Word: offing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Johann Gutenberg was born of well-to-do parents in the Archbishopric of Mainz, Germany. Details of his life, early as well as late, are sketchy, but he apparently trained as a goldsmith and/or gem cutter and then became a partner in a printing shop in Strasbourg.
When Gutenberg entered it, printing was a slow and laborious business. Each new page required the creation of a new printing form, usually an incised block of wood. He began looking for ways to make metal casts of the individual letters of the alphabet. The advantages of such a method...
By the time he was back in Mainz in 1448, Gutenberg had ironed out enough of these problems to persuade Johann Fust, a goldsmith and lawyer, to invest heavily in his new printing shop. Exactly what happened behind Gutenberg's closed doors during the next few years remains unknown. But...
It was a revelation, at least to Western eyes: multiple copies of an entire volume produced by mechanical means. True, printing from movable type had been performed in Asia, but thousands of ideograms made the widespread use of the technique impractical. Gutenberg, who apparently knew nothing of the Asian innovations...
Shortly before his completed Bible was released, Gutenberg was forced to turn over his shop and at least some of his equipment to his creditor Fust, who carried on the work, alone at first and later with the assistance of his son-in-law Peter Schoffer. The monopoly they may...