(A)

Before Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press, making a book was a difficult process in Europe. It wasn’t that hard to write a letter to one person by hand, but to create thousands of books for many people to read was nearly impossible. Without the invention of the printing press, the Scientific Revolution or the Renaissance could not happen. Our world would be very different.

(B)

Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany around the year 1398. He was the son of a man who made jewellery from gold. Not much more is known about his childhood. It appears he moved a few times around Germany, but that’s about all we know for sure.

(C)

Gutenberg took some existing technologies and some of his own inventions to come up with the printing press in the year 1450. One key idea he came up with was moveable type. Rather than use wooden blocks to press ink onto paper, Gutenberg used moveable metal pieces to quickly create pages. Gutenberg introduced innovations all the way through the printing process, enabling pages to be printed much more rapidly.

(D)

His presses could print thousands of pages per day compared to only 40 – 50 pages with the old method. This was a dramatic improvement and allowed books to be read by ordinary people for the first time in the history of Europe. Knowledge and education spread throughout the continent like never before.

(E)

People think that the first printed item from the press was a German poem. Other prints included Latin grammars. Gutenberg’s real fame came from producing the Gutenberg Bible. It was the first time a Bible was mass-produced and available for anyone outside the Church. Bibles were rare and could take up to a year for a priest to transcribe. Gutenberg printed around 200 Bibles in a relatively short time.

Dezo Hoffmann was born on 24 May 1912 in Banská Štiavnica, Kingdom of Hungary, now Slovakia. After studying journalism in Prague, he worked at Twentieth Century Fox in Paris as a photo-journalist. During Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, he was sent to make a documentary of the invasion. After returning from Africa he was sent to Spain to film the 1936 People’s Olympiad (a protest against the official Olympic Games in Berlin under Hitler’s propaganda). Soon after he arrived in Spain, the civil war broke out and Dezo found himself on the barricades.
 Facing war dangers, Dezo was injured a few times. The third injury was serious, leaving him without memory for several months. After recovery he moved to England and joined the group of Czechoslovak pilots flying with the RAF during World War II. After the war, he remained in London, working for various newspapers and magazines. In 1955, he began his collaboration with Record Mirror magazine, which was the start of his career photographing show-business celebrities.
 In 1962, he went to Liverpool to shoot an unknown but promising group The Beatles. Mutual appreciation and sympathy led to a long-lasting relationship between Hoffmann and the group. They say that Paul McCartney declared him the world’s best photographer. During the following years Hoffmann’s famous photos of The Beatles attracted the attention of many other stars. He was regarded as a ‘nice chap’ who was welcomed wherever he went despite his strong foreign accent.
 In 1982, Omnibus Press published With The Beatles – The Historic Photographs of Dezo Hoffmann, showing some of the photos taken by Dezo during the prime time of Beatlemania. This book is out of print as Dezo’s Beatles photos collection has been acquired by Apple Corps Ltd. Hoffmann sold 100 of his Beatles negatives to Australian Colin Kaye. The remainder of Dezo’s archive of approximately 1 million photographs of many pop musicians and showbiz personalities was acquired by Rex Features, the photo agency and library which had represented Dezo for worldwide media sales of his work from the early 1960s until his death. Dezo Hoffmann died on 29 March 1986 aged 73 in the Harley Street Clinic, London.