Unique Names   There are a couple of unique first names in the news worth discussing. I’ve been aware for some time, maybe you have too, that a certain Mrs. Winfrey wanted to name her daughter after a biblical figure in the Book of Ruth named Orpah, but somehow either she, the doctor, or the office writing out the birth certificate got it wrong and transposed it to Oprah, and the rest is history.

A reversal of sounds like this is called metathesis (muh-TA-thuh-sis), and it’s really quite common. It can happen between adjacent sounds, sounds located further apart within a word, or even between words. I remember as a child I was never sure if the word was “only” or “olny”, as both sounded pretty good to me, until I forced myself to remember to both say and write “only”.

Sometimes metatheses are humorous, but metathesis is a valid basis for language change. Here’s an example in Spanish. Notice the placement of the R and L in English “miracle”, French “miracle”, Italian “miracolo”. You can use examples like these to determine the original basis of the word. Then you see the Spanish version “milagro”. Aside from the fact that the C changed in Spanish to a G, the traditional standard still seen in the other languages of R followed later by L metathesized to L followed later by R, and became the standard for the Spanish word.

Of course, there can be a great potential for humor when metathesis occurs. A famous one goes back to the radio announcer Harry Von Zell, who later on regularly announced for the Burns and Allen radio and TV shows. Early in his career, he went down in the books for announcing on national radio: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States, Hoobert Heever”. Actually, I suppose most accurately that that’s a metathesis, along with the loss of an R.

Another first name in the news has an Italian basis. When reading about this name in the Times, a reference was made to its oddity similar to the name Oprah, but the explanation was not included, so off to Google I went. I’ll extend somewhat what I found.

You know the Italian word “dolce” (DOL-chay), meaning “sweet”, because of two common expressions, both of which, curiously, involve high living. The expression “la dolce vita”, the sweet life, derives from the film of the same name, and also “dolce far niente”, “sweet doing nothing”, is used to describe relaxed living, as in “a dolce far niente lifestyle”.

The noun form is “dolcezza” (dol-CHETT-sa), “sweetness”. I was aware that there was a musical term “con brio”, “with liveliness”, and I’ve now learned of another musical term, “con dolcezza”, “with sweetness”, meaning a passage is to be played sweetly.

A certain piano teacher named Mrs. Rice, well familiar with Italian musical terms, took the term con dolcezza and, in a joyous burst of double consonants, purposely altered it to name her daughter Condoleezza. Personally, in her place I’d have spelled it Condoliza.

It is of further interest to note that both these very interesting names belong to extremely prominent black women.

Brooklyn Technical High School   I’ve discussed in the past the Master’s Degree studies Beverly and I did at Middlebury (where we met), and then Mainz, in 1961-1962 and also the doctoral work we did at Middlebury in 1975-1980. I’ve also mentioned additional miscellaneous language studies we did in Pau, Vienna, and elsewhere. Before that, Beverly was educated in the Bloomington (MN) public schools and at the University of Minnesota, and I was a product entirely of the New York City public education system, with college work done at Queens College of the City University of New York.

I’m glad that in my early schooling, I was able to benefit from enriched classes. In 1948, on entering fourth grade, I was told that I would be going to another school that had enriched classes, called Advanced Reading classes, and I went to AR4, AR5, and AR6.

I do not approve of “skipping” students, just as I don’t approve of tearing out a chapter in the middle of a novel and having people read around it, trying to figure out what they missed. My Junior High was part of a program that involved a responsible solution for accommodating bright students. Many of us from the AR classes were put in the SP (Special Progress) class in Junior High, where three years were neatly covered in two. In SP7, in all subjects, we covered the entire seventh grade curriculum, then the first half of the eighth. We then all moved directly to SP9, where we finished the eighth and did the whole ninth grade curriculum. Our group thus covered three grades’ work in the academic years beginning in 1951 and 1952. I don’t know if this is done similarly today, since it may be up to local option.

The New York City public school system is the largest in the country. There are over 300 high schools alone. They vary from your average high school to ones who emphasize various fields, such as finance, or nursing, and also include Special Ed and Alternative schools.

