How a German city changed how we read | Hacker News Reader

How a German city changed how we read

bbc.com

39 pointsmontrose8 comments

Couple notes:

- The Gutenberg bible is still a rather unique book. It used many specialized ligatures and used variations of letters to achieve a typesetting quality that's still regarded a benchmark today. In total some 300 different glyphs have been used (for a latin text).

- It took almost two decades, a lot of people and money to develop this technology. Two decades later it has spread across all of Europe. This is a typical pattern of groundbreaking inventions you can observe many times across history.

- The major improvement devised by Gutenberg was not press printing, but the movable type. Presses have been used for printing before, though not much in Europe. Similarly, printing wasn't really new, but carving one wood block for each individual page was an insane amount of work, and even beech wood (fun fact: beech is called Buche in Germany, and that's the root of the word Buch / book, both in English and German. Buchstabe (letter) is related as well.) didn't last that long.

The typesetting does look amazing. Here's a scanned copy: http://bav.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/arch-b-b10

According to the Wikipedia article on movable type [1], it existed long before Gutenberg, in East Asia. It seems like Gutenberg's contribution was to introduce some additional innovations and popularize it in Europe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type

> Of his original print run of about 150 to 180 Bibles, only 48 remain in the world today.

Only? It's remarkable that any survived!

The publisher Taschen Verlag has just published a facsimile of the exemplar in Göttingen (which they claim to be the best, both in paper quality and illustrations).

ISBN 978-3-8365-6221-8

Awesome. I learned Classical Latin in school. Would I be able to read the Latin of the Gutenberg Bible with moderate effort or is that Latin too different and peculiar?

I suspect yes, but I am not qualified to really answer that.

But can you read Textura?

There are digital facsimiles and photos of several Gutenberg Bibles online. Just give it a try.

The Latin of the Gutenberg Bible is St. Jerome's, so from about 400. It should be nothing that you would find difficult. I imagine that there will take some but not much time to figure out the abbreviations, ligatures, etc.

Tuft's Perseus project (and many, many other sites) have the Vulgate available on-line: see http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Pe... .

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