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Celebrating Gutenberg: Anniversaries of Printing from 1540 to Today
From: The British Library
| By:
Susan Reed |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The year 2000 marked the six hundredth anniversary of the birth of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type printing. Celebrations around the world ranged from scholarly conferences and exhibitions to the production of souvenirs such as Gutenberg wine, chocolates and pretzels. Susan Reed, curator of German Printed Collections 1501-1850 at The British Library, considers how earlier Gutenberg anniversaries were celebrated. |
 lthough few exact dates in the life of Johannes Gutenberg are known, particular years have been chosen and commemorated as Gutenberg anniversaries ever since the sixteenth century.  The traditional date of 1440 for the actual invention of the printing press has been the most frequently commemorated anniversary, while Gutenberg's supposed birth date of 1400, which we remembered in 2000, was first widely celebrated only in the last century. |
Commemorating the anniversary of Gutenberg's death in 1468 was also a twentieth-century innovation, while the unveiling of a Gutenberg memorial in Mainz in 1837 had become a date to remember in itself by the late nineteenth century. Commemorative publications from these years illustrate how attitudes to Gutenberg and his invention and to the very concept of anniversary celebrations have changed over the centuries. |
1540--Commemoration or coincidence?
The first people to celebrate the anniversary of printing were printers themselves; Hans Lufft of Wittenberg is said to have held an anniversary feast in 1540, although no firm evidence of this has survived. A Latin poem by Joannes Arnoldus published in 1541 (Figure 1) has been described as the first Gutenberg centenary publication, but can only claim the title by default since Arnoldus mentions no specific anniversary, claiming instead that a visit to Mainz provided the stimulus for his work. He calls the printing press a new wonder of the world, praising Gutenberg and his colleagues, Fust and Schöffer, as divinely inspired, and deploring the legal quarrels which developed among them. The poem ends with a call for careful censorship to prevent the abuse of presses. |
1640--Celebration and controversy
 Although Germany was in the grip of war in 1640, more notice seems to have been taken of the bicentenary of printing than of its centenary. A handful of German scholars produced anniversary poems and essays, like that by Bernardus Mallinckrodt with its engraved title page (Figure 2) showing a lively picture of various stages of the printing process. Mallinckrodt was apparently the first writer to use the term "incunabula," the Latin word for cradle, to refer to books printed before 1501, during the "infancy" of printing. |
Mallinckrodt's main aim was to defend Gutenberg's reputation as the inventor of printing against Dutch claims that Laurens Jansz Coster, of Haarlem, had first perfected the art.  A "Coster v. Gutenberg" debate continued for generations, becoming particularly intense in the nineteenth century. Although the modern consensus has come down in favour of Gutenberg, in the Netherlands Coster was long celebrated as the definite inventor of printing and 1428 was given as the date of his breakthrough. Commemorative medals were struck bearing his likeness, monuments erected to him and, of course, books published, celebrating his achievement (and belittling Gutenberg's). In the engraving in Figure 3 from a 1726 publication, the scroll superimposed on the church spire may be intended to reflect the shape of an early press. |
1740--Scholars and printers
By 1740, the idea of an anniversary was more firmly established, and in many German towns celebrations were organised by those involved in local book trades. These festivities also began to involve scholars and academics as lecturers, preachers or authors of commemorative tracts. Their speeches and sermons accompanied more entertaining events such as processions and firework displays. |
Printing as a vehicle for disseminating the Christian faith was a frequent theme in such celebrations, as illustrated by the pictures and captions in the almost comic-strip-style engraving in Figure 4 from a souvenir of the celebrations in Wernigerode. In the accompanying text Struck, the author and printer of the book, and the chief organiser of the celebrations, proudly claims to have printed fifty thousand Bibles in forty years. |
1840--Gutenberg as hero
In most celebrations before 1840, the invention rather than the inventor of printing took centre stage. Gutenberg was mentioned and praised, but there was little speculation about his character or motivation. In the nineteenth century, however, social and political changes, as well as increasing popular literacy and cheaper book production, created a new attitude to the anniversary of printing and Gutenberg himself was moved into the limelight. For the first time, fictional and dramatic portrayals of his life and work were presented, as well as "factual" biographies aimed at a wider audience. |
