The World of Rare Books: The Gutenberg Bible, First and Most Valuable

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

2-01-2008 @ 6:49AM

John C. Randolph said...

Correction: it was the first book printed in Europe. The Chinese and Koreans were using moveable type several centuries earlier.

-jcr

2-03-2008 @ 10:43PM

Werner Saemmler-Hindrichs said...

Dear John! Are you the John C. Randolph who is a rare book dealer? If so, we have to pursue this issue. I dispute that the ceramic and wooden types used by Bi Sheng are even in the same paradigm as Gutenberg, who should be more properly credited with achieving an entire system of type-founding, something the Chines, nor the Uihgurs, nor the Koreans ever did. Those systems did predate, but they were laborious, and much like the hominids in the Rift Valley, largely evolutionary dead-ends. The jeweler type-founders of Mainz (my bet is on Fust!) created a system which is the logical antecedent of what we do today. The Koreans could have, since Hangyul only has 24 characters, but the idea of Chinese wooden type (or the ceramic nonsense) being moveable and reuseable is just that. Trash a type slug, and get a new one. Trash a wooden slug, and carve a new one. It'so wonder that mass printing didn't catch on in China until tey adopted the Western paradigm.

Cheers,

Werner Saemmler-Hindrichs
Antiquariat Hindrichs
Middleburg VA

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