Johannes Gutenberg

NAME Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Inventor of the movable-type printing press in Europe and publisher of the Gutenberg Bible, the first major book printed using mass-produced movable type.

BIRTH Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany, around 1400. His exact birth year is uncertain, with scholarly estimates ranging from 1393 to 1406, though 1400 is commonly assigned "for the sake of convenience". Some traditions hold his birthdate to be June 24, the feast day of Saint John the Baptist.

FAMILY BACKGROUND Gutenberg was the youngest son of Friele (Friedrich) Gensfleisch zur Laden and Else Wyrich. Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden adopted the surname "zum Gutenberg" after the name of the neighborhood into which the family had moved. (1)

His father Friele was a patrician merchant likely involved in the cloth trade and served as a "master of the accounts" for the city, holding a position in the archbishop's mint as part of the Münzerhausgenossenschaft (minting house cooperative). His mother Else was the daughter of a shopkeeper, Werner Wyrich zum steinern Krame. 

The marriage between his patrician father and commoner mother complicated Gutenberg's future prospects, as his mother's status prevented him from succeeding his father at the mint.

CHILDHOOD Little is known about Gutenberg's childhood and youth. The family was forced to leave Mainz multiple times due to political unrest, including in 1411 and 1413, when conflicts arose between the patrician class and the craft guilds. During these periods of exile, the family likely resided in Eltville am Rhein, where his mother had inherited property.

EDUCATION Gutenberg probably received a good education befitting his patrician status. University of Erfurt enrollment records from 1418-1419 mention a "Johannes de Alta villa" (Johannes from Eltville), which some scholars believe may refer to Gutenberg. He was literate in both German and Latin, the language of scholars and churchmen. His later achievements demonstrate substantial educational attainment. 

During his time in Strasbourg in the 1430s and early 1440s, he was involved in creating metal hand mirrors and was affiliated with the local goldsmiths’ guild. Court records and testimonies confirm that he worked with metals and taught others the craft, and he purchased metals, presses, and forms for his early experiments. These metalworking skills enabled him to devise and cast durable, reusable metal type 

CAREER RECORD   1428 Documented as a goldsmith and dealer in precious metals.

1434–1444 Engaged in crafts such as gem cutting, and taught pupils how to polish and cut stones.

1438 Attempted to mass-produce “pilgrim mirrors” for the Aachen pilgrimage. The convex mirrors, mounted in decorated tin frames, were meant to capture and transmit the sacred rays of relics. The pilgrimage, however, was postponed until 1440, delaying any return on his investment.

1438–1443 Entered into a business partnership in Strasbourg with Hans Riffe, Andreas Dritzehn, and Andreas Heilmann, likely an early attempt at printing ventures.

1448–1453 Formed a partnership in Mainz with financier Johann Fust and his son-in-law Peter Schoeffer. During this period, Gutenberg perfected the movable-type printing process, developing alloys, molds, and oil-based ink.

1454 Printed his first known item, a Turkish calendar.

1455 Produced the Gutenberg Bible, the first major European book printed with movable type.

1459 Published The Catholican, praising the new printing process as a miracle.

1461 Associated with another printing venture, though without notable success.

1465 Granted a pension and position as a courtier by the Archbishop of Mainz, receiving grain, wine, and clothing allowances.

APPEARANCE No contemporary portraits or physical descriptions of Gutenberg exist. The famous monuments and statues, including Bertel Thorvaldsen's 1837 bronze statue in Mainz, show him in idealized form: bearded, elegantly dressed, holding a Bible and movable type.

Gutenberg Monument by Bertel Thorvaldsen, erected 1837 by Kenneth C. Zirkel 

FASHION As a Mainz patrician, he likely dressed in modest but well-made merchant-class clothing, and in later years received official outfits from the Archbishop of Mainz.

CHARACTER Gutenberg was a determined and persistent inventor, as his work on the printing press spanned over a decade. He was also secretive about his work, as shown by his legal troubles with his business partners. He was clearly a skilled and innovative craftsman.

