The Printing Press: The Invention Built on Debt and Sin

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26:53Robert, we're back from the break, and it is October of 1454. We're in Frankfurt at a diet. A religious meeting of some sort. Yeah, a meeting of the Catholic Church. Not a conclave, but a diet. Yeah. It's not as big as a conclave, I guess. And we're with an Italian bishop named Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. Piccolomini sees something that blows his mind. He sees some preliminary pages from a printed Bible, from what's going to be the Gutenberg Bible. And we know this because he wrote a letter to a cardinal about it. He describes a miraculous man who he encountered, who I hope was Gutenberg, but it could have been somebody who worked with Gutenberg.

27:38We don't know. And he describes for the cardinal what the pages of this Bible were like. Give it to us. He said they were exceedingly clean and correct in their script and without error, which your grace could read effortlessly even without glasses. That means something. I know. I appreciate that. Large print. I learned from numerous witnesses that 158 copies had been completed, although some others say the number is 180. I shall try, if possible, to buy a copy on your behalf and have it brought here. But I fear it will not be possible, both because of the distance and because they say that ready buyers had all been found even before the volumes had been finished.

28:18It's a hit. It's a hit. That seems promising, right? It is wild to think of a guy seeing what's going to be the Gutenberg Bible. Do I remember that you went to see one at the New York Public Library? Yeah, for Planet Money, I went to—it was on display in—they have a special display case. for these kind of things. There's also one at the Morgan Library, I should say. J.P. Morgan bought one. No big surprise. And I recall it was much larger than I thought it was going to be. It was probably the largest Bible I'd ever seen. It looked like one of those giant dictionaries that you have to put on a stand.

28:52And the other thing I remember about it is that the margins were very wide. It was just, it was these columns, these two columns, and the print was that old-fashioned sort of gothic print. Yeah, Germany, very German looking, yeah. It was very orderly, I will say, with these large margins, these very straight columns, and this very dense writing. Was there color in the part that you looked at? Yeah, there were some color that clearly someone had filled in or painted, right? Right, yeah, they actually left blank, like where there would be a big colored first letter at the start of a chapter or a paragraph or something.

29:31They actually didn't print that on the press. They left it to be hand inscribed. I wonder if the scribes were afraid of the printing press and then saw that, in fact, they could do their favorite part. You know, it's no fun to print every little letter, but to make the giant G with the flowers and the colors, they must have loved that. And now they could do 180 of them. Maybe. Maybe Gutenberg was like, no, no, I'm not going to automate your work out of existence. I'm just going to take away the drudgery and leave you to do the creative fun part. It's a compliment. Familiar. Yeah. So you've described the book very well.

30:03It's remarkable how many still exist. There are, I believe, 21 complete copies still in existence, which is a very large percentage given how long ago it was and how it just happened in Europe since then. It shows you how valuable they were. How valuable they were and how special they must have seemed even then, right? One fun business detail about the printing of the book itself, it's referred to typically as the 42-line Gutenberg Bible because there are 42 lines per page. And as you say, it seems quite spacious and like not crammed in. The first few pages, they were actually doing 40 lines a page.

30:40And so presumably they must have figured out like, oh, we could do two more lines per page. And that means less paper, less parchment. That's just profit right there. By the time you get to Revelations, it's tiny, tiny, tiny writing. No, it isn't. So he's cranking them out. Gutenberg is making the Gutenberg Bible. And there's this great detail. So some of the Bibles were printed on parchment, some on paper. And there is a belief, a kind of a theory based, I believe, on the different watermarks on the different pieces of paper, which I love like scholarly work like this. A belief that at some point Gutenberg might have had six different presses going, just kind of a factory, right?

31:20He's becoming a publisher, a printer. And then it feels sudden looking back, but we don't know. Something goes wrong. There's a big problem that's going to happen right now, and that is this. Johann Fust, the guy who put up the money to get the project going. The investor? Decides he wants his money back. We don't know why. There was a fight maybe. Maybe Fust needs the money for something else. But we know that they wound up in court on Thursday, November 6th, 1455. I love court documents. As a reporter, I've always loved them. I covered cops in courts in Bozeman, Montana, 20 many years ago when I started out.

32:03It's amazing because we wouldn't know anything about this, really. Yeah. And there is this one document that describes this whole thing in detail, written by one Ulrich Helmusperger, cleric of the Diocese of Bamberg, notary public and lay judge of the Holy Seed at Mainz by imperial authority, who wrote out this beautiful, detailed document that explains a lot about the first printing press in Europe. The document is called the Helmersberger Notarial Instrument. Notarial Instrument is one beautiful long word in German. And it lays this out kind of as a story. And it starts with Fust's version. It's like a he said, he said.

