“The history of the Gutenberg Bible is the subject of considerable scholarly debate. The earliest dated specimens of printing by Gutenberg are papal indulgences (notes given to Christians by the Pope, pardoning their sins) issued in Mainz in 1454.”

“Johannes Gutenberg – inventor, goldsmith – and businessman. Like any good businessman, Gutenberg was constantly on the lookout for market opportunities. He diagnosed the market’s need for mass produced writing. Like any good businessman, Gutenberg borrowed money to research a solution for this gap in the market. He produced the printing press, with innovations in the use of movable metal type. And like any good businessman, he was good at marketing. His first publication was thus the bible, the world’s first, and still greatest, bestseller. But Gutenberg had an eye on where the real money was – Indulgences. Indulgences were rich people’s way of buying forgiveness from God for their sins, and the Church’s way of funding religious wars. Gutenberg wanted to mass produce these indulgences for the Church, in effect a license to print money.”

“Onto this scene came Johannes Gutenberg, a profit-minded goldsmith from Southern Germany. Ben Franklin he was not. His inspiration for the reinvention of movable type (this time cast in metal) was not the betterment of his society, nor the advancement of human knowledge. His motivation was personal profit. He hoped to get rich by printing the Church’s ever-popular indulgences. These handy slips of paper could be bought by a sinner to gain dispensation from any discretion, past or future.

So popular were indulgences that soon Gutenberg was printing up to 200,000 of them in one run.”

All quotes cited here.

I always thought the Bible was one of the drivers for the printing press, but it looks like you’re right that it was indulgences even before that.

So yeah, there’s some irony there.

Of course, you can split a lot of hairs there–the written word and the book predate movable type, so we’re really only crediting indulgences with moving along the production process. And it’s really fiction that I love, more than the generic book (I can love non-fiction books, but it’s much less common), which predated the press, was suppressed for a long time during the primacy of the Church, and then came back much later. And I can live with the irony anyway–kind of like how I love the Internet, even though it started as a military thing. An American military thing, even.