The man approached us with plenty of confidence. He seemed self-assured, but had an inquisitive look on his face too. He pulled out a pen and paper ready to make some notes about who we were. One of us at our booth, on Wellesley Street in Toronto, asked him the burning question of the day:
“Are you a writer?”
“Sure am, “ he said. “I’m a poet. Have been all my life.”
It must have been an extraordinary moment. A 40-year-old inventor in the 15th century city of Mainz, Germany, had experimented with metal alloys, molds, a pressing machine and oil-based ink. He took handmade paper, placed it in his press and moved the letters of the alphabet into position to print a 42-line piece of writing. He repeated the process 30 times to create a book. The book was a short Bible. The inventor was Johann Gutenberg. And the invention was history’s first mass printing of the world’s first published book.
“Incomparably the greatest event in the history of the world,” Mark Twain wrote 400 years later.