Some sources characterize him as having been involved in "strange and wacky schemes" and suggest he was not always a pleasant person. (2)

RELATIONSHIPS His most significant relationships were his business partnerships, particularly the one with Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer, which ended in a lawsuit. 

No definitive evidence exists of Gutenberg ever marrying or having children, but he was involved in a broken engagement with a woman named Ennelin zu der Iserin Tür in 1436-1437. He appears to have remained unmarried throughout his life.

MONEY AND FAME At the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair, Gutenberg showcased the revolutionary power of his printing press by selling his two-volume Bibles for 300 florins each. While this was a substantial sum—equivalent to about three years' wages for an average clerk—it was a fraction of the cost of a handwritten Bible, which could take a single monk two decades to complete. (1)

Gutenberg faced continuous financial difficulties throughout his career. His most significant financial crisis occurred with the lawsuit filed by Johann Fust in 1455, claiming 2,026 guilders. Fust won the case, gaining control of Gutenberg's printing equipment and half the printed Bibles. Despite these setbacks, Gutenberg achieved some recognition later in life when Archbishop Adolf von Nassau made him a courtier in 1465, providing him with grain, wine, clothing, and tax exemptions.

FOOD AND DRINK As a courtier from 1465, Gutenberg received 20 Malter Korn (approximately 2,200 litres of grain) and 2 Fuder Wein (approximately 2,000 litres of wine) annually. These provisions likely also supplied his printing workshop employees.

MUSIC AND ARTS His printing work demonstrated exceptional artistic sensibility, particularly in the design and execution of the Gutenberg Bible, which has been praised for its aesthetic quality.

Gutenberg was not known as a musician or artist, but his invention profoundly impacted both fields.

THE GUTENBERG BIBLE The Gutenberg Bible. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? And it was, in every sense. Printed in Mainz around 1454–55 by Johannes Gutenberg, it’s often described as the first proper book of the modern age. What it really did was fling open the gates to a whole new world of ideas. Before Gutenberg, if you wanted a Bible you needed a team of monks with good eyesight and endless patience. Afterwards, you just needed Gutenberg’s press—and a fair few florins, mind you.

It was, officially, the Latin Vulgate, both Old and New Testaments. Two columns, 42 lines each—hence the snappy nickname “42-line Bible.” No title page, no page numbers, just page after page of Gothic script that looked almost exactly like what scribes had been producing by hand. About 160–185 copies were made, most on paper, some on vellum. Forty-nine of them are still around today, tucked away in libraries where security guards and humidity controls watch over them like nervous parents.

Each copy needed 1,288 pages, usually bound in two enormous volumes. You could hardly tuck one under your arm on the way to church.

Gutenberg didn’t just knock up a few letters and get stamping. He had to invent an oil-based ink, perfect a lead–antimony–tin alloy for the type, and adapt a screw press to do the heavy lifting. The results were astonishing. Printers today still get misty-eyed over the craftsmanship. Some pages were hand-illuminated afterwards—gold leaf, bright paints, fancy initials—so that each Bible felt as glorious as the manuscripts it was replacing.

And what was the result of all this sweat, stress, and genius? For the first time, texts could be replicated exactly and shared widely. The Bible didn’t have to stay locked away in a monastery library anymore. It could sit in a parish church, or on the desk of a scholar, or—eventually—find its way into the hands of ordinary people. That was the seedbed of the Reformation, the Renaissance, and every late-night argument ever had in a university dormitory.

Today, you can see Gutenberg Bibles at the Library of Congress, the British Library, in Paris, Harvard, Yale, and other such shrines of learning. They are among the most valuable books on earth, but their true worth is in what they represent: the beginning of mass information, the chance for anyone—anyone with the means to read—to hold the Word in their own hands.

It all began with Gutenberg, some movable type, and a dream that knowledge might finally be shared, rather than hoarded.

Gutenberg Monument by Bertel Thorvaldsen, erected 1837

LITERATURE Gutenberg's command of Latin and involvement in producing religious texts, including the Bible and various liturgical works, demonstrates substantial literary knowledge.

