Johannes Gutenberg - Postage Stamps 1

Postage Stamps Pictures of Johannes Gutenberg

Johann Gutenberg (c. 1400-68) did not invent printing. After all, the Chinese had already employed various printing methods for centuries, and “block books” were printed in Europe by the early 15th century. Gutenberg was fortunate, however, in that his native language was alphabetic, not ideographic. An alphabetic system requires a finite number of symbols to render; thus Gutenberg had only to design and cast about 300 different pieces of type to print his 42-line Bible, including upper and lower case letters, abbreviations, ligatures, punctuation marks, etc. Not so with the Chinese language, which requires about 3,000 different characters to print a typical Chinese newspaper or magazine, and at least 6,000 characters for most Chinese literature, technical writing, or classical literature. A system like that of Gutenberg was not practical in the 15th century for printing the Chinese language.

These two stamps were issued on20 March 1997 to mark the possible 600th birth anniversary of Johann Gutenberg (1397-1468). The 20-lek value has Gutenberg’s portrait, and the 60-lek value displays a possible configuration of his printing press (Albania, Scott #2529-2530)

Bulgaria issued the stamps on this First Day Cover to mark the 500th anniversary of the beginning of Gutenberg’s work, ca. 1440, and the 100th anniversary of the first printing press in Bulgaria, operated in Samokov by Nikola Karastoyanov (Bulgaria, Scott #384-385).

Postage Stamps Pictures of Johannes Gutenberg