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Travel: Mainz, the home of Gutenberg

The information age began in this ancient town on the Upper Rhine
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With the click of a mouse the 1,200 words in this column leave my home computer screen and two days later reappear in 17,200 copies of Pique Newsmagazine. It's a process we have come to take for granted but it wasn't always that easy to reproduce and spread the printed word. Some of us can remember the days of manual typewriters, whiteout and carbon paper, and the seemingly endless correcting and retyping before a clean copy was ready to be set into type. But even those quaint innovations of the pre-digital era would have seemed like miracles to the scribes of the 15 th century when the only way to reproduce a manuscript was to copy it by hand.

During a recent trip to Europe we stopped in Mainz, the capital of Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany, and visited the Gutenberg World Museum of Printing - a fascinating look back at the beginning of the information age we now live in. Johann Gutenberg, the man credited with starting it all, was born in Mainz around 1400. Not much is known about the man himself except that he trained as a goldsmith and, despite the momentous influence of his invention, spent most of his life on the brink of poverty, and died penniless in 1468.

Gutenberg began dabbling in metal work in the late 1420s and came up with the idea of casting letters into reusable type, but he was too poor to pursue his vision. Then, in 1448 he negotiated a loan of 800 gilders from Johann Fust, a wealthy Mainz entrepreneur. He used the money to build his first press and two years later, after another loan from Fust, he had a fully operational print shop and began cranking out textbooks and a variety of small items such as calendars. But his passion was the production of a bible, a project that soon absorbed all his time, most of his money, and the entire capacity of his shop.

By 1455 Gutenberg had produced 180 copies of his bible - a magnificent book with the text in two 42-line columns, its pages embellished with hand crafted ornamentation and icons. But he was also broke. Fust demanded his money back, Gutenberg had none, and the court awarded all of his assets including his print shop, to Fust in lieu of payment. During his lifetime Gutenberg received neither the financial reward nor the recognition that his invention warranted. A few years before his death he was made a "gentleman of the court," an honor that carried a meager stipend, just barely enough to keep him fed and clothed.

The lower floor of the World Printing Museum includes a working replica of Gutenberg's shop and Klaus, one of the museum curators, gave us a demonstration. Inking the plates, positioning a sheet of paper, and turning the giant wooden screw to press the plate onto the page was a laborious process that took several minutes, but for its day Gutenberg's printing machine was a technical marvel. Previously a scribe, commonly a Monk, might have laboured 20 years with brush and quill pen to produce a single copy of the bible.

Gutenberg's bible, the first substantial book ever printed using movable type, was infinitely faster to produce than the hand-written versions of the day but it was still not cheap. At 30 gilders a copy, the equivalent of three years' wages for the average clerk, there weren't a lot of buyers. Only churches and well-healed monasteries could afford the first few runs but Gutenberg's bible laid the foundation for the mass production of books. As printing costs decreased the world of reading, once the exclusive domain of the clergy and the ruling elite, was thrown open to the rest of society. And with the books came increased literacy, the spread of knowledge, and a shift of power from the church and state to the common people.

On the upper floor of the museum (no cameras allowed) I wandered past an array of primitive but ingenious printing devices and into a small room where one of Gutenberg's original 42-line bibles is displayed in a special humidity-controlled glass case. The book is larger than I imagined - 1,272 large pages bound into a heavy leather cover. After more than half a millennium the print is still crisp and the paper barely yellowed.

I could have spent the entire day in the museum but there is much more to see in Mainz, one of the oldest cities in Germany.

Located at the confluence of the Rhine and Main rivers Mainz sits strategically at the intersection of two ancient trade routes. In 12 BC Emperor Augustus set up a military camp there to use as a base for his invasion of central Europe. After the Romans an English Benedictine Monk, St. Boniface (the Apostle of the Germans), was appointed archbishop of Mainz. Throughout the Middle Ages Mainz was seat of the mighty Arch-Chancellors and Archbishops of the church and capital of the Holy Roman Empire. The French occupied the city briefly in the early 1800s and after WWII it was chosen to be capital of the new state of Rhineland-Palatinate. And Mainz, now a modern industrial city of about 200,000 has, to a remarkable degree, preserved the attitudes and architecture of each group that helped to shape its history.

It's only a short walk from the Gutenberg Museum to the city's magnificent cathedral or Dom. Archbishop Willigis, an arch-chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire laid its foundation stone in 975 AD but the original was repeatedly damaged by fire and with each rebuilding it became larger and more elaborate. Made of bright red sandstone its two-metre-thick walls and six conical towers loom above the half-timbered buildings that crowd around its base just as they did in medieval time. We pushed through the massive bronze doors, entered the somber, dimly lit interior, and waited for our eyes to adjust. Beneath the soaring arch of the roof the pillars of the central nave are adorned with the elaborate grave monuments of bishops and archbishops who are buried there - enduring tributes to the hubris of long forgotten medieval power mongers.

Before returning to our ship we spent several hours wandering the streets of the old city, admiring the mix of old and new buildings and the city's many spacious plazas. At St. Stephan's we popped in to see the church's nine brilliant blue stained glass windows that were designed by Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall when he was in his 90s. In a nearby bookstore I bought an English edition of the History of the Rhine Valley. And of course, no visit to Mainz would be complete without sampling the local wine.

The fertile Mainz basin at the northern end of the Upper Rhine plain is one of the great wine producing regions of the world. From the castles clinging to the tops of hills to the villages clustered beside the river, the banks of the Rhine are draped in vineyards. Mainz is at the very heart of Germany's wine trade and it was not hard to find a well-stocked tavern with a view across the Rhine, a funky old-world ambience and a waiter loaded with advice on which vintage to buy.

As I sipped my glass of Riesling and leafed through my new book I thought again about Gutenberg and how we have come to take his invention for granted. I know, of course, that someone else would have come up with the idea of a printing press if he had not. But here in Mainz, Johann Gutenberg actually made it happen - and I drank a silent toast to the man who gave the world its first printed book.