Gutenberg, Johann

Gutenberg, Johann (c. 1398-1468), German printer, is supposed to have been born c. 1398-1399 at Mainz of well-to-do parents, his father being Friele zum Gensfleisch and his mother Elsgen Wyrich (or, from her birthplace, zu Gutenberg, the name he adopted). He is assumed to be mentioned under the name of “Henchen” in a copy of a document of 1420, and again in a document of c. 1427-1428, but it is not stated where he then resided. On January 16, 1430, his mother arranged with the city of Mainz about an annuity belonging to him; but when, in the same year, some families who had been expelled a few years before were permitted to return to Mainz, Gutenberg appears not to have availed himself of the privilege, as he is described in the act of reconciliation (dated March 28) as “not being in Mainz.” It is therefore assumed that the family had taken refuge in Strassburg, where Gutenberg was residing later. There he is said to have been in 1434, and to have seized and imprisoned the town clerk of Mainz for a debt due to him by the corporation of that city, releasing him, however, at the representations of the mayor and councillors of Strassburg, and relinquishing at the same time all claims to the money (310 Rhenish guilders = about 2400 mark).1 Between 1436 and 1439 certain documents represent him as having been engaged there in some experiments requiring money, with Andreas Dritzehn, a fellow-citizen, who became not only security for him but his partner to carry out Gutenberg’s plan for polishing stones and the manufacture of looking-glasses, for which a lucrative sale was expected at the approaching pilgrimage of 1440 (subsequently postponed, according to the documents, although there is no evidence for this postponement) to Aix-la-Chapelle. Money was lent for this purpose by two other friends. In 1438 another partnership was arranged between Gutenberg, Andreas Dritzehn, and Andreas and Anton Heilmann, and that this had in view the art of printing has been inferred from the word “drucken” used by one of the witnesses in the law proceedings which soon after followed. An action was brought, after the death of Dritzehn, by his two brothers to force Gutenberg to accept them as partners in their brother’s place, but the decision was in favour of the latter. In 1441 Gutenberg became surety to the St Thomas Chapter at Strassburg for Johann Karle, who borrowed 100 guilders (about £16) from the chapter, and on November 17, 1442, he himself borrowed 80 livres through Martin Brechter (or Brehter) from the same chapter. Of his whereabouts from the 12th of March 1444 (when he paid a tax at Strassburg) to the 17th of October 1448 nothing certain is known. But on the latter date we find him at Mainz, borrowing 150 gold guilders of his kinsman, Arnold Gelthus, against an annual interest of 7½ gold guilders. We do not know whether the interest on this debt has ever been paid, but the debt itself appears never to have been paid off, as the contract of this loan was renewed (vidimused) on August 23, 1503, for other parties. It is supposed that soon afterwards Gutenberg must have been able to show some convincing results of his work, for it appears that about 1450 Johann Fust (q.v.) advanced him 800 guilders to promote it, on no security except that of “tools” still to be made. Fust seems also to have undertaken to advance him 300 guilders a year for expenses, wages, house-rent, parchment, paper, ink, &c., but he does not appear to have ever done so. If at any time they disagreed, Gutenberg was to return the 800 guilders, and the “tools” were to cease to be security. It is not known to what purpose Gutenberg devoted the money advanced to him. In the minutes of the law-suit of 1455 he himself says that he had to make his “tools” with it. But he is presumed to have begun a large folio Latin Bible, and to have printed during its progress some smaller books2 and likewise the Letter of Indulgence (granted on the 12th of April 1451 by Pope Nicholas V. in aid of John II., king of Cyprus, against the Turks), of 31 lines, having the earliest printed date 1454, of which several copies are preserved in various European libraries. A copy of the 1455 issue of the same Indulgence is in the Rylands Library at Manchester (from the Althorp Library).

It is not known whether any books were printed while this partnership between Gutenberg and Fust lasted. Trithemius (Ann. Hirsaug. ii. 421) says they first printed, from wooden blocks, a vocabulary called Catholicon, which cannot have been the Catholicon of Johannes de Janua, a folio of 748 pages in two columns of 66 lines each, printed in 1460, but was perhaps a small glossary now lost.3 The Latin Bible of 42 lines, a folio of 1282 printed pages, in two columns with spaces left for illuminated initials (so called because each column contains 42 lines, and also known as the Mazarin Bible, because the first copy described was found in the library of Cardinal Mazarin), was finished before the 15th of August 1456;4 German bibliographers now claim this Bible for Gutenberg, but, according to bibliographical rules, it must be ascribed to Peter Schöffer, perhaps in partnership with Fust. It is in smaller type than the Bible of 36 lines, which latter is called either (a) the Bamberg Bible, because nearly all the known copies were found in the neighbourhood of Bamberg, or (b) Schelhorn’s Bible, because J. G. Schelhorn was the first who described it in 1760, or (c) Pfister’s Bible, because its printing is ascribed to Albrecht Pfister of Bamberg, who used the same type for several small German books, the chief of which is Boner’s Edelstein (1461, 4to), 88 leaves, with 85 woodcuts, a book of fables in German rhyme. Some bibliographers believe this 36-line Bible to have been begun, if not entirely printed, by Gutenberg during his partnership with Fust, as its type occurs in the 31-line Letters of Indulgence of 1454, was used for the 27-line Donatus (of 1451?), and, finally, when found in Pfister’s possession in 1461, appears to be old and worn, except the additional letters k, w, z required for German, which are clear and sharp like the types used in the Bible. Again, others profess to prove (Dziatzko, Gutenberg’s früheste Druckerpraxis) that B36 was a reprint of B42.

