Looking at the triumphs and turpitude of the modern world, the temptation is always to seek someone responsible. In 1900, succumbing to that temptation, Mark Twain pointed to the 15th-century German inventor Johannes Gutenberg. More than any man living or dead, Gutenberg had ‘created a new and wonderful earth, and along with it a new hell’, Twain wrote. ‘Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg’s invention has made it.’ 

Call me soft, but it seems unfair to pin all the horrors and glories of modernity on one man, however broad his shoulders, however remarkable his creation. The question of what, exactly, Gutenberg invented is still live. It has become fashionable for scholars to point out that there was, by the 15th century, a rich tradition in Asia of hand-printing using movable type made from wood, ceramics and, in Korea, cast metal. And yet, as Eric Marshall White persuasively argues in his admirable new biography of Gutenberg, such methods did not and indeed could not have influenced the development of printing with movable type in Europe, which combined the use of a press with endlessly reconfigurable Latin letters in cast-metal type. In 1448, Gutenberg was a middle-aged debtor, newly returned to his hometown of Mainz. By 1455, he was selling Bibles that were hailed as near-miraculous in their beauty and accuracy. Within forty years, the new technology had taken hold in every corner of Europe.

What do we know of Gutenberg’s character? Almost nothing. Genius has a habit of leaving behind only scattered and uninspiring documentation. Just look at Shakespeare. One of the chief virtues of White’s book is that he manages to squeeze the evidence for all it is worth without the juice becoming too sweet to swallow. Consider his handling of the legal evidence. Historians both love and hate litigation: as source material it is often indispensable, but it seldom provides the information you want and, let’s be frank, nobody escapes a lawsuit smelling of roses. Gutenberg emerges from White’s biography as a litigious serial tax-dodger who squandered a privileged upbringing (and probably a university education) to become a manufacturer of souvenir mirrors for pilgrims in Strasbourg. He was certainly not, as is still commonly asserted, a goldsmith or a mint official. In fact, as White puts it, he probably ‘never personally worked with anything hotter than a bowl of soup’.

Even so, the man’s appetite for risk must have been extraordinary. He staked everything on a technology that at first appeared to deliver far less than it promised and the capabilities of which he himself seems barely to have understood. The earliest products of the Gutenberg press, like the first pancakes of the batch, were clumsy and misshapen things, ephemeral busywork that tested the limits of the new equipment: some execrable German poetry, Latin textbooks, papal indulgences and a calendar that combined useful dates with propaganda against ‘the Turks’. Even with the famous forty-two-line Bible, one cannot avoid suspecting that Gutenberg and his men were making it up as they went along. The original plan, for instance, was to print only forty lines to the column instead of forty-two. But it was quickly calculated that by squeezing another two lines of text into each column, Gutenberg might milk his stock of top-grade Italian paper for an additional seven or eight Bibles. And so, as White recounts in a delightfully vivid example of analytical bibliography, the printer decided to file down the type pieces of the tallest ascenders so that one line of text could be more compactly stacked on top of the next. It is the kind of solution that is so utterly bonkers as to be sure proof of genius.

Histories of the book in Europe are often hampered by the lack of technological progress between the Gutenberg ‘moment’ and the development of industrial presses in the 19th century. There were changes in scale, but the essential technology of the handpress remained the same. And yet Gutenberg was constantly breaking the rules, precisely because the rules had not yet been set in stone. Filing down type is just one example. Another would arise during his printing of the Latin dictionary called the Catholicon in the 1460s, when, as White shows in another beautifully lucid explanation, Gutenberg began fusing entire lines of type into slugs by pouring hot metal into the gaps between the individual letters. This made reprinting the book quick and easy; it did not need to be reset entirely from scratch. Thus Gutenberg’s second major invention was, White chuckles, ‘non-moveable types’. Unlike their movable counterparts, these died with their originator. Only in the 1880s, with the invention of the Linotype machine, did the notion of casting whole lines of text in metal instead of individual letters catch on.

For all these tales of technological innovation, there are occasional hints that White would rather be writing about Gutenberg’s oft-maligned business partner, Johann Fust, and Fust’s protégé, Peter Schoeffer. Following a rift that ended, as so often with Gutenberg, in the courtroom, Fust and Schoeffer established their own printing press on the other side of Mainz, where they elevated the technology to new heights. Forgetting himself for a moment, White describes the psalter that Fust and Schoeffer produced in 1457 as a ‘virtually perfect, quite heavenly printed book that three or four years earlier could only have been dreamed about’, adding that ‘few printing houses would ever again attempt such fiercely difficult typographic operations, and even fewer would achieve such an effective balance between function and beauty.’ Only with great reluctance does White drag himself back across Mainz to Gutenberg’s workshop, which, following Fust’s departure, was stuck churning out crummy broadsides and schoolbooks. In many ways, Fust and Shoeffler’s forty-eight-line Bible of 1462 would prove more influential than the original forty-two-line Gutenberg Bible, although the book lacks the charisma of its older cousin.

As with any charismatic individual, the precise appeal of the Gutenberg Bible is difficult to articulate. It is not, or not exclusively, a matter of aesthetics, for compared to illuminated manuscripts of the period, it is a simple, unprepossessing thing. Nor is it a matter of rarity or chronological primacy. Rather, there is something about the book – the void-black ink on thick paper – that, as anyone who has ever handled a Gutenberg Bible will tell you, feels and even sounds expensive, the pages making an elegant swoosh as you turn them.

I have been lucky enough to handle two copies in my life (well, turn a few pages) and can verify that you are left with a sense of both technical accomplishment and physical heft. The books combine understated beauty with durability. It is therefore a shame to report that White’s otherwise excellent book is printed on squeaky semi-gloss paper, presumably to enable the reproduction of copious but entirely unnecessary colour illustrations. This, facilitated by the wonders of modern digital printing, makes the text itself glint distractingly under sunlight, while the paper sticks to the fingertips. Sometimes the old ways truly are the best.