First Printed Book on Display at Mugar

A section of the 1623 First Folio copy of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and a page from the Gutenberg Bible—the first printed book in the Western world—are among the rare manuscripts on display in the exhibition From Manuscript to Moveable Type: The Information Shift that Brought About Modern Learning at Mugar Memorial Library this winter.

In our digitized world, we tend to forget that books were once copied by scribes and inaccessible to most laypeople until Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing process in the 1450s. With the Mugar exhibition, Lydia Fash, a CGS lecturer and postdoctoral fellow, illustrates the social and cultural change brought about by the shift from script to print. The manuscripts featured in From Manuscript to Moveable Type—including a 9th- or 10th-century leaf from a hymnal and a 16th-century devotional text—bear tangible evidence of the way in which they were produced and read.

In Shakespeare’s text, for example, “you can see that the margins of the pages are dirty, where countless people thumbed the pages. You can see the letters, which were raised pieces of lead, ‘biting’ into the rag-linen paper, which makes the object tactile, not just legible,” Fash says. “Someone actually had to pull a bar—using muscle—to make the impression of the words on the page. The object has a presence, and a past.”

From Manuscript to Moveable Type, on display at Mugar Memorial Library February 1 to 12, is free and open to the public. Learn more here.