Gutenberg’s work, whatever it may have been, was not a commercial success, and in 1452 Fust had to come forward with another 800 guilders to prevent a collapse. But some time before November 1455 the latter demanded repayment of his advances (see the Helmasperger Notarial Document of November 6, 1455, in Dziatzko’s Beiträge zur Gutenbergfrage, Berlin, 1889), and took legal proceedings against Gutenberg. We do not know the end of these proceedings, but if Gutenberg had prepared any printing materials it would seem that he was compelled to yield up the whole of them to Fust; that the latter removed them to his own house at Mainz, and there, with the assistance of Peter Schöffer, issued various books until the sack of the city in 1462 by Adolphus II. caused a suspension of printing for three years, to be resumed again in 1465.

We have no Information as to Gutenberg’s activity, and very little of his whereabouts, after his separation from Fust. In a document dated June 21, 1457, he appears as witness on behalf of one of his relatives, which shows that he was then still at Mainz. Entries in the registers of the St Thomas Church at Strassburg make it clear that the annual interest on the money which Gutenberg on the 17th of November 1442 (see above) had borrowed from the chapter of that church was regularly paid till the 11th of November 1457, either by himself or by his surety, Martin Brechter. But the payment due on the latter date appears to have been delayed, as an entry in the register of that year shows that the chapter had incurred expenses in taking steps to have both Gutenberg and Brechter arrested. This time the difficulties seem to have been removed, but on and after the 11th of November 1458 Gutenberg and Brechter remained in default. The chapter made various efforts, all recorded in their registers, to get their money, but in vain. Every year they recorded the arrears with the expenses to which they were put in their efforts to arrest the defaulters, till at last in 1474 (six years after Gutenberg’s death) their names are no longer mentioned.

Meantime Gutenberg appears to have been printing, as we learn from a document dated February 26, 1468, that a syndic of Mainz, Dr Conrad Homery (who had formerly been in the service of the elector Count Diether of Ysenburg), had at one time supplied him, not with money, but with some formes, types, tools, implements and other things belonging to printing, which Gutenberg had left after his death, and which had, and still, belonged to him (Homery); this material had come into the hands of Adolf, the archbishop of Mainz, who handed or sent it back to Homery, the latter undertaking to use it in no other town but Mainz, nor to sell it to any person except a citizen of Mainz, even if a stranger should offer him a higher price for the things. This material has never yet been identified, so that we do not know what types Gutenberg may have had at his disposal; they could hardly have included the types of the Catholicon of 1460, as is suggested, this work being probably executed by Heinrich Bechtermünze (d. 1467), who afterwards removed to Eltville, or perhaps by Peter Schöffer, who, about 1470, advertises the book as his property (see K. Burger, Buchhändler-Anzeigen). It is uncertain whether Gutenberg remained in Mainz or removed to the neighbouring town of Eltville, where he may have been engaged for a while with the brothers Bechtermünze, who printed there for some time with the types of the 1460 Catholicon. On the 17th of January 1465 he accepted the post of salaried courtier from the archbishop Adolf, and in this capacity received annually a suit of livery together with a fixed allowance of corn and wine. Gutenberg seems to have died at Mainz at the beginning of 1468, and was, according to tradition, buried in the Franciscan church in that city. His relative Arnold Gelthus erected a monument to his memory near his supposed grave, and forty years afterwards Ivo Wittig set up a memorial tablet at the legal college at Mainz. No books bearing the name of Gutenberg as printer are known, nor is any genuine portrait of him known, those appearing upon medals, statues or engraved plates being all fictitious.

In 1898 the firm of L. Rosenthal, at Munich, acquired a Missale speciale on paper, which Otto Hupp, in two treatises published in 1898 and 1902, asserts to have been printed by Gutenberg about 1450, seven years before the 1457 Psalter. Various German bibliographers, however, think that it could not have been printed before 1480, and, judging from the facsimiles published by Hupp, this date seems to be approximately correct.

On the 24th of June 1900 the five-hundredth anniversary of Gutenberg’s birth was celebrated in several German cities, notably in Mainz and Leipzig, and most of the recent literature on the invention of printing dates from that time.

So we may note that in 1902 a vellum fragment of an Astronomical Kalendar was discovered by the librarian of Wiesbaden, Dr G. Zedler (Die älteste Gutenbergtype, Mainz, 1902), apparently printed in the 36-line Bible type, and as the position of the sun, moon and other planets described in this document suits the years 1429, 1448 and 1467, he ascribes the printing of this Kalendar to the year 1447. A paper fragment of a poem in German, entitled Weltgericht, said to be printed in the 36-line Bible type, appears to have come into the possession of Herr Eduard Beck at Mainz in 1892, and was presented by him in 1903 to the Gutenberg Museum in that city. Zedler published a facsimile of it in 1904 (for the Gutenberg Gesellschaft), with a description, in which he places it before the 1447 Kalendar, c. 1444-1447. Moreover, fragments of two editions of Donatus different from that of 1451 (?) have recently been found; see Schwenke in Centralbl. für Bibliothekwesen (1908).

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