But there remains very clearly a commitment to excellence in the Specialized High Schools, of which there are eight very highly selective schools, which choose students citywide. The three original ones are best known (I’ll discuss this elite triumvirate momentarily) and four more have been added in more recent years. All seven of these schools are referred to as the “exam schools”, because applicants have to pass a rigorous city-wide entrance exam.

The eighth of the Specialized schools has a long name, since it combined two earlier separate schools. The LaGuardia HS of Music & Art and Performing Arts, located at Lincoln Center, is uniquely not an exam school as above, but has its own stringent requirements, since students have to audition for entrance. It’s the only public high school in the world offering a complete program in academics plus professional-level training in the arts. Graduates include Al Pacino and Liza Minelli.

The three original, therefore oldest, best-known, and possibly most academically rigorous of the elite schools are, as it turns out, all science-oriented.

Stuyvesant HS (1904), “Stuy”, is the oldest. Its latest incarnation is located here in Battery Park City, walkable from me. Frank McCourt, who wrote the autobiographies “Angela’s Ashes” and “’Tis”, after first teaching elsewhere in the City, taught English and Creative Writing for many years at Stuyvesant. It was in the Times last month that he got together at Stuy with a number of former students, some of whom became writers themselves, in order to promote his third and presumably last autobiographical book called “Teacher Man”, whose name is self-explanatory. Apparently, McCourt likes trilogies as well as I do.

The Bronx HS of Science (1938), “Bronx Science” or just “Science”, has more Nobel laureates among its alumni, seven, than any other public high school in the world. It also has five Pulitzer Prize winners among its alumni. When Beverly retired in 1991, and I still had one year to go, we decided that she should apply to Bronx Science for a one-year opening for a German teacher that we had found out they had, and she was, I’m very proud to say, accepted to teach German at Bronx Science. However, early into that summer, we rethought the situation, and she cancelled her application, which, as things developed later medically, was for the best.

Brooklyn Technical HS (1922), “Brooklyn Tech” or just “Tech”, is the one of these three science-oriented schools that is obviously more oriented toward engineering and technology. It is the one I chose.

In October, when the entrance exam for all seven schools was given for this year, the Times listed the cutoff points for acceptance to each school. Stuy had the highest cutoff point, then Science, then Tech, then the others. I’ve now learned that this skewing is due to the fact that Tech takes in a larger incoming group, which lowers the average.

When I took the entrance exam in 1953, each of the three schools had its own exam. I remember deciding to not take the exam for Science for two reasons. The location of the school way in the North Bronx was just to far to travel by public transportation, but, because of the name, it just sounded like more science than I wanted to study. But I traveled to Stuy, then on 15th Street in Manhattan, and to Tech, still located near downtown Brooklyn, to take what was then their separate tests, and I was accepted at both schools. So what made me pick Tech over Stuy? I’ve been pondering that lately. As I think back on the situation, two thoughts emerge. One, viewed in retrospect, is the foolish thinking of a 13-year old that, if you’re going to have to travel for an hour by a bus and two subways one way across the city to either school, if both places look distant and forebidding, and if going to Stuy means venturing alone into the unknown, but going to Tech means being able to have the familiar face of a friend from one’s 9SP class who’s also going there, then that’s why I chose Tech. But as I think in retrospect, a more valid reason comes back to me, one that I’d really forgotten over the years. I never really knew until years later what career choice to make. It only now comes back to me that, on trying to decide on a high school for me, we decided at home that, being so in a quandry, maybe technology could be a lucrative field to go into. Although I didn’t, and later changed to the liberal arts component of my studies, I know I did the right thing.

[When we were married, I worked for the first year as a German and French translator for American Express, then on lower Broadway. Then I applied to the Harvard Linguistics Department for graduate study, and was accepted, with a small scholarship. But Beverly and I then thought better about an out-of-town move to Cambridge/Boston and I went to study instead at the Linguistics Department here in NYC at Columbia. During that second year, I decided to go into teaching, since I had Beverly at that point as a role model, switched to Columbia’s Teacher’s College for the rest of that year, and in 1964 started a 28-year career at John Jay HS & JHS in Westchester.]

