BERLIN — On a recent Saturday afternoon, a hush fell in the bright, airy “reading-aloud” room at Krumulus, a small children’s bookstore in Berlin, as Sven Wallrodt , one of the store’s employees, stood up to speak. Brandishing a newly published illustrated children’s book about the life of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, he looked at the crowd of eager, mostly school-aged children and their parents. An hour later, the children followed Wallrodt down to the bookstore’s basement workshop, where he showed them how Gutenberg fit leaden block letters into a metal plate. Then the children printed their own bookmark using a technique similar to Gutenberg’s, everyone was thrilled. Matthis Ritter, who is 9 and owns a lot of books, learned that printing used to be called a “dark art,” because the ink got on your fingers, while Mithuni Hopp, also 9, was most impressed with how monks used to make a certain kind of red ink: “They smushed snails!”

Source: New York Times May 20, 2019 18:20 UTC