Gutenburg Rocks My Socks!

On the first day of class I made a menchion of a rant about Gutenburg, so I decided that Here it is! I cannot express my love and apprication for the man who gave us moveable type. I mean at first I really did not think about it much, how books first started, where they came from and all that jazz. I guess my love for Gutenburg and his contributions can be traced back to my five years of German.

One of my German teachers LOVED Gutenburg, he said if it had not been for the famous German the world as we know it would have been altered. And I have to say that after I thought about that comment, it is very true. The printing press came in at the perfect time, if it had not come along then our whole line of technology would be messed up and I for one cannot think of living without my cell phone haha. But also Gutenburg gave the world a chance to read, to have the written word spread. The Bible was the first book that was printed on the printing press, and it is easy to assume that if that had not happened then maybe the views people have on religion would be changed, or not as deeply rooted as they are now.

I got to see one of the few copies of the Gutenburg Bible that still exist. One is on display at the Library of Congress. While I was there I studied that Bible for at least twenty minutes maybe longer. I was of course trying to translate and read the page that the Bible was open to, but I was also looking at the complexity of the letters, how even and perfect they looked for the worlds first printing press. I marvled at the book, at how each letter was shaped, each word spaced perfectly next to the last word. It was amazing that such a primative tool in our eyes can produce such perfection.

As someone who reads all the time, and spends a lot of time reading and looking at printed words and that book at was made hundreads of years ago still looks as perfect as any type I have seen in a book today.

So thank you Gutenburg. Thank you for the gift you have given man kind. You opened up doors that needed to be opened and without those doors we might still be in the dark in more ways then one. Thank you for the gift of the printing press, and for making books easy for normal people to have access to. Don't know who I would be without you, weather I loved to read or not.