Eric Marshall White, Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books. London: Reaktion Books, 2025, 223 pp., 57 color ill.

Hardly any other fifteenth-century person has attracted more attention than Johannes Gutenberg. His invention of the printing press around 1450 was a technological revolution that led to a profound paradigm shift, which in turn really transformed the Middle Ages and introduced the age of the Renaissance or early modern age. Of course, the manuscript culture continued well into the sixteenth century, and many medieval aspects or features continued to be in place, but the emergence of the printed book truly transformed the entire book market. Countless scholars have engaged with Gutenberg and his invention, and the famous Gutenberg Jahrbuch has regularly reported the latest research on Gutenberg and the early modern history of book production for ca. 100 years by now (both in German and in other major European languages).