1971 Johannes Gutenberg, pioneer of the Western printing press, chose the Bible as his first major text in c. 1455. Some 180 copies were run off and the history of the world changed by an apparatus that, to the untutored eye, looked like a cider press. Copies of the first Gutenberg Bibles sold at 30 florins in Gutenberg’s native Mainz – which restricted circulation to wealthy or institutional purchasers. The Latin text was no more universally readable than the earlier manuscript codex versions, whose layout and script Gutenberg simulated exactly. But the technology was infinitely liberating.
Five hundred and sixteen years after Gutenberg’s Bible, Michael S. Hart launched ‘Project Gutenberg’. At the time, Hart was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. The mainframe computer he had access to was stone-age, technologically, but he managed to wangle virtually unlimited time and space on it.
Hart mobilised a team of volunteers to archive, digitally, the great books of the English language. Until 1990 they were manually keyboarded and mostly transliterated into basic 256-character ASCII computer script (some HTML versions were also available). Optical recognition apparatus made later transcription more efficient.
Hart’s all-volunteer army (a genuine ‘point of light’) was dependent principally on graduate labour, which by the early 21st century had compiled an e-textual library of 120,000 titles, growing all the time.
In 2000, the project was institutionalised as a non-profit organisation and, as such, was able to attract tax-deductible charitable donations. The texts (almost all in the public domain) were offered, free of charge, to any reader with computer access to them.
Educationally, Project Gutenberg was a godsend. Prescribed reading for advanced courses (hitherto impeded by the high cost of printed textbooks) could expand hugely. Despite some rough edges, erroneous transcription, and imperfect bibliographical accompanying data, PG texts were adequate to most teaching purposes. The project remains true to Hart’s original belief that getting the material out takes precedence over scholarly punctilios and that free texts make for better learning.
Johannes Gutenberg launched his medieval project with the Bible. In as grand, and as democratic a gesture (‘let the people read’), Michael Hart chose, as his primal text, the American Declaration of Independence, released on 1 December 1971. 4 July might, perhaps, have been too neat.