The Gutenberg Bible revolutionized access to literature, reducing the cost of owning books compared with handwritten manuscripts.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Beyond his professional work in goldsmithing, gem cutting, and printing, no specific hobbies or sports interests are documented. His involvement in manufacturing mirrors for pilgrims might be considered a side venture.

PRINTING PRESS  In the middle of the fifteenth century, a man named Johannes Gutenberg, working away in the German city of Mainz, quietly set about changing the world in a way that almost no one noticed at first. He invented the movable-type printing press, which, in terms of altering human civilization, belongs right up there with fire, agriculture, and indoor plumbing.

What Gutenberg did was take a handful of existing technologies—metal casting, screw presses used for making wine, inks of various kinds—and smash them together in a way that no one had thought of before. Out of this improbable alchemy came a contraption that could produce identical pages over and over again, something previously so unattainable that most people didn’t even bother to dream about it.

Now, to be fair, Gutenberg didn’t invent movable type. The Chinese had been fiddling with it as far back as the 1040s. But as Europe hadn’t the faintest clue about that, Gutenberg gets the credit. What he perfected around 1447 was a system that allowed letters to be mass-produced by pouring molten metal into molds stamped with punches. It meant you could have, quite literally, an endless supply of letters—far more reliable than my postman, who appears only on alternate Thursdays.

European books at the time were laboriously handwritten by scribes, often in Gothic script that looked as if it had been designed by someone who’d just fallen off a horse. Gutenberg, wanting to replicate that “authentic” look, created a font of more than 300 characters—an absurdly high number compared to modern fonts. To pull this off, he invented a variable-width mold and discovered that a mix of lead, tin, and antimony produced type that was both durable and crisp.

He also devised an oil-based ink—because the watery inks then in use simply slid off the metal type like rain on a waxed jacket—and adapted a wine press to apply steady, repeatable pressure. The process was beguilingly straightforward: arrange the type, ink it, press paper against it, and repeat until the neighbours start complaining about the noise.

The result was miraculous. Where a monk with aching fingers and fading eyesight might manage forty pages in a day if he avoided distractions, Gutenberg’s press could turn out 3,600. It was as if someone had gone from pushing a wheelbarrow to driving a Ferrari.

The historical impact is difficult to exaggerate. Within decades, books were tumbling out of presses across Europe. The Reformation, the Renaissance, the scientific revolution—all were turbocharged by the sudden and dizzying spread of ideas. Literacy, once the preserve of priests and princes, began to creep outward into the hands of merchants, craftsmen, and eventually the rest of us.

And so, with a few ingenious tweaks to metal, ink, and wine-making equipment, Gutenberg launched what we now call the “printing revolution.” It is no exaggeration to say that nearly everything you’re reading today, from a paperback novel to the back of a cereal box, can trace its ancestry back to that workshop in Mainz, where a man with a knack for fiddling about with screws and molten metal accidentally changed the course of history. 

SCIENCE AND MATHS  Gutenberg's work required considerable technical knowledge of metallurgy, chemistry, and engineering. He developed a special alloy of lead, tin, and antimony for casting type , created oil-based printing inks , and designed mechanical systems for his printing press. His background in goldsmithing and experience at the mint provided crucial technical expertise.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY  Gutenberg, being a Catholic chap, thought it best to kick things off with the Bible. Not a bad choice really, if you’re looking for a first project. It shows, I suppose, that he took his faith rather seriously. He even belonged to a lay brotherhood at St. Viktor’s monastery, which sounds as if it would involve a great deal of hymn-singing, bread-baking, and earnest discussions about God over cheese and wine.

Now, the clergy of the day weren’t entirely thrilled with his new contraption. They weren’t sure the Holy Scriptures ought to be clattered together with bits of metal and sticky ink, like a recipe for jam. But Gutenberg pressed on (literally), and suddenly the Bible was available to Mr. Joe—or Herr Joseph—Average, who until then had been entirely dependent on the local priest for his portion of divine wisdom. Without intending it, Gutenberg laid the table for the Reformation, simply by putting the Word of God into ordinary hands.

