Gutenberg and Mainz

Mainz is a city in Germany that is built on the Rhein River. The Rhein is a beautiful river that begins in the mountains of Southern Germany and flows north through the western part of Germany down into the Netherlands and out into the North Sea. In Mainz there is a confluence of the Rhein River and the Main River (pronounced like "mine"), which is the large river running through Frankfurt. Thus it is called Frankfurt Am Main. But in Mainz the two rivers converge and it is an important shipping port. Here is a picture I took of a barge coming up the Rhein and going under the bridge we were walking across.

On Saturday, 7 March, we gathered with several of the other Senior missionaries that are here in Frankfurt and traveled to Mainz. We took the train from Frankfurt for about a forty minute ride west to Mainz and then we walked from the train stop across this bridge over to where the Gutenberg Museum is located in Mainz.

Here is Elder Howlett and some of the senior missionaries waiting to go in to the museum. It was in this city that Johannes Gutenberg was born in about 1400 A.D. He was quite well educated since his father was of a noble heritage. Gutenberg was an inventor, a businessman and an entrepreneur.

Printing up to the time of 1835 A.D. had mostly been done by hand or by carving raised letters or pictures on a board sort of like a large stamp pad, using one stamp per page. It was a very slow way of printing and if one made a mistake on the page, it had to be carved all over again. The Bibles up to that time had been hand copied by munks and it took about three years to do one Bible. Since it took so long to do this, Gutenberg came up with the idea to produce metal letters which could be put in a frame to print a page with moveable type. This allowed the publisher to change letters if there was a mistake made or to print many different pages.

He used the idea of an old wine press for the printing press and came up with a method to secure the type in a frame and hold it in place while they painted the letters with black ink for the printing and then they would press the paper down onto the inked frame for the printing. As you can see here in this picture which we took of a press like his in this museum, it looked something like the printing presses in the 18th and 19th centuries, but this one was not as efficient. However, instead of taking 3 years to make a Bible, he produced 180 Bibles in three years. He couldn't complete books for sale any quicker than that because at that time he could only print in black ink and the customers wanted chapter headings in several colors and some pictures in their Bibles. This all had to be hand painted page by page. Gutenberg would print his pages with space left for the chapter headings and the pictures. Then the books had to be taken to special artists for the colored letters and pictures. But he did come up with the revolutionary idea to make moveable type printing presses then others later expanded on his ideas. Here is a picture of a couple of pages out of one of his Bibles.

There was a famous painting made of Gutenberg about a hundred years after he had died in 1468 A.D. However the lady who was our museum tour guide said that he probably didn't have a beard because it would have gotten in the way when he was using the printing press. Imagine how he would have yelped if his beard kept getting stuck in the press?! What a funny picture that would have been.

During the time we were in Mainz we walked around to a few other places. Below is a photo of a historic church called St. Martin's Dom which was first started in 900 A.D. and has been added onto and improved much since its beginning. If you look closely you can see at the back of the church is a tower of a slightly different achitecture. It was the first part of the church built in 900 A.D. The other parts in front of it were built bit by bit over the succeeding years.

We also visited another historic church called St. Thomas's Cathedral. Here is one photo of the outside of this building. There were many old stone carvings in the walls which were quite ancient, but the most beautiful things, I thought, were the stained glass windows.

From inside, during the day, we can see the contrasting colors in these beautiful stained glass windows. The very pretty shade of blue contrasts so beautifully with pictures depicted of Christ and other scenes in the windows. There were several of these windows all around the cathedral.

There was also a very interesting sculpture of a conglomeration of characters put together in this sculpture below. We didn't have time to stand and study all the different characters in this large statue or whatever you would call it, but it made a nice center piece in a main plaza in the city. You can see Elder Howlett here in front of it, and a car that decided to drive in front of him just as I took the picture. Oh well.




It was a long day, but fun to be with many of our missionary friends.