STEPHAN FUSSEL, Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing, trans. Douglas Martin.

Abstract

STEPHAN FÜSSEL is Professor of Book History in the University of Mainz, the home of Gutenberg and of Western printing, and editor of Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, the leading international journal in the field of early printing. The original Gutenberg und seine Wirkung was published in 1999 with an eye on the (traditional) sexcentenary of its subject's birth in 2000, in which year, not unhappily for Füssel, he was also voted ‘Man of the Millennium’ in several polls. This short book is designed as an easy-going introduction, in the first place for the German general reader, to Gutenberg's invention and its effects down to the Reformation in Germany, with some desultory notes at the end on the ‘On-going media revolution’ of the twenty-first century—electronic ink, digital paper, etc. The discussion is often usefully tied to well-chosen colour plates, all printed on a heavy beige background. There are no notes but an ample list of further reading, much of it newly angled towards the reader of English (with errors: I am credited with an article ‘Incunabula’ in a book which I edited of that title without contributing an essay). Douglas Martin, who has performed other services to Anglophone students of Gutenberg and also typeset this book, supplies a readable and generally reliable translation.