Evening star., 1940-06-09
Cities in War Area
At Present Share
In Distinction
By Douglas McMurtrie.

years ago JOIdIln Gutenberg H.
vented the art of printing with
movable types.
In these two communities, now
on opposite sides of the Siegfried-
Maginot Lines, was brought into
being the very process that makes
1t possible for you to read today
what is printed on this page.
Although the event is being hon.
ored alike by friend, foe and neutral
throughout the civilized world,
the least of the 5O0th anniversary
celebrations are taking place in the
very communities which saw the
birth of printing.
The populations remaining in
those cities have been momentarily
expecting a grim barrage of shell
fire Both cities have been Smoth-
cred under sand bags as AFRAID
precautions. Food ration cards have
been the order of the day and black
outs the order of the night.
Cabled attempts to get new photo
graphs of the reconstruction of the
Gutenberg workshop in Mainz, ac-
cording to my information as chair
man in charge of the 500th ami
versary celebration for the Inter-
national Association of Printing
House Craftsman, have met with
reply that the workshop has been
dismantled and stored piece by piece
In bomb-proof cellars,
1t is paradoXical that from this
locality, present-day scene of fear
and privation in war, came the in
vention that has contributed more
than any one factor to the spread
of knowledge and to the progress of
civilization.
AS the result of the invention of
printing, it has been possible to pre-
serve the best thought of the past
and present to be passed on to flu
ture generations in books. maga-
zines. and newspapers such as the
one you are reading.
Power Shown.
The power of the printed word
Is evidenced today in several coun-
tries of the world-but in the re-
verse direction. 1t has been clearly
demonstrated that when a ruler
desires to subjugate people, he
must first throttle the printing press.
Had the 13 original colonies been
without the advantages of the
printing press, the cryStallization of
public opinion which resulted in the
unanimous demand for independ-
ence might never have taken place.
To evaluate more vividly the i'm
portance of the invention of print
ing, it is we'll to take a glance at
the early forms of writing that led
up to the invention of movable
types as we know them today.
Men in the inconceivably remote
past were able to communicate with
each other only by grunts, supple
mented no doubt by a kind of sign
language or gestures. But grunts
and gestures were not adequate as
a means of expression for the grow
Ing human spirit. Somewhere in
the dim prehistoric past, man began
to resort to drawings or pictures
to express himself.
This was undoubtedly the first
effort to make thought of feeling
visible In lasting form The paleo-
lithic cave dwellers of Europe have
left us such draWings-or shorthand
sketches of birds and beasts and men
on the walls of their caves. They
are quite intelligible as meaning
goat or mammoth" or men" :"
Quite unconsciously. without knowing
what mighty power they were un-
leashlng, these early cave men made
a beginning Of writing with these
crude pictures.
Later the pictures evolved into a
series OF symbols which in time be-
came a crude alphabet. Each of
the symbols came to have a definite
phonetic value. The Greeks named
their highly developed set of SYM
bols the alphabet from their first
two letters Alpha" and Beta" We
know them today as "a and "B."
Period of Parchment.
The early Egyptians used papyrus
as their material on which to write,
but parchment or the skin of calves
and goats succeeded papyrus as a
writing material. Parchment was
the principal writing material in
Europe by the end of the 4th CEN
tury AID. A writing material less
costly and unWieldly was needed to
give printing its initial impetus. That
material was paper, which had been
invented in China in los AID.
Paper did not find its way from
China to Europe for a thousand
years. Its advance in favor in Eu-
rope was painfully slow, but by the
time of the invention of printing,
there were paper mills in all sections
Of Europe.
The Chinese also gave the world
the art Of printing from wood blocks,
which had also became known in
Europe by the time of Gutenberg s
invention of printing. BY this
process, the Chinese cut out an en-
tire page of text or pictures on a
wooden Mock, carving away all the
sections N the block not to appear
on the paper. They next Smeared
water color ink on the block, laid
on a sheet of paper and rubbed it
down, thus transferring the image
on the block to the paper. Because
of the thousands of 5yr1bols in the
Chinese language, it was more prac-
tical for the Chinese to carve out
an entire page of text and discard
1t after using it, than it was for
them to cut series of so many in
dividual letters in movable types
There is also evidence that the
Chinese produced movable types, but
they did not meet the requirements
Of their language. There is no evil
dence, however, that knowledge OF
this early attempt reached Europe
With fewer symbols or letters in
the alphabet, another factor that
made the time ripe for the invention
Of printing with movable type in