Only the curators of the Morgan go down to the archives. They swap things in and out of display and bring items requested by people who want to see them up to the beautiful Morgan reading room. I came into the reading room to view a Gutenberg Bible, the first book ever printed in the western world. The Morgan owns three copies, more than any other institution in the world. There are only 50 or so copies in existence, and only 12 of those are on vellum. I had a morning to myself with the Morgan’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible on vellum.
Inge Dupont, one of the librarians, brought it up out of the vaults of the Morgan and there it was, in two enormous volumes – Old and New Testament. It was sitting on a trolley, which Inge and her colleague wheeled across the reading room to a desk. Together, they heaved the New Testament up on to a lectern. They handed me a piece of acid-free card with which to turn the pages and asked me to turn them holding the bottom right-hand pages only. Then they left me alone with one of the most valuable books in the world. It was sublime. I felt so lucky. I’d seen a copy on paper in the New York Public Library, but it was behind glass. This civilization-changing beauty was here in my hands.
I stood up to read it. Gutenberg created the Bibles so they could be read in monastery refectories, by lots of monks at the same time, so they tend to be enormous. This one was huge, and the vellum pages were stiff to turn, so I had to be standing above the Bible to turn a page. Standing up also seemed appropriate. When the first Gutenberg Bible to come to the United States arrived in New York, the officers at the Customs House were asked to remove their hats on seeing it, for the privilege of viewing a Gutenberg Bible is available to so few.
As I turned the pages, I was in a vortex, transported to Johannes Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz, Germany, in 1454; to a room in which Gutenberg paced up and down, watched by his investors, helped by his assistants, combining ink and calf’s leather and his new invention, a printing press which held 270 type moulds of letters, to create 180 Bibles, which would begin a revolution in the way we receive and spread information.
Gutenberg worked hard. In fact, I have reason to believe he slept in his workshop, or at least came to work in the clothes he slept in at home. When I visited Harvard’s Natural History Museum’s entomology collection, their curator showed me an ant collected and preserved in vodka at a dinner party hosted by Stalin. When I asked him if he had a favourite item in his collection, he said there was one creature he wished he still had – Gutenberg’s bedbug. He told me how the phone had rung one day and it was the Boston Library, who said, ‘We’ve found a creature in our Gutenberg Bible, can you check it out for us?’ They sent the creature over so the curator could have a good look. He called them back later that day to say, ‘You’ve got a bedbug belonging to Mr Gutenberg.’ He gave the bug back to the library and never saw it again.
Even if Gutenberg did lose a lot of sleep while creating movable type and his Bibles, it was certainly worth it. He invented a new way of communicating, transformed the rate of literacy throughout the western world and started a revolution that remained unprecedented in human culture until the arrival of the internet in our lifetime. Before Gutenberg, the only way to create a book was by hand. In the west, this was the job of monks, who worked in scriptoriums in chilly monasteries. They probably had inky hands, sore backs and, by the end of each day, rather tired eyes. Yet they laboured on, spreading the good word. In the east, a Chinese blacksmith, Pi Sheng, had invented movable type four centuries earlier, but his invention hadn’t been adapted for use by a machine. In China, type was imprinted on the page by hand rubbing, which made the process only slightly more efficient than the copying by a medieval scribe.
When Gutenberg put all the ingredients together, crucially, with the invention of his type mould, and began printing his Bibles, a lot of scribes soon found themselves out of a job. Now, a book could be created more quickly, by machine. This machine could, amazingly at the time, create as many identical copies of the same text as you needed. Suddenly, anyone lucky enough to own a Gutenberg Bible, no matter where they were in the world, could turn to page 20 and read from the same text.
Just imagine the work that went into this one book. For years, Gutenberg toiled in secret in a little hamlet downriver from Strasbourg. He couldn’t risk anyone finding out the techniques he was developing. He shaped each of the 200 or so letters he needed for a Bible out of metal, by hand. Then, using the type mould, he made copies of the letters. They were set into a form, covered with ink made in his workshop and pressed, using a machine he may well have adapted from a wine press, on to either vellum, as with this Bible, or paper. Vellum – calfskin – is more precious than paper, which itself was worth almost as much gold. Gutenberg wanted all his Bibles to be printed on vellum, but it was just too expensive.
The ink shimmers, because it contains metal compounds. It’s set off beautifully by its decoration in rich golds, blues, greens and reds. As soon as a page of the Bible was printed, it was handed over to an illustrator in Gutenberg’s home town who illustrated the initials, and then to another in Bruges who completed the intricate decoration of the Bible’s columns and borders. When the book was complete, it was bound. It came out of the workshop and changed the world. In just 50 years, the number of books printed with movable type went from zero to 20 million.
When, nearly five centuries later, Morgan bought the manuscript of Pudd’nhead Wilson from Mark Twain, the author told Morgan, ‘One of my highest ambitions is gratified – which was to have something of mine placed elbow to elbow with that august company which you have gathered together to remain indestructible in a perishable world.’ This is why the Morgan Library and Museum is so special. The ‘august company’ really is wonderful and each precious work is safe in the quiet vaults below Manhattan. No wonder the muses love this place so much.
[Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913)] Pierpont Morgan was a brilliant financier and an avid collector of rare and precious things. His son J. P. Morgan, Jr gave his father’s extraordinary library to the public in 1924, and now anyone who visits can see a selection of his art, rare books, manuscripts, drawings, prints and ancient artefacts that are on display.
[Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (1398–1468)] Gutenberg invented movable type and so introduced printing to Europe.
[The Morgan Library’s Gutenberg Bible on vellum] I had an afternoon alone with this world treasure, in the reading room of the Morgan Library and Museum.
I ALMOST FORGOT TO LOOK at the moon today.
Those are the words on the first painting I ever chose for myself. I saw it in a little arty café in Cochin, Kerala, India. At the other end of the subcontinent, in Nepal, people think the dead live on the moon. Visiting Apollo astronauts have been asked, ‘When you were on the moon, did you happen to see my auntie?’
Since my trip to the storage facility of the National Air and Space Museum, when I look at the moon I see hundreds of spacesuits, lying quietly in the cold, and two knees, thickly coated in moon dust.
When I visited the museum, the spacesuit storage facility was located, rather appropriately, in Suitland, Maryland. To get there, I took a Metro from central Washington DC and then walked along a highway, melting in the summer heatwave and being hooted at by people who were probably wondering what on earth I was doing there. Eventually, I arrived and was greeted