Category Archives: Contents

There is an endless fascination with Johannes Gutenberg, the impact of the printing press, and the town of Mainz, Germany where he grew up and began the world’s first major printing operation in the 1450s. You see it in the crowds making something of a pilgrimage to the Gutenberg Museum there, and you see it in the thriving city itself — the flower stalls, the cathedral, the singing students pedaling the bicycle-powered beer wagons.

Madhvi Ramani of the BBC captures this in a May 8, 2018 article, How a German City Changed How We Read, and quotes from some of the ideas and insights that I’ve been fortunate enough to gather there.   

In his book, Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age, Dr Bill Kovarik, professor of communication at Radford University in the US state of Virginia, describes this capacity (for speeding up manuscript copying)  in terms of ‘monk power’, where ‘one monk’ equals a day’s work – about one page – for a manuscript copier. Gutenberg’s press amplified the power of a monk by 200 times.

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