Along Our Way: Day 7 - Last Day in Germany

Today we went to Mainz and visited the Gutenberg Museum.

There was an original Gutenberg Bible on display - two huge volumes representing one of history's greatest accomplishments.

One of the volumes is just the Old Testament and the other has the rest of that and the New Testament. There are over 1,000 pages in the two books together and it took over 6,000 goat skins to make the book. Can you tell I got the audio tour? Like a lot of museums seem to be doing, the recording was on an iPod nano. Wonder if anyone has trouble navigating the menu or if that technology has seeped into our basic knowledgebase.

We watched a demo of making one of the moveable letters that was key to this tech advancement. And then they printed a page of the text on a replica press.

A section of the museum also discussed the development of moveable text in Asia. The Chinese developed it about 300 years earlier, but their methods of printing were more cumbersome and time consuming than Gutenberg's press. The Koreans were earlier than Gutenberg but they had issues with their printing methods too.

Very interesting museum. Glad we went.

There was a farmers' market in the city square near the museum with beautiful fruits, vegetables and flowers:

White asparagus was much more plentiful than the green as well as being much bigger in diameter. In this market, as in several others, we saw macaroni or other noodles packaged in various unusual (to us) ways.