The Gutenberg Press  As you enter the Gutenberg Room you can be fitted with earphones to hear a recorded guided tour. Peter Schoeffer, general manager of the Gutenberg Print Shop, will welcome you. You will be taken back to the city of Mainz, Germany, where the first printing workshop of its kind in the world was founded. You can continue throughout the museum guided every step of the way by the recorded tour tapes.

You may prefer to join a group for a personally guided lecture tour conducted daily by appointment. In the museum you can watch as type is cast using authentic replicas of Gutenberg printing equipment. Within four years after Gutenberg commenced work around 1452, nearly 200 copies of a 1,280-page Bible were completed. At the height of production, six presses were operating with six complete crews. Gutenberg spent an estimated quarter of million dollars on research and development of printing.

Peter Schoeffer was a goldsmith by training, and loyal to Master Gutenberg, who taught him printing.

Hand Casting  Dr. Hinckley is shown casting a letter just as Gutenberg cast the letters to compose the pages of the 42-line Bible.

Type Caster  Louis E. Crandall, Jr. one of the museum's directors demonstrates casting type in a 1450 hand mold.

A good type caster can make two to three pieces of type a minute. In a twelve hour day, he can cast upwards of 2,000 pieces of type. Nearly 70,000 pieces of type where needed to print the Gutenberg Bible. Type had to be set, proofed by the monks from the monastery, and then corrected. When you look at pages from the 42-line Bible you will notice that not only is the text in Latin, but it is full of abbreviations and contractions.

Johannes Gutenberg's work bench  Gutenberg's work bench and hand type caster. Notice the punches and molds he uses to cast metal letters.

The heart of printing is the metal type. Here at Gutenberg's work bench the punches are cut and the matrices are struck. The punch is made from a three-eighths-inch piece of tool steel that is a couple of inches long. The end is made square and polished before the letter is traced on the end, then filled.

Drying Line and Storage Drawers  Once the pages were printed, with the aid of a wooden peal, shown leaning against the wall, the damp pages were draped over the line to dry.

Mr. Crandall is beneath paper-drying line showing you a case where the metal type is stored. Capital letters are located in the upper case, and the small letters in the lower case. Make sure on your visit that you watch Mr. Crandall carefully. Sometimes, just for fun, he puts them in the wrong compartments. Then, he tells the story about how young apprentices who are just learning the type case, in error places the letter "p" in the box where the letter "q" should be. Since type is made and set upside down and backwards, the person distributing the type frequently places them in the wrong box. He believes this is where the phrase "mind your P's and Q's" originated.

For Gutenberg's Bible, once the pages were dry they would be shipped to the monasteries where the double-stroke capital letters at the beginning of sentences were filled in with red ink by the monks. This is called rubrication (you could translate that as 'red'ification. See you do need to know Latin!) The large initial letters and margin designs are then painted by hand. This is called illumination. Each copy of the bible would therefore look slightly different from all others. The purchasing church or monastery would then collate and bind the Bible, usually in two volumes, and it would look like the facsimile displayed in the case.

Ink  As daughter Sarah watches, Dr. Hinckley is shown preparing the ink prior to printing.

Men outside the city walls boiled linseed oil to thicken it to make printer's ink. The ink was oil based and thick to adhere to metal type, and to work on the paper. The oil had to be well aged to make good ink, so it was made in advance. The pigment is ground from oxides of lead and copper. The linseed or nut oil is reduced to half its original volume by boiling. The finely ground oxides and thickened oil along with other ingredients are rubbed together in such proportions as to make black ink of the proper consistency.

Paper  Dr. Thomas Hinckley, printing scholar and technical director of the museum, demonstrates how the paper was positioned in the press. Daughter Sarah is the 'paper boy' who positions the paper.

The paper makers have always spent a great effort in making paper hard and smooth - like sheepskin vellum - so that the scribes' water-soluble ink will print with crisp, not sharp, edges. The paper is dampened so that it is no longer hard and slick. This enables the oil-based ink to be pressed into the paper.

A large sheet of paper is folded in half and two pages are printed on the front and two on the back. These four pages are printed one at a time and must be kept damp until all four pages are printed.

Display Case  Visitors will also view a facsimile reprint of the magnificent Gutenberg Bible. This two-volume facsimile is a truly perfect reproduction of the first Bible ever printed with moveable type.

Credit needs to be given Gutenberg and Peter Schoeffer, his General Manager, for their exacting work. Within fifty years of the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, upwards of 20 million books had been printed in Europe.

Inking the press  Louis E. Crandall, founder of the museum, demonstrates the use of ink balls in the printing process of the world's first printed Bible. Remember the ink was made of boiled linseed oil so that it would adhere to the metal type.

Pressing  Dr. Hinckley pulls the bar. This press, built by Master Gutenberg's friend, Konrad Saspatch, is significantly different from other types of presses. It has a stone upon which the type is mounted. The press was equipped with an inner and outer tympan to hold the paper and packing in place. Packing is used to make minute adjustments in the pressure with which the paper is forced against the inked type. Attached to the tympan, is a frisket overlay, which holds the paper in exact position. Stone, type, frisket, and tympan slide in under the platen. A quarter-turn of the screw creates several hundred pounds of pressure per square inch between the inked type and the dampened paper.