“Gutenberg! The Musical!”, a comedic meta-musical about two wobbly puppets who put on a show for a printing press father, ends its limited run on Broadway on January 28.
Written by Scott Brown and Anthony King and starring Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells (reprising their “Book of Mormon” buddy), the series has garnered mixed reviews and strong returns at the box office. But even before it opened, its presence on Broadway had book and library nerds quivering with anticipation and a little disbelief.
There were also grumblings from some traditionalists (of the rare book, not the Rodgers and Hammerstein, variety), along with some resignation. Well, why? not a musical about Johannes Gutenberg? If Broadway can turn a semi-neglected founder like Alexander Hamilton into a household name and cultural hero, why would the guy whose invention helped launch mass literacy throw away his shot?
Hamilton had some thick biographies on his side. But as Gand’s character notes on the show, Wikipedia (correctly) states that records of Gutenberg’s life are “minimal.”
Here’s a primer for those who, even after seeing the show, may be left wondering, “Guten-Who?”
What do we really know about Johannes Gutenberg?
Born the son of a patrician in the early 15th century in Mainz, Germany, Gutenberg first trained as a goldsmith and metalsmith. Some surviving documents suggest that in the 1430s he began secretly developing what would become his famous printing press. His early efforts included a few papal indulgences and one grammar book. Then, in late 1454 or early 1455, seemingly out of nowhere, came his monumental two-volume Bible of nearly 1,300 pages, with its two columns of 42 lines per page.
Today, experts accurately describe Gutenberg’s achievement. His Bible “was the first substantial book printed in the West with movable type,” George Fletcher, the author of “Gutenberg and the Genesis of Printing,” said during a recent interview at the Grolier Club in Manhattan, where I recently visited for Get an up-close look at some of Gutenberg’s prints, including loose leaves from his Bible.
So did Gutenberg really “invent” the printing press?
Not exactly — although mentioning it over a pint of mead at the Rusty German, the show’s seedy tavern, could get you in trouble. As early as the late eighth century, Japanese artisans mass-printed Buddhist sutras using carved wood carvers. And a mobile type format appeared in China as early as the 11th century, though it’s unclear whether Gutenberg would have known about it, Fletcher said.
However, the world-changing nature of Gutenberg’s invention lay not in the press, Fletcher said, but in his entire system, starting with types (as experts call individual characters). “What’s important is this ability to reuse and reuse and reuse the types of types, in any possible combination,” he said. “You have 26 letters, but you can get millions of combinations out of them. And figure out how you could do that.”
Did Gutenberg’s Bible really help teach the illiterate masses of Europe to read, as the show’s character claims?
“There’s so much to it,” said Fletcher, a former curator at the New York Public Library (which has one Gutenberg Bible) and the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan (which has three). From about 1455 to the end of the 1500s, about 30,000 different editions of printed books, amounting to millions of copies, appeared throughout western Europe and as far away as Constantinople. “And by the 1490s, there were all kinds of things that had gone extinct,” he said. “So there was a lot more material for people who could read or could learn to read and improve themselves.”
Did Gutenberg fight religious authorities?
The musical depicts Gutenberg locked in a battle with an evil monk, who fears that the printing press will loosen the church’s power over the masses.
In fact, some religious readers were very impressed with Gutenberg’s wares, including the future Pope Pius II, who saw a sample at the Frankfurt Book Fair in early 1455. He wrote excitedly to a cardinal in Rome, praising Gutenberg and the pages of it, which they declared to be “exceedingly clear and correct in their script, and without error, such as your Excellency could easily read without glasses.”
Unfortunately, the future Pope noted, the run of about 180 copies had already sold out.
Was Gutenberg really in love with a bag named Helvetica like in the show?
Unlikely. Helvetica is the name of a now ubiquitous clean line font was created in 1957, which rose to global dominance after being chosen as the default font on the first Macintosh computers. The font used by Gutenberg, which mimics the look of calligraphic writing, is known as blackletter.
What happened to Gutenberg after his Bible?
Shortly after announcing the book for sale, he had a falling out with one of his financiers and lost his press. “He was thrown out of business, right at the point of success,” Fletcher said. Gutenberg died in 1468, around the age of 70. His grave is unknown. A history of the world published in 1482 by William Caxton, Britain’s first printer, omitted his name but noted the revolutionary technology born in Mainz, saying: “art is multiplied throughout the world, and books are cheap and extremely number.”
Where can I buy a Gutenberg Bible?
Sorry, you’re out of luck! The last one that went to auction, in 1978, fetched $2.2 million, about $10 million in today’s dollars. Today, all 49 of Gutenberg’s substantially complete Bibles known to survive are in institutional collections.
The single sheets, known in the trade as Noble Fragments, go for about $70,000 to $100,000, slightly higher if they are on vellum rather than paper, said Selby Kiffer, Sotheby’s senior vice president. (Grolier has several Gutenberg leaves and other fragments.) If an entire Bible were to come on the market, Kiefer estimated, the price would be a record-breaking $60 million to $80 million.
However, what is remarkable about Gutenberg’s work may not be its rarity, but its enduring familiarity. “We may be in a digital world now, but from 1455 to today, the book as a technology hasn’t changed that much,” he said. “And certainly, craftsmanship has not been improved since Gutenberg.”
Are there other early printers ripe for a Broadway close-up?
The best bet is probably Aldus Manutius, a leading printer in late 15th-century Venice, where the center of printing innovation moved a decade after Gutenberg. Aldus pioneered the printing of portable, relatively affordable editions of classics that revolutionized personal reading. He was the first to print the editions of Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus and Sophocles. the first to use italic type. and the first to use the question mark in its modern sense.
Aldous was a famously irascible character. And if you believe Robin Sloan’s 2012 novel, “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” he was also the founder of Unbroken Spine, a secret society of bibliophiles locked in a 21st-century existential showdown with Google for the soul of humanity.
But then why? not Believe it? As Gand’s character in the play puts it, historical fiction is “fiction that is true.”