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In 1837, a Gutenberg monument had been set up in Mainz, featuring a statue by the Danish sculptor, Thorwaldsen, which was to become one of the most popular nineteenth-century images of Gutenberg. The dedication of this monument in 1837 (Figure 5) was in itself a cause for celebration and became an anniversary to be celebrated in later years. Music played an important part at these events. No less a composer than Giacomo Meyerbeer had provided a special chorus for the dedication ceremony, while the lesser-known Carl Loewe's oratorio Gutenberg became a regular feature of celebrations later in the century. |
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The Gutenberg of 1840 appeared in many different guises, often with a particular political colour. To some, he was still the man who had brought God's word to the masses and facilitated the Reformation. To others, and particularly to radicals who used the anniversary to call for freedom of the press, he was a more secular apostle of enlightenment, pushing aside mediaeval darkness and superstition (Figure 6). |
 Many groups emphasised Gutenberg's appeal as a national hero to encourage support for German unification (a concept which we may associate with the conservative attitudes of the late nineteenth century, but which was also an ideal of many liberals in the 1840s). However, there was also a more international emphasis on printing as a force for uniting the peoples of the world, as in the colourful image in Figure 7 from a deluxe souvenir publication of 1840. |
1900--Pomp, circumstance and scholarship
In the five hundredth-birthday celebrations of 1900, when Germany had become a strong unified state, the nationalistic view of Gutenberg was more pronounced and more conservative than it had been sixty years before. A spectacular pageant held in Mainz (Figure 8) reflected the self-confidence of the new German state, placing Gutenberg and his achievement in a definite context of German culture and history. Figures such as Martin Luther, Goethe and Schiller were portrayed alongside Holy Roman Emperors and the Prussian army of Frederick the Great, shown here processing past the Gutenberg memorial. |
With the advent of cheap mass production, popular souvenirs such as postcards, ornaments and pictures were another feature of the 1900 celebrations. However, the anniversary also gave rise to a number of serious scholarly publications on the early history of printing which had become an important area of research in the previous century. |
1940--Only in America?
The idea of celebrating Gutenberg as a German hero was, of course, taken to extremes by the National Socialist regime which had already instituted annual "Gutenberg Celebration Weeks" in Mainz in 1936. However, the outbreak of war in 1939 meant that plans for grandiose celebrations in 1940 had to be set aside, and the events which did go ahead were somewhat muted. |
Other European countries were similarly constrained from celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of printing, but there was more freedom among American academics and bibliographers. Their serious studies of early printing were complemented by unusually humorous offerings.  For example, the cartoons in M.B. Cary's The Missing Gutenberg Wood Blocks (New York: Press of the Woolly Whale, 1940), purport to be newly discovered fifteenth-century illustrations of Gutenberg's early life and work, while A.W. Rushmore's "The Mainz Diary" portrays Gutenberg's wife as the true inventor of the press (Figure 9). |
Gutenberg 2000--and beyond
As we celebrated Gutenberg's 600th birthday, some voices questioned the very future of the printed book, yet, like most Gutenberg anniversaries, this one was marked by a number of printed books--exhibition catalogs, conference proceedings, deluxe facsimiles of early books and fictionalised versions of Gutenberg's story. So, perhaps, reports of the death of the book have been somewhat exaggerated. |
On the other hand, most celebrations were publicised via print's new great rival, the Internet, which is also making the very first printed books available to researchers in new ways. It seems that printed and nonprinted materials may coexist for a long time yet, perhaps to the benefit of both. In the meantime, those who find such philosophical speculations too much to bear could find plenty of more relaxing ways to celebrate the anniversary: Gutenberg wine, chocolates and even pretzels were offered among the official souvenirs during the year, as well as candles, umbrellas and a "Gutenberg's movable nose" postcard. |
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