemius was deeply interested in the conjuration or banishment of demons, angels, and witches, it would have created a small scandal. So Trithemius kept his views close to his chest and discussed them only in the privacy of selected personal letters, such as the ones to Arnold Bostius.
Here’s a life tip, dear reader, directly from Trithemius to you. If you want to keep a secret secret, never write it down. Never. Not anywhere. Not anytime. It’s like when you’re at work and you email your friend across the room about Susan being a total bitch. The thing is, Susan is going to read that email. She will. If you write it down, chances are she (or someone sympathetic to her) is going to see it. Which is fine, if you don’t mind snuffing out the last defense mechanism Susan held on to after the divorce. You monster.
Trithemius also learned this lesson a little too late. When he sent his letter to Bostius, he had no idea that the intended recipient had died just a short time before. The ill-fated correspondence then found its way into the hands of the prior of the convent, a man who wasted little love on the outspoken Trithemius of Sponheim Abbey. Rather than quietly slipping the letter into a rubbish bin, the prior did exactly the opposite and circulated it as a public denouncement of Trithemius, practitioner of black magic.
What did Trithemius write to Bostius that got the prior’s habit in such a knot? He informed his friend that he was furiously working on a series of books addressing the very important subject of steganography, which sounds innocent enough. Today steganography is a computer coding term for concealing a text or image within another text or image. But the person who invented the word had something a bit more unusual in mind. Derived from the Greek words steganos (“concealed”) and graphein (“to write”), steganography, to Trithemius, was a framework by which human beings could transmit messages over great distances with total fidelity, using an occult system of angel conjuring. It was like a fifteenth-century telegraph, only powered by miracles instead of science.
Trithemius told Bostius that a shadowy figure had appeared to him in the middle of the night and taught him the ancient secrets of steganography. These secrets were summarized in the letter, and Trithemius informed his friend that he was working on something called Steganographia, a four-book instruction manual on this arcane method of secure communication. The fallout from his public outing, however, forced Trithemius to abandon the project partway through book three.
Some people reading this might not find Trithemius’s idea so odd. Isn’t transmitting messages the traditional job of angels? The Greek word angelos means “messenger,” after all. Well, Trithemius’s angels were less “hark the herald” and more Book of Revelation. If incantations were said wrong, or symbols drawn too hastily, or the wrong direction was faced, these angels could wreak righteous havoc on their summoners. Steganography, Trithemius wrote, “is very difficult and full of danger because of the pride and rebellion of its spirits, who do not obey a man unless he is very experienced in this art . . . if they should be too strongly pressed on, they frequently do injury to [the novice] and offend them by various delusions.”
Other dangers one might encounter when trying to control rebellious spirits include angels bursting in on recipients at inappropriate times; spirits working themselves into an unholy frenzy and alerting everyone in the village; and giving your letter to the one person from whom you wish to keep it secret. Aw, c’mon regional angel Pamersyel, you handed that email right to Susan!
Recently there have been suggestions that Trithemius’s Steganographia was a clever ruse to present his studies on cryptography within the guise of cabalist magic, but to say that trivializes Trithemius’s decades of private arcane beliefs and writings (with titles ranging from Antipalus maleficiorum and De demonibus, to De morbo caduco et maleficiis). Cryptography certainly plays an important role in Steganographia, but if you were going to hide your involvement in cryptographic studies, why choose a framework that would blacklist you from the religious community and forever brand you a dark magician? In 1508, Trithemius completed a “natural” version of his work entitled Polygraphia. It was like Steganographia, but without the angel conjuring—essentially just a simple handbook of codes and ciphers. (Note that “simple” refers only to angel conjuring: the Polygraphia is actually a brilliant landmark of codicology known for its meticulous descriptions. The first edition now sells for thousands of dollars and is worth every penny.)
Steganographia certainly wasn’t something Trithemius wanted out in the public eye—and with good reason. Almost a century after his death, Trithemius’s Steganographia was printed in Frankfurt. Three years later, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of 1609, the Catholic Church’s official list of banned books, branded it a work of heresy. As long as manuscript copies were being passed from town to town by a quiet network of occult supporters, Trithemius’s unique mix of arcana, Christianity, and spirit summoning posed little threat. But hand that sucker over to the long arm of the printing press, and Rome itself sits up to take notice. Steganographia remained on the Index for the next three hundred years. Thanks to the printing press, Trithemius’s demonology, “a minor current” when compared to the rest of his writings, became his most definitive historical trait. Maybe he was right to hate Gutenberg’s invention after all.
Trithemius died at St. Jacob’s in Würzburg in December 1516, almost fifty years after the death of Gutenberg. A champion of educating the clergy, he served as an abbot from age twenty-two until his passing at age fifty-four. During that time, he built libraries, authored a flood of religious and historical treatises, and played host to princes, dukes, and emperors. Yet a pamphlet aimed at shaming his lazy monks and a treatment of arcane cryptography that was never supposed to be published have enshrined him within the halls of history as the magical monk who hated printing.
Still, at least Trithemius was remembered, due in no small part to the printing press. For hundreds of years, Gutenberg was not remembered at all because he never printed his own name. One of the most important technological innovations of human history almost passed through the annals of time disembodied from its real inventor. Had it not been for a scattering of handwritten manuscripts that were printed in the 1700s, Johannes Gutenberg would have been sentenced to obscurity. Whether on papyrus, vellum, paper, or digital text, sometimes the wrong people are forgotten, and sometimes those who are remembered are remembered for the wrong reasons. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.