I suppose you could say, the names did it: the word “Science” in that school’s name was for me a turnoff, the word “Tech” in that school’s name began to sound like an interesting field, and the name “Stuyvesant”, prestigious as it was, didn’t offer any guidance one way or the other.

As it turns out Tech’s language requirement, for either German or French, was scary, and the same friend, whose parents were from Germany, was choosing German, so, I thought, who knows, maybe he could help me with my homework. Therefore, for the most trivial of reasons, I started my study of German. I loved every minute of the very full program of both liberal arts and technology at Tech, but obviously I turned to the liberal arts afterward as a career choice. If I had chosen Stuy, would I have fallen that easily into a German class without the impetus of that friend? Eight years later would I have met Beverly in a German-speaking milieu at Middlebury? If not for that language requirement existing at all, would I have ended up building bridges today? (Actually, I’d have found Industrial Design or Architecture more interesting.) Both the world and life turn on such otherwise trivial decisions.

The curriculum at Tech was demanding, challenging, and filled your day. You found next to no free time in the school day, and were glad going home on the subway to be able to get a lot of homework done, either reading or writing. As I said, the one-way hourlong trip from Queens to Brooklyn Tech involved a bus and two subways.

There was, however, a scheduling problem in those years. The very full Tech curriculum covered the four years (actually, eight semesters) of grades nine through twelve, and was designed for students coming from the eighth grade. Students who’d had ninth grade somewhere else—even if it was the enriched 9SP—just hadn’t covered some required Tech ninth grade coursework. The problem was resolved by doing two things. First, if you’d had ninth grade elsewhere, you could not finish Tech in three more years (six semesters). You needed to stay on another semester, for a total of 3 ½ years, and graduate in January. In addition, in one of your first semesters at Tech, after a rigorous eight-period day, you had to take the infamous “ninth & tenth”, two additional periods at the end of the day, until about 5 PM, to help you catch what you’d missed of the Tech curriculum.

Most often, someone graduating in January implies having failed some coursework somewhere, but at Tech, for a large group of students, it was the normal thing. That means for me and my group, our HS years weren’t only the three academic years starting in 1953-4-5, that last semester started in 1956 to January 1957. That threw my four years at Queens College off schedule, so that I graduated there in January 1961, and worked for the half year until meeting Beverly that summer for DeCoppet & Doremus, a now-defunct brokerage house directly on Wall Street.

The academic curriculum of the College Prep Course was very full, with required subjects being the norm (the only choice was between either two or three years of language), English, Social Studies, Language, Phys Ed, Chemistry, Physics, all sorts of math: advanced algebra, plane geometry, solid geometry. They also do the Calculus today, which I didn’t get to until Queens College. They did freehand drawing, and plenty of mechanical drawing. There was a two-semester course called Industrial Processes, so I now know you can make steel in an open-hearth furnace or in a Bessemer converter. You can also imagine how much fun teenage boys had with a course whose name was regularly shortened to “I.P.”.

There is something else that I remember fondly that has been reduced in the curriculum nowadays. I find myself surprised on how positively I look back on the many required shop classes. There are fewer of these today, but we had a semester of wood shop, and I came home with a wooden lamp; we had sheet-metal shop, learning how to fold sheet metal in the big folding machines. I came hope with a sheet metal lamp that semester. We had machine shop, learning to run big metal-cutting lathes, and I still have the nail-set tool we made. It may surprise that we had foundry shop. There was a big foundry in the building, with dark-gray packed sand on the floor. You’d take a wooden block in some shape, say a star, set it on the floor, put a topless and bottomless metal frame around it, and shovel sand into the form, packing it firmly. You then flipped the form over, like an upside-down cake, gently removed the wooden block and poured molten metal into the mold. It would soon solidify, and you’d break down the mold, plunge the metal casting into water to cool it, and go get graded by the teacher for that period’s work.

There was also a semester of printing shop, under the title of Printing Technology. That experience was so significant for me that I’m going to discuss that separately in the next section on Gutenberg.

