Problems and Controversy

To further push established beliefs, Gutenberg's claim to being the inventor of printing in the west is well established, however it has not always been so concrete. A story of long ago tells of a man, Lourens Coster in 1440, of Haarlem in Holland, "Occupied himself during an after dinner stroll in the local woods but cutting letters out of tree bark and then put them together on paper for his grandchildren's amusement, and then the story diverges and gets blurred with historical inaccuracies and other fallacies. There are also many other legal and historical issues concerning Gutenberg. (Scholderer 21)


Technical problems. The reason that the invention of the printing press did not come earlier was, 1. Nobody thought of it 2. The nature of Western script, with it's twenty-six alphabetic signs perpetually repeated in various combinations (Scholderer 8) The difference in the Chinese way of printing is that Chinese script, with ideograms, were all of readily manageable size and only recurring once in a while. This being much easier to reproduce than repeating patterns of 26 letters. In his early years, which much is not known, he testified in court about one of his coworkers, but was later reconciled. After some loans that Gutenberg could not pay back for business expenditures that went bad, he decided to move out of Strasbourg. Apparently he was unable to find new sources of money in the area, and even his private resources were likely to have been greatly drained due to his experiments. The last mention of him in the tax records of the time was from March 12, 1444, when he paid excise duty to a guilder on the contents of his wine cellar, which was always well stocked (In 1439 it contained ~420 gallons)(Scholderer 13). In 1449 or 1450 Gutenberg received from Fust a loan of 800 guilders, carrying interest at six percent, to be used in completing his work on his apparatus, this being pledged to Fust as security. After a short period of time, it appeared that 800 guilders were not enough, so Gutenberg applied for a further loan. Fust obviously declined in the offer, but offered instead to advance in Gutenberg another 800 guilders, on the condition of being taken into partnership with them for "the work of the books". Out of desperation Gutenberg agreed. "All went as planned until late in 1455, when Fust sued Gutenberg for the repayment of the loan and the investments, together with interest amounting in all of 2,026 guilders"(Scholderer 14).	To further push established beliefs, Gutenberg's claim to being the inventor of printing in the west is well established, however it has not always been so concrete. A story of long ago tells of a man, Lourens Coster in 1440, of Haarlem in Holland, "Occupied himself during an after dinner stroll in the local woods but cutting letters out of tree bark and then put them together on paper for his grandchildren's amusement, and then the story diverges and gets blurred with historical inaccuracies and other fallacies. There are also many other legal and historical issues concerning Gutenberg. (Scholderer 21)	Nothing was known of his appearance. Most impressions come from an engraving made in 1584, yet some do not believe this was the "real McCoy". One of several mistakes that Gutenberg made in his life, was the fact that he told too many people of his invention and because of that people claimed to have invented it before him and other nonsense, that probably is not true.(Scholderer 19). Also he did not establish himself as the true inventor of the printing press, mostly be not signing or dating anything.