From the Renaissance to the Reformation, from the fall of feudalism to the rise of capitalism, from the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, from the way we order our thoughts to what we choose to think about, nothing survived the printing revolution intact. Our world is the world that the printing press has created.
You see, in the Middle Ages, mirrors—especially curved mirrors—were fiendishly difficult to make.
And pilgrim badges—elaborately designed lead or pewter plates with a curved mirror in the middle—were even more difficult to make. But in fifteenth-century Germany, they were in hot demand.
It all goes back to the year 800, when Emperor Charlemagne gifted four holy relics from Jerusalem to the Cathedral in Aachen in modern-day Germany: the swaddling clothes and loin cloth of Jesus, Mary's robe, and the cloth that held John the Baptist's decapitated head. The relics were thought to have miraculous restorative powers. And so, after the Black Death of 1349, they were removed from the Cathedral's golden shrine and put on display for the public once every seven years, attracting tens of thousands of pilgrims from across Christendom.
Soon, the belief developed that a curved mirror could be held up to the relics to capture their miraculous powers and bring them back to the pilgrims' home in whatever far-flung land they hailed from.
Now, the mirror was not a mirror like the ones we're used to today. It was a pilgrim badge and it was one of the few mass-manufactured items of the Middle Ages. They were lucrative products to make. So lucrative, in fact, that the goldsmiths and stamp cutters of Aachen couldn't keep up with the demand.
Enter Johannes Gutenberg. Born around the turn of the fifteenth-century to a wealthy family in Mainz, in modern-day Germany, Gutenberg—whose father was a companion of the ecclesiastical mint—had a background in goldsmithing, coinmaking and metalwork.
Arriving in Strasbourg in 1434, he thought to put his skills to work on a profitable venture: creating badges for the next Aachen Pilgrimage in 1439. There was only one problem: he didn't have the capital to make the badges himself. So he entered into a cooperative with three business partners, each of whom ponied up a portion of the money required for Gutenberg to start producing the mirrors.
But just as the pilgrimage approached and it looked like the inventor was going to make a tidy profit for himself and his business partners, the Black Death struck again. An outbreak of the plague ravaged the Upper Rhine Valley in 1438, postponing the pilgrimage by a year. Gutenberg had already produced a number of the mirrors, but his capital was running out. And so he set his sights on a new venture—one so audacious, so revolutionary that he made his partners sign a contract swearing them to secrecy before he would let them in on it.
In fact, so secret was this project that the only reason we know anything at all about it is because one of the business partne