I’m mentioning these things to show the variety of coursework we did at Tech. You’d go from advanced algebra to foundry shop to history to mechanical drawing to language, for an incredible variety of experience. Although the online listing of curriculum includes contemporary things like computer lab and mechanical drawing by AUTOCAD, there seems to be less in the way of this hands-on experience. Although I never continued with engineering, I appreciate this hands-on experience I had, intermingled with all the academic work.

A sign, beyond my plunging into German studies, that I was going to be moving out of technology and into the liberal arts was the fact that I did get involved with Horizons, the Tech literary magazine. Mostly I was just helping out, expecting those talented in writing to make the actual contributions, but once, on a whim, I submitted two short stories I wrote for the occasion. At least my mind’s eye (that liar) pictures two stories. No one was shocked more than I when one was published that semester in Horizons. I have searched up and down, and don’t seem to have a copy of the story or the magazine, but I remember it was just one page long and dealt with World War One soldiers in the trenches finding out that the Armistice had just been signed. Even though I knew no French at the time, I clearly remember using toward the end of the story the phrase “sacré bleu”. Even though I have said many times that what I write is factual, and that I write no fiction, I am now caught in a lie. The very first thing I ever wrote that got published was a page of fiction. But not since.

German and French were the only languages offered at Tech in the Fifties. I’d heard a rumor over the years that German was no longer offered, but I didn’t check, because I didn’t want to believe it, but recently I bit the bullet, as it were, and checked online. It’s true, and it’s like a knife through the heart. The languages offered today are French, Spanish, Italian, and, surprisingly, Chinese.

You will have noticed that I’ve been saying “the guys”. It was in those years an all-boys school, but I had heard it was now coed. I read that girls were first admitted in 1972, and now form 43% of the student body.

In the Fifties there were 6,000 students at Tech. In recent years, though, the average seems to be down to the area of 4,500 or less. That’s a student body only ¾ the size of the one I knew. Yet Tech is reportedly the sixth-largest high school in the US.

I do not favor an all-male or all-female atmosphere, and am for coeducation, but I have to say that there was a certain degree of comeraderie in an all-boys school. Typical of that was that everyone used last names. People I knew were Coppola, Sabbatino, Springer, Schwartz, Shevchenko, Dudkewitz. It may surprise that even the teachers, both male and female, did this in class. There could have been guys you called by last name, but that you didn’t know very well, and whose first names you might not even be sure of. You’d usually use the whole last name, but among themselves, students would shorten longer ones. For all those years, I was more often than not called DiNap. Looking in my yearbook, I saw that Sabbatino signed one picture of his with his first name, but another picture as “Sabby”.

Not surprisingly, the Tech auditorium seated 3,000, and, with a student body of 6,000, any assembly was held twice. Usually, there’d be some speaker for a half hour on a technical subject, or the screen would come down to see a film. I remember one film on steel-making, and another on car designs “of the future”. It’s discomforting to think that the car designs—and the future—they were referring to have all come and gone by now.

Assembly topics were never announced in advance; you just found out when you got there. Once each semester there was a treat, and I remember it fondly all these years later. On that day, the house lights would dim—what, another film?—the huge curtain would suddenly be floodlit, and you’d hear muffled sounds coming from behind the curtain. At this point, everyone knew to get excited. The massive floodlit curtain would slowly rise and the sounds escaping from underneath it would suddenly become recognizable as “Deep Purple”, the themesong of the school band. These performances were always very well received. It was a bit odd being entertained so early in the morning, with a whole day’s work ahead, but it was a well-enjoyed pleasure. After a half-hour, without warning, they’d start playing “Deep Purple” again, and down would come the curtain, gradually muffling out the music until next semester.

The school song we sang to start each assembly also comes back to me, but even at the time, the first line “Tech, Alma Mater, Molder of Men!” seemed a bit too serious. I liked the third line “Loyal we stand, now six thousand strong”, but the song has now been changed, given the advent of coeducation and the reduction in size of the student body.

