Johannes Gutenberg 1398-1468

God’s World News Biographies
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Lower Editions
Johannes Gutenberg 1398-1468
D
o you have a Bible?
How much do you think
a Bible costs?
a) About as much as lunch for
your family at McDonald’s?
b) About as much as a car?
c) About as much as a candy bar?
Most families did not have
Bibles about 600 years ago. They
cost too much money. That meant
most people never read the Bible.
Long ago, books were copied
by hand—page by page! It took
hours and hours to copy the whole
Bible.
Your dad or your mom would
have had to work for a whole year
to earn enough money to buy a
Bible in those days.
People listened to preachers.
That was the only way to learn
what God said in the Bible.
That made Johannes Gutenberg
unhappy. Johannes was a printer. He
lived in Mainz, Germany. He was
also a goldsmith. He worked with
jewelry and dainty metal objects.
Johannes wanted people to have
their own Bibles. He thought and
thought. Why did Bibles have to
cost so much?
Printers in Johannes’ day used
blocks of wood. They were something like giant rubber stamps.
Careful craftsmen carved letters
into pieces of wood the size of a
whole page. What if they slipped
and made a mistake? They had
to start over with a new block of
wood.
Each page took days of work.
Ink was rolled onto each finished block of wood. A piece of
A German postage stamp show a drawing
of Johannes Gutenberg.
paper was pressed against the
letters. Sometimes that pressing
would break the wood. The carvers
would have to start over again!
Johannes thought it would be
better to use metal than wood. And
he thought it would be better to
make each letter a separate piece.
That way he could use the letters
over and over again. And they
would not break like wood.
Now Mr. Gutenberg’s skill as a
jeweler came in handy. He decided
lead was best metal to use. He
made thousands of little lead letters. Then he used those letters to
print hundreds of Bibles.
Johannes Gutenberg’s invention
made books cost much less. His
skill did not make him very rich.
But it did make him very famous.
The work of Johannes Gutenberg was so important. Some
people even say it makes him the
most important human in a thousand years! —Joel Belz
In the News
Before Johannes Gutenberg’s
invention there were only wood
blocks for printing or pens and
brushes for copying books.
An ongoing work of art is
being displayed online for all
to see. The St. John’s Bible
was commissioned by St.
John’s Abbey and University in
Minnesota. The 2-foot-tall, 3-footwide Bible is being created by
artist Donald Jackson and a team
of assistants. They are using
materials and methods that were
used before the invention of the
printing press.
Ever since he was nine years
old, Donald Jackson loved
to copy ancient writings and
decorate letters. This British artist
grew up and became a worldclass calligrapher—scribe to the
Queen of England.
Mr. Jackson dreamed of making
a handwritten copy of the Bible.
St. John’s agreed to pay for the
work.
Before Mr. Jackson’s team
even begins writing there is
much work to do. Each vellum
sheet of calfskin is scraped and
sanded. Goose feather quills are
prepared. Ink sticks and colors
are ground and mixed. Real
minerals and precious stones are
gathered to color illustrations.
And the writing itself takes
many hours—seven to ten hours
for a page without pictures. A
single drawing often adds many
days of work.
Mr. Jackson plans to complete
his huge project in 2010.
View sample pages from the
St. John’s Bible at
www.saintjohnsbible.org.
An etchings shows a page of type being inked with pads.
Lead is melted and poured into letter molds.
Hundreds of years before Johannes Gutenberg lived libraries were often destroyed during wars.
Many books were lost. But God used monks—men who lived and worked in religious communities—
to help keep his word. Those religious communities were called monasteries. They had special rooms where Bibles were
copied by hand. The task was an important one and only the older and more experienced monks worked at copying God’s
word. When a monk finished copying a page, a second monk would check it over. Thanks to the work of these men, many
copies of God’s word were saved. God has protected his word from generation to generation.
Bible2Life
“I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means
disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” (Matthew 5:18).