He wasn’t all Bibles, though. In 1460, he printed The Catholicon, a great hefty encyclopedia originally compiled by Johannes Balbus. Seven hundred and forty-eight pages, two columns, sixty-six lines each—just the sort of thing you’d want if you couldn’t sleep. Gutenberg himself compared the whole project to a miracle, saying God had given him the cleverness of punches and characters instead of pens and ink. Which is exactly the sort of thing you’d say when you’ve just invented something astonishing and want to sound pious about it.

And then, rather less spiritually, there were indulgence letters in 1454, printed in Mainz to raise funds for a crusade against the Turks threatening Cyprus. Perhaps not Gutenberg’s proudest moment, but there we are. History tends to serve up a mixture of the sublime and the slightly awkward.

POLITICS Gutenberg's family faced political persecution due to conflicts between patricians and guilds in Mainz. He was exiled from Mainz in 1462 during the Mainz Diocesan Feud when Archbishop Adolf II raided the city. Those who didn't pledge allegiance to the new archbishop, including Gutenberg, were driven out or imprisoned.

His press had vast political consequences, especially in spreading Reformation ideas.

SCANDAL The most significant scandal involved the 1455 lawsuit with Johann Fust, who accused Gutenberg of misusing borrowed funds. Fust claimed Gutenberg owed substantial amounts for paper, vellum, ink, apparatus, and workers' wages, ultimately winning the case and gaining control of Gutenberg's printing operation.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Reports indicate Gutenberg became blind in his final months. No other specific health information is documented, though he lived to approximately 68 years, a respectable age for the 15th century.

HOMES In 1411, Gutenberg’s father was forced to leave Mainz after a political quarrel broke out between the city’s patricians and its guilds. The dispute, sparked by the election of a new mayor, drove 117 patrician families out to their country estates. The Gutenberg family likely relocated to Eltville, a small town on the Rhine where his mother had inherited property.

After his father’s death, the young Gutenberg left Mainz himself, settling around 1428 in the Strasbourg suburb of St. Argobast. Records confirm his presence in Strasbourg from 1434 to 1444, during which time he honed his craft. In 1448, he returned to Mainz, where he attempted to establish a printing partnership—an endeavor that would prove financially rocky.

But Mainz was not finished with upheaval. On October 30, 1462, the city was sacked, and Gutenberg, along with many of his coworkers, was once again driven into exile. Most of his printers scattered across Europe, carrying with them the skills and secrets of the new trade. Gutenberg himself found refuge in Eltville, where he could count on the support of family ties—his niece’s husband lived there—and the loyal friendship of Gretchen Schwalbach and Heinrich Bechtermünze. A few years later, he made his way back to Mainz once more.

TRAVEL Gutenberg's documented travels include movements between Mainz, Eltville, and Strasbourg. He lived in Strasbourg from approximately 1428-1444 , returning to Mainz by 1448 to establish his printing business.

DEATH Johannes Gutenberg died on February 3, 1468, in Mainz. He was buried in the Franciscan church in Mainz, where many family members were also interred. The original cemetery was later destroyed, and his grave's exact location has been lost.

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Gutenberg has been featured in numerous documentaries, including Stephen Fry's The Machine That Made Us. 

The Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, founded in 1900, displays artifacts and offers demonstrations of printing techniques. 

Multiple monuments commemorate him, including Bertel Thorvaldsen's famous 1837 bronze statue in Mainz and monuments in Frankfurt. 

Project Gutenberg, the digital library founded in 1971, was named in his honor and has digitized over 75,000 free eBooks.

ACHIEVEMENTS Invention of the movable type printing press in Europe.

Printing of the Gutenberg Bible, considered one of the most beautiful and valuable books ever printed.

Revolutionizing the spread of knowledge and literacy, paving the way for the modern era

Sources: (1) Encyclopaedia of Trivia (2) The Week