“In McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the Medieval world of what he called ‘manuscript culture’.”
Follow him on Twitter at on Facebook.“McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the Sixties.” His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Stephen Fry Introduces the Strange New World of Nanoscienceīased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcas ts on cities, language, and culture. Stephen Fry Profiles Six Russian Writers in the New Documentary Russia’s Open Book
The Art of Collotype: See a Near Extinct Printing Technique, as Lovingly Practiced by a Japanese Master Craftsman The Oldest Book Printed with Movable Type is Not The Gutenberg Bible: Jikji, a Collection of Korean Buddhist Teachings, Predated It By 78 Years and It’s Now Digitized Online Oxford University Presents the 550-Year-Old Gutenberg Bible in Spectacular, High-Res Detail See How The Gutenberg Press Worked: Demonstration Shows the Oldest Functioning Gutenberg Press in Action The fruit of these combined labors is a single replica page of the Gutenberg Bible: a reminder of what brought about the economic, political, and cultural reality we still inhabit these 570 years later. He also visits a paper mill and a type foundry whose craftsmen make their materials with the same methods used in the 15th century. Since none of the presses Gutenberg built survive today (though at least one functioning approximate model does exist), Fry involves himself in reconstructing an example. And he comes to understand that enterprise itself more deeply while following the “Gutenberg trail,” retracing the steps of the man himself as he assembled the resources to put his invention into action.
In order to place himself at the beginning of that particular story, Fry travels to Mainz in modern-day Germany, birthplace of a certain Johannes Gutenberg, whose edition of the Bible from the 1450s isn’t just the earliest mass-produced book but the most important one as well.įry may not have a straightforward relationship with religion, but he does understand well the ramifications of Gutenberg’s Bible-printing enterprise. The use of movable type to run off many copies of a text goes back to 11th-century China, strictly speaking, but only in Europe did it first flourish to the point of giving rise to mass media.
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