This is a book for Wikipedia editors who are accustomed to beginning discussions of their contributions with "Well, actually...." In other words you could call it "meticulously researched" (as the Storygraph AI summary does), even though words like 'precise' and 'persnickety' were the ones that kept leaping to mind as I read.
But that's not actually a diss! This is also a book for those who are interested in how we know what we think we know about history. As White traces each historical reference that credits (or ignores) Gutenberg's contribution to the invention of movable type, you get a much better sense of the fragility of historical records, and of how our sense of our joint past is created both by the stories we tell one another and by the information we retain or lose as time passes.
The book is also full of fascinating details, like the fact that Johan Fust, Gutenberg's business partner, made the then-largest order of paper in European history to print the (probably) 158 copies of what we now call the Gutenberg Bible. Or that we can tell that 6 different teams of printers working in concert produced that bible, based on differences in ink composition, paper, and the minor printing discrepancies between the various 'quires' of the books of the bible. It was also interesting to learn that the Gutenberg bible was *not* the first widely distributed piece of printed material -- that honour probably goes to a mass of indulgences that Gutenberg printed for the church the year before (that were intended to raise money for a campaign against Muslims after an attack on Cypress).
I found Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books an interesting read, even if I personally have no particular interest in printing, medieval history, or Johannes Gutenberg per se. Recommended for students of any of those subjects, or for those, like me, who sometimes enjoy learning random things.
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