In researching Tech, I now find out why I hadn’t heard anything from them since 1957. There were pages on the website of “lost alumni”, by year, and there was I, among many others for that year. I promptly filled out an online bio form and also joined the Alumni Association. I now find out that there is a Homecoming every spring for Tech Alumni, and as part of that, classes with major anniversaries have a reunion as part of Homecoming. In other words, reunions are done, not privately by graduates, but through the school’s official Alumni Association. They now even have an alumni office right in the building. Homecoming 2007 should include my Fiftieth Reunion. At Beverly’s Fiftieth this summer, because of frequent attendance I knew not only our circle of friends, but even others. It will be strange at my Reunion not having seen people for a half-century.

There are no longer January graduations, but I asked the alumni office, and they told me that in January 1957 I was one of 238 graduates. In June 1957 there were 968 more, for a combined 1957 Class of 1206. A quick calculation shows a precise 20% to 80% breakdown, which supports my explanation of the 3 ½-year course of study in those years. But I also laboriously counted the “lost alumni” for 1957. Aside from me there still remain 772, or 64% of the combined 1957 class. Before the Alumni Association was formed roughly 25 years ago, no attempt was made by Tech to keep in touch, which is why there is so much catching up to do. Also, since students come from all five boroughs, there is the natural dispersal factor.

One more thing about the Tech years. The same friend that I went to Tech from Junior High with, the one that I started German with, was the one that precipitated my first European trip that summer of 1957 (Reflections 2004 Series 24). He and his family crossed every year on the original Queen Elizabeth, for both business and pleasure. In retrospect now, I see the Tech years as one of two major turning points of my school years. Consider this: I started language studies (German) at Tech; I went to Europe the first time that summer with my Tech friend’s family; I had my first writing published at Tech. Aren’t those the three elements leading to being the essayist for this Travelanguist website? The languages mushroomed later on, and as for travel, just as my friend’s family regularly crossed the Atlantic to Europe by ship, I maintain a Euramerican outlook, also crossing regularly by ship.

Following the Tech turning point, I view the years at Queens College a transitional time, even though I enjoyed it there, and started Spanish there. The second big turning point was of course graduate study with Beverly at Middlebury and Mainz.

But it’s been almost a half-century since anyone seriously called me DiNap.

Gutenberg & Mainz   Now who was Gutenberg again? He invented the printing press, right?—Wrong.

To talk about Johannes Gutenberg, I’d like to tie together 1) our experience living in Mainz and studying at the university, 2) printing in general and Gutenberg’s incredible—yet incredibly simple-- contribution to it, and 3) my own printing experiences at Brooklyn Tech. Obviously it’ll be a broad portrait I’ll be painting, but connecting Tech with Middlebury and Mainz might be of interest. (Note that Mainz rhymes with Giants.)

After the summer in Middlebury, some two dozen students made their way to Mainz for a year’s study (1961-1962) at Middlebury’s program at the university there. I was booked on the Liberté of the French Line; Beverly had booked on the SS United States, but changed to the Liberté. She always joked that she never got to travel on the United States because of me. After ten wonderful, but chilly, October days in Paris, off we were on the train to Mainz. Beverly and Rita, and I, located in the very near suburb of Mainz-Gonsenheim. The two of them at first got a room over a butcher shop, with an outdoor toilet, which was totally inadequate. The promptly relocated in the same villa at Lennebergstrasse 20 where I had a room on the top floor, and they shared one on the main floor. It was still a time of our having to buy charcoal briquettes to heat the rooms via potbelly stoves. We lived very frugally, but enjoyed ourselves. We participated in the Fasching, or Karneval, celebrations (Mardi Gras), for which Mainz is particularly famous. Also that year our group put on an Amerikanischer Abend/American Evening. I clearly remember a number of us, including Beverly and me, performing square dances, and I remember the evening closing with the whole group singing a rousing, and loud, rendition of “Oklahoma”. Just picture our group singing “O-O-O-O-Oklahoma, where the wind goes sweeping down the plains” in a totally Mainz environment. My mind’s eye is fuzzy (and it’s a known liar, anyway) as to the details of where we put on the show and exactly who the audience was, but we did have fun. The first year or so after we got married, Beverly and I would go square dancing here in suburban Westchester County about once a week.

