I was especially interested in the discussion in Keith about attempts to create movable type printing in China, and the combination of factors—ink viscosity, paper-making methods/materials, a much larger and thus exorbitantly more expensive number of characters needed—that prevented it from taking off in the same way that Gutenberg’s press did, despite attempts being made up to 4000 earlier. The Stephen Fry documentary also pointed out that Gutenberg grew up among vineyards, where he would have been familiar with wine-presses, on which he may have based his prototype printing press. He was funded by “proto-venture-capitalists” like Fust, but it was his winning-over of the Catholic church through the printing of mass-produced indulgence letters and eventually his full Bible that really convinced anyone of the viability of his invention.

Because we currently live in an age where everything under the sun appears in print, we tend to think of the invention of printing as value-neutral and all-encompassing, but what the readings this week show is that it was actually a very particular and context-specific process, and that the fact that it happened in the way it did—in German wine country, printing books in the Roman alphabet, printing leaves between covers at all as opposed to more flexible, rollable broadsheets or scrolls—wasn’t inevitable, but a product of Gutenberg having access to the appropriate methods and materials and leveraging the right connections. 

Mass-market printing is seen as a democratization of knowledge, and to some degree it definitely was, but the physical form that knowledge is conveyed in is inextricably linked to the content of the knowledge itself. In the Gutenberg documentary Stephen Fry calls books “the building blocks of civilization” and Gutenberg’s press “the most revolutionary advance in technology since the wheel.” But it’s interesting to examine what kind of civilization is built with those blocks, what that wheel advances, and what could have been otherwise if other cultures had had the material and linguistic advantages that Gutenberg did.