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Observations of the Mystery of Print and the Work of Johann Gutenberg / Hendrik Willem Van Loon
Books
REF.BC.1309
45 p. : ill. ; 21 cm.
1937
Printing, Gutenberg, Johann, 1397?-1468, Printing presses
In Observations on the Mystery of Print and the Work of Johann Gutenberg, Hendrik Willem van Loon candidly portrays the developments that led to the printing press and to the book as we know it. The title was originally created by the Book Manufacturers’ Institute for the New York Times Second National Book Fair, and begins with a description of the early developments of printing ranging from the use of wooden blocks in early China to the eventual creation of paper as a mass product and the later development of a European middle class who “eagerly craved their share of the world’s learning”. Van Loon moves on to a discussion of the interrogation mark behind Johann’s qualifications as the true inventor of printing. Here, the reader will learn about Laurens Janszoon Coster, Gutenberg’s presumed teacher from whom he stole all his ideas; and about Pamfilo Castaldi of Feltre, whom a few Italian patriots claim worked with movable type long before Gutenberg. Despite these alternate claims to the development of movable type printing, as van Loon notes, “Like all other inventions, the art of printing was not the work of a single man, but was the result of the unconscious cooperation of a vast number of people of all sorts of racial antecedents…” He closes with the summation that the future happiness of the human race depends upon only one thing – international cooperation.