After he died in 1227, his successor, Ögedei Khan, continued conquering, including gaining ground that Genghis Khan had never held. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan had created the largest empire in human history, which stretched from the Pacific coast of Asia west to Persia. The attempt would be prescient it preserved the concept and technique for later years, when more invaders eventually arrived. This prompted the Goryeo government to create its own Tripitaka with woodblock printing, perhaps with the aim of preserving Korean Buddhist identity against invaders. Their part of the story is heavy with innovation in the face of invasion.įirst, in 1087 AD, a group of nomads called the Khitans attempted to invade the Korean peninsula. Meanwhile, imperial imports from China brought these innovations to Korean rulers called the Goryeo (the people for whom Korea is now named), who were crucial to the next steps in printing history. Later efforts would create early movable type-including the successful but inefficient use of ideograms chiseled in wood and a brief, abortive effort to create ceramic characters. Around 971 AD, printers in Zhejiang, China, produced a print of a vast Buddhist canon called the Tripitaka with these carved woodblocks, using 130,000 blocks (one for each page). The first overtures towards printing that began around roughly 800 AD, in China, where early printing techniques involving chiseling an entire page of text into a wood block backwards, applying ink, and printing pages by pressing them against the block. That sentence downplays and misstates what occurred. But a single sentence late in the book nods to a much longer story before that: “Movable type was an 11th-century Chinese invention, refined in Korea in 1230, before meeting conditions in Europe that would allow it to flourish-in Europe, in Gutenberg’s time.” Everything can be traced to this source.”Īt least, this is how the story is rendered in most books, including, for the most part, The Lost Gutenberg. “What the world is to-day,” Twain wrote, “good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source.” Indeed, Gutenberg’s innovation has long been regarded an inflection point in human history-an innovation that opened the door to the Protestant Reformation, Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the advent of widespread education, and a thousand more changes that touch nearly everything we now know. For Davis, Twain’s words were “particularly apt.” “What the world is to-day,” Twain wrote, “good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. It recounts the saga of a single copy of the Gutenberg Bible-one of the several surviving copies of the 450-year-old Bible printed by Johannes Gutenberg, the putative inventor of the printing press, in one of his earliest projects-through a 20th-century journey from auction house to collector to laboratory to archive.ĭavis quotes Mark Twain, who wrote, in 1900, a letter celebrating the opening of the Gutenberg Museum. Davis’s The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book’s Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey, released this March, begins with just that descriptor. If you were Margaret Leslie Davis, the answer would be obvious. If you heard one book called “universally acknowledged as the most important of all printed books,” which do you expect it would be?
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