32:45So Fust tells a story like this. He says, I loaned Gutenberg 800 guilders at 6 % interest. And by the way, I borrowed that money from somebody else at interest. Oh, good job, Fust. Fust, right. He's like private credit, right? He's like, I don't know, Apollo or something in the market today. And then, Foost says, Gutenberg came back to me later and said, actually, I need another 800 guilders. So I loaned him 800 more. Which, remember, is a lot of money at the time. Yes, yes. And now Foost is saying, I want repayment of that 1 ,600 plus interest, which comes to over 2 ,000 guilders. And as you pointed out, like 800 guilders was four houses.

33:28So 2 ,000 is a lot of houses. We don't know why he's demanding the repayment, but it's happening. Gutenberg doesn't show up at the hearing, weirdly. Don't know why, but he wasn't there. But he sends a statement, which somebody reads on his behalf. And Gutenberg disputes a lot of what Fuss says, unsurprisingly. It's quite the court, I guess. He says, okay, yes, that first 800 guilders, that was a loan. But even though the contract might say in the fine print that it's 6 % interest, we actually agreed that I wasn't going to pay interest on that. Not his strongest argument. Not his strongest argument.

34:08Get it in writing, Gutenberg. Come on. The second part is more interesting. He says the part of the money Fuss put up after that, the other 800, that wasn't a loan. That was investment as a partner to share in the profit or loss of the business. In other words, Gutenberg is saying in our language today, he wouldn't have said it this way, that first 800 was debt, but the second 800 was equity. That's the he said, he said. Then, kind of third beat of the document, there is a sworn affidavit from Fust. Remember who was there in the room. In this part, Fust actually seems to back off his original claim a little.

34:41You know, we don't know what was said in the room, but it seems like in the course of the hearing, maybe he reduced his claim. because in this affidavit, he basically says, okay, Gutenberg should go back through his accounts, figure out how much of the money that I gave him actually went into this printing business, and he should pay me back with interest for whatever part of the money did not go into the printing business. If he took my money and spent it on something else, come on, he's got to pay me back with interest for that. So, Robert, actually, we have it in foos words translated into English.

35:12Give it to us. Oh, nice. On the borrowed money which he, Gutenberg, received and did not use for our common undertaking. I demand from him the interest due under the terms of the verdict. And the court basically seems to agree with this, which I have to say seems reasonable, right? It does seem like a very common sense thing. And the court sends Gutenberg back to produce evidence on what he actually spent on the project. I guess they're saying, like, show us your books. And if, in fact, you took his money... Books existed, yeah. The ledgers. Books existed. The codex is the book. And it is a useful technology, but it's been around for a long time at this point.

35:46Otherwise, you've got to use a scroll. Much less convenient. Let me tell you from experience. It's a little bar mitzvah joke. I see. So the court says, Gutenberg, go back, look at your records, pay him with interest for whatever you didn't put into the project. And that's the end of what we know from this document. It ends there, which is interesting given the myth that has arisen around this part of the story. The myth is basically the evil financier Fust drove the noble and brilliant inventor Gutenberg into bankruptcy. Everybody will say they made him go bankrupt. Yeah, just like people talk about private equity and private credit today.

36:25Yeah, fair, fair. And yeah, maybe for similar reasons, right? Like it's a classic villain. Financiers are classic villains. Now, there is no evidence that Gutenberg went bankrupt. And in fact, he kept printing things after this. My favorite is he printed a wall calendar for doctors. Why do doctors need a wall calendar? I'll tell you in the 14-whatever, I think it was 60s or so, mid-1400s, it tells you based on astrology, when is the best time to do your bloodletting for the year? There were bad days and good days. There were bad days and good days to drain the blood of your patients, to help them.

37:03I'm doing it to help them. Of course, he prints some more indulgences, always a good business. He may have printed this giant Latin dictionary. He definitely didn't print anything, as far as we know, as beautiful as the Bible. Maybe because he didn't have access to capital anymore. But he was, you know, he was still in the game. But it is a little sad, right? I mean, right away, the man who invents the most amazing invention in Europe at the time is reduced to, you know, basically running a Kinko's in Harrisburg, right? He's doing calendars. He's doing flyers. This sort of thing. You buy one, get one free.

37:41It doesn't seem as miraculous. It just seems like a little business he has. Yeah. In a way, as a story, you want him to either have wild success or crushing failure. Not personally, not as a human being, but just for narrative purposes. The middle is unsatisfying. One thing that is true is Fust, the lender, I'm not going to call him a banker, but the lender, the financier, seems to have surpassed Gutenberg in the printing business. Well, he's gotten some of the money back and he's going to invest it in something else. And furthermore, and we know this again from like really careful scholarship, I guess, we know that he got some of the types, some of the metal letters that had been in Gutenberg's shop.

