“THE quality of mercy …
is twice bless’d;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.”
– Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare

When the prints were about to come to the world in the late-medieval Europe, paper and paint oil had already been invented. So did the manuscripts, the wine-press and jeweler’s punches or punches used at the mint. But when Johannes Gutenberg was about to actualize his scheme of putting printing to work during his self-imposed exile, he was in need of several things. As Keith Houston, the author of The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, pointed out, what Gutenberg needed are a set of mixed “skilled goldsmiths”, “a wealth church”, “a pious population” and “an injection of capital from a willing investor” (Houston, 2016). In 1448 Gutenberg’s returning to his howntown Mainz allowed him to secure the first three. Two years later, Johann Fust, a Mainzer goldsmith and guildsman, loaned Gutenberg 800 Rheingulden (at 6 percent interest), a large amount of money that allowed Gutenberg to run his printing workshop. In 1452, another 800 Rheingulden from Fust was invested in this new workshop. However, Gutenberg “defaulted upon the interest payments” (Houston, 2016). In the end, he had to give his finished system of moving types and the final products (i.e., the 42-line Bibles) away to Fust in order to “repay” the large debt.  

Despite of that, while explicitly drawing an analogy between the story of Gutenberg and Mark Twain’s historical fiction, The Prince and the Pauper, it is not Fust who borrowed Gutenberg money at least twice but the prints themselves that are compared to the prince in Mark Twain’s tale by Houston. Gutenberg is as the pauper even though he is “of respectable if not noble birth” and had a disposable income before coming back to the city of Mainz (Houston, 2016). In a way, the anthropomorphic prints stress the holiness of the books – both those made through printing by means of the movable types and those that we are reading today. The analogy between the two stories signifies the complementarity or mutuality of the prints and the pauper, as well as the duality of the identity of a book. For instance, the Gutenberg Bible embodies not only the life of the text or data but also how this text or data is distributed. 

While composing the novel of The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain once wrote to another American writer William Dean Howells,

“My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the King himself and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others—all of which is to account for a certain mildness which distinguished Edward VI’s reign from those that preceded and followed it”.

(Cope & Cope, 1996)

Similarly, Houston’s narrative of the prints and Gutenberg in part also provides us a realizing sense of the severity of the laws that regulated the making of books of Gutenberg’s day. When the penalties are imposed both upon the prints and the man who made “movable print” work in the fifteenth century Europe, Houston makes the reciprocal relationship between the prints and the commoner conspicuous. We see how the prints and Gutenberg suffered the consequences together and how both are transformed in the process. In a word, this reciprocity between the prints and Gutenberg mildens the suffering of humanity as a whole through its reinforcement of “the quality of mercy” that is shared by both. This quality of mercy, according to Shakespeare, “is not strained”. “It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath” and, in the end, it was injected into a printing press that had changed and is still influencing the way in which information is distributed. 

Reference

Cope, W. P., & Cope, W. P. (1996). A teacher’s guide to the Signet Classic edition of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the pauper. Penguin USA.

Houston, K. (2016). The book: A cover-to-cover exploration of the most powerful object of our time (First edition). W.W. Norton & Company.