Mainz, founded by the Romans (as Moguntiacum), was celebrating its 2000th anniversary that year. Online research shows that Gonsenheim, which became part of Mainz only in 1938 and remains its biggest suburb, has a history even older than that (which we were totally unaware of when we lived there), going back to the New Stone Age years of 2800-2400 BC. (Stonehenge, 2500-2000 BC, is slightly younger.)

Time perceptions are funny. When we were in Mainz, it was only sixteen years after the end of World War Two, yet that time seemed so very far in the past. The fact that there were still considerable ruins in the center of town and that the cathedral was still being repaired didn’t alter this feeling. Beverly and I went back many times since, and Mainz is so very different; long since rebuilt, lots of modern buildings, pedestrian zones all over, a new Hilton on the Rhine, a bypass Autobahn called the Mainzer Ring, going right across Lennebergstrasse just down from our villa, an expanded and modernized university. So much is improved, yet we felt things were so improved way back then. Mainz is across the Rhine from Wiesbaden and a half-hour from Frankfurt. Nowadays both Wiesbaden and Mainz are outer stations on the Frankfurt S-Bahn (suburban railway).

That Christmas Beverly and I went to her relatives in Sweden and got engaged. The relatives had assumed at first that I was German and that Beverly had met me there. I’ll be filling in more information on that holiday period in an upcoming essay. We bought our wedding bands in Mainz in a little jewelry store that’s still there on the corner of Klarastrasse and Grosse Bleiche. We flew home in the summer of 1962 via New York to Minneapolis to get married. Beverly had flown before, but that was my very first flight ever.

The University of Mainz was founded in 1477 in the center of the Old City. Its beautiful Baroque building, now known as the Alte Universität/Old University was being repaired the year we were there, and some courses are given now in the town center. However, Mainz’s location on the Rhine is relatively close to France, and between the French Revolution and Napoleon’s time, in other words in the 1790’s and early 1800’s, the university was closed, which lasted a century and a half. Finally, in 1946, the university was reopened on a campus south of downtown, which is where we studied. Today, with 35,000 students Mainz is one of the biggest schools of higher education in Germany, and the university is the city’s largest employer.

Not far from the Alte Universität, on a building that was still a ruin when we were there, was a marker saying that Gutenberg’s printshop had once been there. Not far from there, the Gutenberg Museum was later rebuilt, and now is the World Center for the Art of Printing. Nearby is a famous statue of Gutenberg in the middle of Gutenbergplatz. In Gonsenheim, the restaurant that Beverly, Rita, and I would go to every once in a while when we felt we could afford it, was called Zum Gutenberg.

Most German universities are named after people in addition to using the city’s name. Sometimes they’re named after nobility such as the two nobles in Ruprecht-Karls- Universität Heidelberg. Other times it’s very famous and leading figures such as the Martin Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.

So why was the university we attended called the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz? Compared to the major figures just mentioned, wasn’t he just a printer, a simple craftsman? Will they be naming a university after a shoemaker next?

Apparently, there’s more to this than meets the eye.

Let’s not discuss the Chinese invention of paper (and some early printing of their own), or Egyptian papyrus, or the invention of alphabets. The point isn’t writing or the written language. These discoveries and technologies had existed for a long time, but—and here’s the main point—dissemination was very limited.

In all the time up to Gutenberg, only well-educated people could read and write, the nobility, the clergy and such. Beyond that, illiteracy was the norm. Why? Primarily because there was nothing to read, and that is not a frivolous statement.

Churches have pictures and statues to this day because during times of illiteracy, they were used to instruct illiterate parishioners about bible stories.