38:26Because I guess, you know, you can match the books that he printed with what Gutenberg had printed before. And some of the letters are Gutenberg's letters because they were sort of unique at the time. Yes, because they were sort of unique at the time. That's right. And, you know, maybe – remember that loan was – the original loan was collateralized by the apparatus, right? So maybe these letters are him collecting on the debt. We don't know. But that seems totally plausible to me. He also hires a guy from a Gutenberg shop, this really talented guy. I guess no non-competes then, which is good. It's good for the proliferation of technology.

38:59I suspect the employee walked out with a few letters in his pocket. Right, right. Is that an exclamation mark in your pocket? Are you a tiny bit happy to see me? I don't know if they had the exclamation mark then, actually. Go with the joke. It's a good joke. So this worker's name was Peter Schaefer, I believe it was pronounced. And Fust and Schaefer did great. And maybe Fust was a better businessman than Gutenberg. No idea. Don't know. They started out with this beautiful Psalter, a book of Psalms, you know. And they actually printed it in multiple colors, which must have required, you know, you got to put the same page through multiple times and get the alignment right.

39:36Like, elegant technical work. And as a business move, they do a really clever thing that Gutenberg didn't do. They put their names in the book, just like publishers do today, although at greater length. Robert, read to us what they put in that book. The present book of the Psalms has been fashioned by the artful invention of printing by means of letter forms made without the driving of the pen. And in praise of God, it has been brought faithfully and industriously to completion by Johann Fust, citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schaeffer of Gernsheim. In the year of the Lord, 1457. It's early branding.

40:14They put their name on it. They put their name on it. People are like, you know what I need? I need a Fust. We got to get Fust to do our next book. These guys do great. Right. This book does great. Their business does great. They expand to Paris, which is home of a big university, big book town. They're printing broadsheets. Of course, they're printing indulgences. And they print Bibles. And their Bibles are clearly modeled on the Gutenberg Bible because the words are the same. And you might say, of course, the words are the same. But in the era of the manuscript, right, something as long as a Bible, manuscript meaning people are literally writing out every book by hand, something as long as a Bible, there's always going to be a few little errors, omissions.

40:54You leave out one word, whatever, change an and to a but, and print changes that, right? Print, once you set the press, every book that comes out of that edition is the same. And that is actually a new thing in the world. I mean, it becomes more like the unerring word of God. Even though I know Gutenberg put it together, it has that feel that this is more than the work of man. This is something eternal. I like that. I believe that. So Fust and Schaefer are growing, and printing itself is growing. People who worked with Gutenberg and with Fust and Schaefer go to other towns, set up their shops, and you just see this rapid spread across Europe of printing presses in other German cities, but also in Rome and Venice and Paris and Basel and small towns.

41:42It's just happening fast. So there is the end of the Gutenberg story, of Gutenberg the man. We know that in 1465, when he's around 65 years old, the Archbishop of Mainz gives him this, basically this high status lifetime pension. And we have the formal announcement that proclaimed it. Read us a little of that. From the Archbishop. We will clothe him every year, always like our noble men, and give him our court dress. Also, we grant him 20 bushels of grain and two large barrels of wine for the use of his house, free of duty upon its arrival in Mainz, every year as long as he lives, on condition that he will not sell it or give it away, as has been promised in good faith by Johann Gutenberg himself.

42:28Tax-free wine. Tax-free wine. And that is the happy ending, I guess, that we were looking for in a way, right? Well, that and, you know, schoolchildren don't learn about the Fust printing press. Gutenberg's name, even if he didn't put it on the book itself, is famous. He is one of the greatest inventors of all time. We've got one last idea I want to talk about before the end of the show, which is really, I think, the first moment when you see the printing press transform society. We'll talk about that in just a minute.

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45:55Robert, this last idea, we're doing this kind of epilogue to the show. It's about indulgences. Indulgences, of course, were one of the first things Gutenberg printed, one of the first things Fuston Schaefer printed. And it's really remarkable when you look at the spread of printing across Europe, you see this boom in the indulgence business. Because, like, remember, the church was constrained before by the actual labor of the scribes to write out each receipt for each indulgence. But by 1500, you see a bishop in Sicily paying a publisher to print 130 ,000 indulgences. Do we know if sin went up?

46:39Did people, like, cheat on their spouses more because there were just, like, piles of indulgences? I like that. Or if the price went down, right? I don't know. In a competitive market, the price went down, but there was a monopoly. Around the same time you see near Barcelona, a monastery commissions more than 200 ,000 indulgences. The line is around the block. I actually don't know if there was a monopoly. Maybe different local archbishops were competing. Good question. Don't know. So the printing press itself is enabling this explosion in indulgences, but a backlash is building. A backlash of people who want reform, who want to protest.

