{"product_id":"the-press-that-changed-the-world-gutenberg-and-the-first-printed-bible-western-germany-mainz-1454-9798259242340","title":"The Press That Changed the World: Gutenberg and the First Printed Bible Western Germany, Mainz 1454","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): Michael McGilbourne\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: Historical - Renaissance\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eGutenberg and the First Printed Bible Western Germany, Mainz 1454\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eYou are the end point of an unbroken chain of survival.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEvery person who came before you - through plague, war, famine, and flood - lived long enough to pass forward what was necessary for you to exist. You did not begin when you were born. You began when humanity began.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEverything that happened between that beginning and this moment is not the past in any abstract sense. \u003cb\u003eIt is the story of the making of you.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis book takes you to one of the most extraordinary moments in that story.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eMainz, Germany. 1454.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSix wooden presses behind closed shutters. Twenty men working in secret. One hundred and eighty Bibles being made at once, in a city that has never made more than one Bible at a time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA single page contains roughly 2,500 pieces of cast metal - and every one of them was poured by hand, by a single man, in a single cellar, one letter at a time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe arguments about what was actually invented in Mainz have never stopped.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Hand That Set the Word Free\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e asks what it would have meant to be inside that moment.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNot as Gutenberg. Not as the moneylender who ruined him. But as the ordinary witness - \u003ci\u003ea Benedictine novice\u003c\/i\u003e who had spent seven years learning to copy Scripture by hand, and who watched, in a single winter, the craft his master had given his life to begin to end.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhat is a letter when it can be made a thousand times?\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhat is a scribe when his work no longer needs him?\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhat is the Word when every hand can hold it?\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAnd what does a young man do when the vocation he was raised for is dying - and the new world has not yet decided whether it has a place for him?\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe facts are extraordinary enough.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Gutenberg Bible was printed between 1452 and 1455. Roughly \u003cb\u003e180 copies\u003c\/b\u003e were made.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e49 survive today. 21 are complete.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA handwritten Bible took \u003ci\u003eone scribe\u003c\/i\u003e up to three years. The Mainz workshop produced the same book \u003ci\u003eforty times faster.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAeneas Silvius Piccolomini - the future Pope Pius II - wrote in March 1455 that he had seen sheets at Frankfurt Fair. They were already sold out.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn November of that same year, Gutenberg lost the workshop, the presses, and the unfinished Bibles in a lawsuit. \u003cb\u003eHe died in 1468 in obscurity. No one knows where he is buried.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe press did not need him. It never had.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHistory is not a sequence of dates. It is the record of billions of lives lived forward through a present that was, to each of them, as urgent and full of small irreplaceable moments as your own.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey were curious about the same things we are curious about. \u003cb\u003eThey made something that is still asking us questions.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFor homeschooling families: \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou are already doing the most important thing - putting the story of humanity directly into your children's hands. The Beyond His Story We Stand series was written for you. Each book takes one moment in human history and makes it lived rather than memorised, felt rather than filed away. Not a textbook. Not a syllabus. \u003cb\u003eA story your child will not want to put down\u003c\/b\u003e - and that will leave them asking the questions that no curriculum can generate for them. The questions that only wonder produces.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Hand That Set the Word Free\u003c\/i\u003e - a volume of the \u003cb\u003eBeyond His Story We Stand\u003c\/b\u003e series. A chronological journey through human history, told through the eyes of the people official history forgot to record.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe press lived. The inventor was broken.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Word reached hands it had never reached before.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eHistory was made by the hands that shaped the letters that kings could not silence.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Independently Published","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":47883179425943,"sku":"9798259242340","price":1267.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9798259242340.webp?v=1781100009","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/the-press-that-changed-the-world-gutenberg-and-the-first-printed-bible-western-germany-mainz-1454-9798259242340","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}