Picture life in a town. Street signs weren’t needed, since few people traveled anyway, and locals already knew the names of the streets. The baker hung a shingle out with a picture of a loaf of bread; the shoemaker, a shoe. This is the origin of British pubs having such unique names. To distinguish one pub from another, one might have a picture of a pig and a whistle, so the name was The Pig-and-Whistle. Another might have a profile of the reigning monarch, and would call itself The King’s Head. Only much later, with widespread literacy, did writing appear on the signs. Pictures still work—it is not unheard of to pick up the box of pancake mix by recognizing the picture of Aunt Jemima, possibly even without reading the name. How about Carnation’s contented cow? The old pictorial system still works today.

Just as you went to the shoemaker’s when you needed shoes, you went to the scribe when you wanted something to be read or written for you. It would seem that people in those years might have thought it just as odd for the general population to become scribes, that is, learn to read and write, as it would for everyone to learn how to make shoes.

But, again, dissemination is the issue here. Let’s say you were literate and wrote a letter. If you wanted another copy, you simply wrote it a second time. If you wanted another copy of a book, such as the bible, you copied it by hand. Of course, medieval monks were particularly known for doing this. You can imagine how expensive books were, and why only the rich could afford them.

By Gutenberg’s time in the second quarter of the 1400’s, printing presses already existed. As a matter of fact, along the Rhine they were developed from wine presses used for Rhine wine. You can see the type of press that was used for centuries, until modern times: essentially a table with a large screw affair above one end. At first they were used for what is known as block printing of pictures, such as woodcuts (Albrecht Dürer’s famous Praying Hands, for instance). A woodcarver carefully carved a flat block of wood with the picture. Actually, he cut everything away around the picture, so it stood out in bas relief. This block was then inserted into a frame to hold it steady on the open side of the printing table, ink was rolled over it, a sheet of paper laid on top of it, and it was rolled down under the screw affair. When a couple of burly workers turned the screw, it pushed a board down and pressed the paper to the block, which was then rolled away. This is labor intensive and relatively slow, but that was the 15C technology.

Yet it was possible to do writing as well, but that was really labor-intensive. You could have a woodcarver carve a page of writing, just as he’d carved the picture. It would have to be backwards, of course, so that the printed sheet got the positive image. He would have to start carving all the text on the page in the upper-right corner, and again, would have to cut extra wood away, leaving the letters standing out. But in this manner, text could be printed, just like pictures. But consider how many wood blocks would be necessary for an entire book, such as the bible. Printing this way couldn’t have made books much cheaper than copying them by hand.

This was the business that Johannes Gutenberg was involved in in the 1430’s not far from where the Alte Universität would be built some years later in 1477.

So what did Gutenberg do? Where was the revolution in printing?

You hear nowadays of companies rewarding workers who are so involved in day-to-day production, that they come up with innovative ideas to do the work better. And sometimes the improvements are so simple, you wonder why no one thought of it before. Well, Gutenberg did that innovation himself.

Look at it this way. Take one of those blocks—boards, essentially, that are page-size-- that had been laboriously carved with a page of text. Saw away the margins. Saw away each line of text from the next one. Finally, separate all the letters, spaces, and punctuation within each line. You end up with little pieces of wood, each with a letter on the end. (Actually, you could say that the prototype of this is the rubber stamp.) Sort them alphabetically in pigeon holes in a drawer (called today in English a case), and actually, have your woodcarver start making from scratch lots of a’s, b’s, c’s, that look like this until you have a decent supply. The next time you need to print something, you take your individual letters and compose your text. This is now called typesetting. When you’re done printing that page, take the type apart and realphabetize the pieces in the case. This is called MOVABLE TYPE. This simple step is Johannes Gutenberg’s contribution to world civilization. Printing now went so much faster that multiple copies of everything could be printed. Books were no longer expensive items. Literacy exploded. Within two centuries of Gutenberg, literacy was the norm rather than the exception.

In 1454 Gutenberg printed his masterpiece, the very first book ever published in volume, known today as the Gutenberg Bible, and also referred to as the 42-line bible. It was in two volumes covering 1282 pages. 48 copies survive, located in every major library from London to Paris to Moscow to Tokyo, and throughout Germany including the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. In the US, Beverly and I have seen the ones in the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the Pierpont Morgan Library here in New York. Other copies are at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and elsewhere.