47:16And in 1517, Martin Luther, yes, Martin Luther, that Martin Luther, professor, priest in the German town of Wittenberg, I guess it's Wittenberg in German, he decides that the indulgence thing has gone too far. Like it is corrupt. He sees it everywhere. It's all over the place. Yeah. It's too much. And he writes this kind of academic argument in Latin basically against indulgences. You know, famously, his 95 theses, which get posted on the church door. And just posted. He hammered them to the church door. Well, that's the myth. Again, that's the myth. I was actually reading about that. I guess, like, the church door was like the bulletin board and everybody posted everything there, but whatever.

48:00It just sounds better. It does. So his 95 theses, 95 propositions are largely an argument against indulgences. And so I've grabbed a few here for you to read. Give me a couple. All right. We'll skip over some and go to number 32. Two, those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned together with their teachers. Serious? Okay, let's go to 36. Any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt even without indulgence letters. Save your money, bro. He's coming right at them. Yeah. So, yeah. So this, of course, famously, right, is the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

48:41And it's happening, like you could argue, it has been argued, it is happening partly because the invention of the printing press led to this proliferation of indulgences. And if you didn't know what was going to happen next, you might think this would be bad for business for the printers. But no, because first of all, the 95 theses are suddenly reprinted everywhere. Everybody loves a list. This is a very interesting idea. It's very much of the moment. Number 36 will shock you. And really interestingly, in the next few years after this, Luther starts writing a lot, not just in Latin for this kind of academic and religious audience or priestly audience, but he's writing also in German for a much more popular audience.

49:27audience. And in fact, the public goes wild for his work. And it becomes almost like news. Like he writes these short sermons that are just a few pages long and he'll take them to the printer and they'll be out on the streets in a few days. Like it's very dynamic and it's enabled by the printing press. When he's getting going, there's just one printer in Wittenberg. It's a small town. And it's amazing the way Luther keeps complaining about the printer to his friends. At one point, He writes, you would not believe how I regret and how I am disgusted by his work. Writers love complaining about their publishers.

50:03It's too sloppy. He's not promoting my stuff. It's too sloppy. It's too sloppy. He wasn't complaining. Nobody's complaining about the marketing department yet. So he actually invites another printer to come and set up shop in town. And soon, because Luther is this kind of proto bestselling author, there is this little industry of print shops in this small town. so they can just get Luther's stuff out fast. This is like the invention of the media. There's a whole ecosystem developing. People want the newest stuff now. You know, it's a clear line from here all the way to TikTok. So there is now this print industry, this media industry, you could say, if you want to be a little anachronistic, in Wittenberg.

50:43And over the course of Luther's lifetime, it just proliferates. Like, he translates the Bible into German, which is, of course, a big deal historically. In his lifetime, these local printers print over 100 ,000 copies of this German translation of the Bible. And in his lifetime, you know, more broadly in the German-speaking world, printing is proliferating. And something like six or seven million evangelical pamphlets are printed in German throughout the region. It's amazing because it's not just a product. Gutenberg didn't invent something that just fulfilled one need. It created a million needs.

51:23The moment the printing press is there, you don't just want to print one thing, the Bible. You want to print arguments about the Bible and arguments back and competing views of this. And it changes the dynamics of like, well, now you can have more indulgences. Now one random priest can have an audience of millions in a way that is almost unimaginable without the printing press. And if you didn't know how to read, you would have incentive to learn how to read in order to read these things, which creates more demand. Yes. So maybe one idea to land on is like a new technology is a new tool. And what nobody ever knows is how are people going to use that tool?

52:03These guys, Gutenberg thought they were just making a cheaper, more efficient way to make Bibles. They didn't know what else you could print beyond this. And then it goes beyond religion. It changes politics, war, philosophy. Science. Everything. I want to say, as we roll into the credits today, I want to say thank you to the listener who wrote to us to say that whenever he tells his friends about our show, they say, that doesn't sound like you. But it is a nice thought to tell your friends about the show, and we encourage all of our listeners to at least bring someone along. Truly, I am very grateful to anyone who recommends the show to a friend.

52:44If you write to us and tell us that you told a friend, And I will personally write back to you and thank you for whatever that's worth. We're at businesshistoryatpushkin.fm. Our show today was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang, was engineered by Sarah Bruguer. Our video editor is Matt Nielsen. Our showrunner and editor is Ryan Dilley. I'm Jacob Goldstein. And I'm Robert Smith. This is Business History. Thanks for listening. Hey, this is J.R. Martinez, host of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage. Navy Federal Credit Union is celebrating America's 250th anniversary with exclusive$250 offers for new members.

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