Qwisdom Check your reading. Check your thinking. Johannes Gutenberg
1 ___ Johannes Gutenberg’s work as a ________ certainly helped him as he made his
small pieces of metal type. a) surgeon, b) goldsmith, c) weaver.
2 ___ Before Johannes Gutenberg’s work, printing was done using a) etched clay blocks,
b) carved wood blocks, c) cloth soaked in paint.
3 ___ Johannes Gutenberg’s invention a) made books and Bibles more expensive, b) was
slower than hand-copying, c) made it possible for more people to own Bibles.
4 . . . Make a list of the Bibles owned by your family.
For more space, use the back.
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PUZZLING TIMES
Pied Type
If a printer dropped the tiny lead letters that he was
arranging, he was said to have “pied the type.” You might
say the type in this
puzzle is pied. But
you can find 14 key
words. Words may
read across, up,
down, or diagonally.
I
W Q
L
Johannes Gutenberg
COPY
LEAD
PRINTER
MONK
GERMANY
SKILL
GOLDSMITH
PAGE
WOOD
LISTEN
CARVE
LETTERS
INK
QUILL
E T T E R S
X N Z
E C O P Y B F
C Z K
A
T
Y A V
D
Z K X Q G N
L K A Q W
G E R M A N Y U X E
Q D A
V R O J
I
D N X
M E M J
L Q S
I
O X P
R
I
N T E R L
W H T
I
M S D L O G
n
Johannes Gutenberg
L G
T
O T W S K
God’s World News Biographies
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Teaching God’s World News Biographies
Lower edition biographies are meant to be readable for
2nd and 3rd grade students and understandable when
read to children of kindergarten and 1st grade age.
Did you know?
The writer of the Johannes Gutenberg biography is
the founder of GWNews, Joel Belz. He grew up working
around a print shop—one of his father’s business endeavors. Mr. Belz has gathered a fine collection of antique
printing equipment and trays full of metal and wood
moveable type pieces.
I also have printer’s ink in my blood. My grandfather
ran Bishop Printing in Muskegon, Michigan. I worked
my way through a few years of college employed at a
print shop where hand-set type was still in use—the same
method of arranging individual lead letters onto a page
that Gutenberg pioneered.
Students might be surprised to learn that hand-set
moveable type is still in use today in specialized printing.
—Rich Bishop, GWNews Creative Director
your church will ship the Bibles to an organization that
gives them away to those in need.
More:
Students can view sample pages of a Gutenberg Bible at
www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/homepage.html.
A gold mine of information, images, and activities are
provided by the University of Texas at Austin online at
www.hrc.utexas.edu/educator/modules/gutenberg
Qwisdom:
1. b, 2. b, 3. c, 4. Students may be surprised by how many
Bibles are in their homes. Talk about times in history, or
repressive countries today where people would love to
have even a single Bible in their home.
Geography:
Locate Mainz, Germany, on a map of Europe.
Activities:
Look carefully at the different fonts (styles or shapes
of letters) in various printed materials. Headlines show
differences more clearly. Use a magnifying glass to look
at smaller text. The shape of letters in printed work from
Johannes Gutenberg’s time is very different from the type
we read every day.
Rubber stamp kits provide a good example of moveable type. Some toy kits for children have larger letters
that are easier to handle. Time a student to see how long it
takes them to set their name on the stamp kit.
Math: Imagine how much work went into copying an
entire Bible by hand before the use of printing presses.
Time your students as they copy three lines from a Bible.
Do the math to estimate how long it would take them to
copy an entire page. What is the page number of the last
page in your Bible? Imagine how long it would take to
hand-copy that many pages!
Act:
Does your family have an extra Bible? There are people
who cannot afford to buy a Bible. Several organizations,
like The Bible Foundation (www.bf.org) collect and give
away used Bibles. You can search the Internet for an organization to donate to. You could arrange for other families
in your church to collect unused Bibles. Ask a deacon if
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