The Gutenberg Museum proudly points out online that in the late 1990’s “the American magazine” Time named Johannes Gutenberg the Man of the Millennium. Pretty good for a printer from the back streets of Mainz. It’s just as well they named the university after him. The revolution Gutenberg started is starkly parallel to the contemporary computer revolution as to ability to spread information fast.

In more recent times when the typewriter was invented, it, too, worked with the same principle of movable type (hence the name typewriter!). Then in 1886, Ottmar Merganthaler, a German-American (I used to teach about him in German class) invented the linotype machine, which molded an entire line of type in metal at a time and revolutionized newspaper printing. But of course, with the contemporary computer revolution, all older technologies became antiquated, from Gutenberg’s typesetting, to Mergenthaler’s linotype, to the simple typewriter. All publishing and printing today is of course totally computerized.

Which brings me back to the 1950’s and my enjoying Brooklyn Tech’s printing shop so much. In that era, although large-scale printing was mechanized, small jobs were still done by hand, using Gutenberg’s typesetting method. I remember that even into the 1970’s, small printshops did invitations, business cards, and stationery by setting type by hand. It’s all gone now, half a millennium of tradition, in the field and at Tech.

You’d put on your apron and stand—yes, stand—before a high desk with a top slanted toward you. Down below were the many cases of type, different sizes, different fonts, some in italics, some boldface. It’s amazing today that a word processor can do this so simply and quickly. Nearby was a small metal printing press that worked off a flywheel and whose top opened and closed like a clamshell. No automatic feed there—the type was inked automatically, you had to get each sheet of paper in fast, and the machine closed to print.

To set the type, you held a little typeholding device in your hand called a composing stick. It was made of metal, although its designation in English as “stick” implies a wooden origin back in time. Of course, Gutenberg’s wooden type was by now metal as well. Not only did you have to work backwards as did the old woodcarvers, but since the type was loose, you had to work upside down so the type wouldn’t fall out of the holder. Normal spaces were called n-spaces, wider ones were m-spaces, since they were equal to the width of those letters. You’d need to use wedges to tighten up the line, then lay a thin plate down so you could start the next line. In the case were all the small letters, capital letters, numbers, punctuation, and so on, each in a little pigeon-hole. There was so much history in front of you. Since the letters J and W were invented after Gutenberg, they were out of alphabetical order, at the end of the alphabet. The letters ran ...w x y z j w. When I type, I use touch typing, but many people use the hunt-and-peck system on the keyboard. When typesetting, you had to get used to this almost-alphabetical hunt-and-peck system.

The most memorable language item I learned involves the fact that these shallow drawers holding the type in pigeonholes are called cases. In contemporary times, everything you needed in one font and size was in a single case, but apparently at an earlier time small letters and capital letters were kept in different cases, one above the other, capitals on top. For this reason, to this day, we call small letters lower-case letters and capitals upper-case letters. Its a heritage of printing by typesetting, kept fossilized, as it were, within the language.

I have one last thought, related to printing only inasmuch as it involves bookbinding. Originally, what we visualize today as books was just manuscripts, either handwritten or printed. Often one would put a blank page before the title page, and another at the end, to protect the manuscript almost like a cover. The manuscript might have even been tied together with string. Even today, when one writes a term paper, one ends up with a number of loose pages like a manuscript, which blank pages front and back. These blank pages are the first level of cover.

With the advent of bookbinding, hard covers were put around what would have been a manuscript, yet the original blank white pages are still kept, so the hard covers are really a second level of cover.

As beautiful as the hard covers might be, and some are to this day almost of museum quality, we are in an era of so-called dust covers. This is a third level of cover, and in reality, as beautiful as the hard covers might be, the dust cover has all the information of importance on it, and this flimsy thing is really the de facto primary cover.

Are three levels of cover enough in our contemporary society? No. Libraries standardly have cellophane covers that are used—now realize how ridiculous this is—to protect the dust cover, which supposedly is there to protect ..., well, you know. And this fourth level of cover is usually taped to the hard cover, often damaging it substantially. Go figure.