'Gutenberg!': A Guide to the Inventor Behind the Broadway Musical

“Gutenberg! The Musical!', a comedic meta-musical about two talentless idiots who pitch a show about the father of the printing press, concludes its limited Broadway run on January 28.

The show, written by Scott Brown and Anthony King and starring Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells (who reprise their buddy act from the Book of Mormon), has generated mixed reviews and strong box office returns. But even before it opened, its mere existence on Broadway had book and library nerds shaking with anticipation and a bit of disbelief.

There has also been grumbling 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-overlooked founding father like Alexander Hamilton into a household name and cultural hero, why would the man whose invention jump-started mass literacy throw away his opportunity?

Hamilton had a number of thick biographies at his side. But as Gad's character notes in the show, Wikipedia (correctly) declares that records of Gutenberg's life are “sparse.”

Here's a primer for those who, even after watching the show, are wondering, “Guten-Who?”

What do we actually know about Johannes Gutenberg?

Born the son of a patrician in the early 15th century in Mainz, Germany, Gutenberg was originally trained as a goldsmith and metallurgist. Some surviving documents suggest that in the 1430s he secretly began developing what would become his famous printing press. His early efforts included some papal indulgences and a grammar book. Then, in late 1454 or early 1455, seemingly out of nowhere, his monumental two-volume Bible of nearly 1,300 pages, with two columns of 42 lines per page, appeared.

Today, specialists accurately describe Gutenberg's achievement. His Bible “was the first substantial book printed in the West with movable type,” said George Fletcher, the author of “Gutenberg and the Genesis of Printing,” during a recent interview at the Grolier Club in Manhattan, where I recently attended visit was for a conversation. Take an up-close look at some of Gutenberg's printed works, including loose leaves from his Bible.

Did Gutenberg really 'invent' the printing press?

Not exactly, although if you bring this up over a pint of mead at the Rusty German, the seedy tavern in the show, you might get in trouble. As early as the late eighth century, Japanese craftsmen were printing Buddhist sutras en masse carved wood blocks. And a form of loose letters appeared in China as early as the 11th century, although it is unclear whether Gutenberg would have been aware of this, Fletcher said.

Yet the world-changing nature of Gutenberg's invention lay not in the press, Fletcher said, but in his entire system, starting with the type species (as specialists call the individual characters). “What's important is this ability to reuse and reuse the fonts, in any combination imaginable,” he said. “You have 26 letters, but you can get millions of combinations from them. And he discovered how to do this.'

Did the Gutenberg Bible really help turn the illiterate masses of Europe into reading, as the series character claims?

“There's a lot to it,” says 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). Between about 1455 and the end of 1500, 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, all kinds of things were being marketed,” he said. “So there was a lot more material for people who could read or who could learn to read and improve themselves.”

Did Gutenberg fight the religious authorities?

The musical depicts Gutenberg as locked in a battle with an angry monk, who fears that the printing press will lose the church's power over the masses.

In reality, some religious readers were deeply impressed by Gutenberg's wares, including the future Pope Pius II, who saw a copy at the Frankfurt Book Fair in early 1455. He wrote excitedly to a cardinal in Rome, praising Gutenberg and his pages, which he declared “exceptionally clean and correct in their script, and without errors, as Your Excellency could read effortlessly without spectacles.”

Unfortunately, the future Pope noted, the edition of about 180 copies had already sold out.

Was Gutenberg really in love with a girl named Helvetica, like in the show?

Unlikely. Helvetica is the name of a now ubiquitous, sleek line font style created in 1957, which achieved world dominance after being selected as the core font on the first Macintosh computers. The typeface Gutenberg used, which mimicked the look of calligraphic handwriting, is known as blackletter.

What happened to Gutenberg after his Bible?

Shortly after the book was announced for sale, he had a dispute with one of his financiers and lost his press. “He was kicked out of the company just on the cusp 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, the first printer in Britain, omitted his name but noted the revolutionary technology born in Mainz, saying: 'The craft is multiplied throughout the world and books are available cheaply and in large quantities. number.”

Where can I buy a Gutenberg Bible?

Sorry, you're out of luck! The last one put up for auction in 1978 fetched $2.2 million, about $10 million in today's dollars. Today, all 49 nearly complete Gutenberg Bibles known to have survived are in institutional collections.

Single leaves, known commercially as Noble Fragments, are available for purchase and cost about $70,000 to $100,000, a bit higher if they are on parchment rather than paper, said Selby Kiffer, a senior vice president at Sotheby's. (De Grolier owns several Gutenberg leaves and other fragments.) If an entire Bible were to come on the market, Kiffer estimates, the price would be a record $60 to $80 million.

Yet perhaps what is remarkable about Gutenberg's work is not 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, the craftsmanship has not improved since Gutenberg.”

Are there any other early pressers ready 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, transforming personal reading. He was the first to print editions of Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Sophocles; the first to use italic type; and the first to use the semicolon in its modern sense.

Thus was a famously short-tempered character. And if you read Robin Sloan's 2012 novel, “Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore,” he was also the founder of the Unbroken Spine, a secret society of bibliophiles engaged in a 21st-century existential confrontation with Google over the soul of humanity.

But why not believe it? As Gad's character puts it in the series, historical fiction is “fiction that is true.”