Johannes Gutenberg

Strasbourg lawsuit provides the earliest documentary clues to Gutenberg's printing experiments

After his partner died, Gutenberg had the forms collected and dismantled or melted down — so that outsiders could not understand the secret apparatus.

December 1439: the Dritzehn heirs sue

In December 1439, the brothers of Gutenberg's deceased associate Andreas Dritzehn sued him in Strasbourg, seeking repayment of Dritzehn's investment or admission to the secret partnership. The Strasbourg council's judgment of 12 December rejected their demand to enter the partnership, requiring Gutenberg to pay only the remaining 15 guilders due under the agreement.

Secrecy was the heart of the dispute — and after Dritzehn's death Gutenberg had the forms collected and dismantled or melted so that outsiders could not understand the apparatus.

What the witnesses described

Testimony mentioned a wooden press, lead, moulds or forms, and secret equipment. The goldsmith Hans Dünne stated that Gutenberg had paid him about 100 guilders for work connected with “printing.”

That vocabulary is suggestive but ambiguous: the same materials could relate to metalworking or to the manufacture of pilgrims' mirrors, which were worn on hats to capture the rays believed to emanate from displayed relics.

The earliest clue, not an invention date

This testimony is the earliest surviving documentary connection between Gutenberg and printing. It does not prove that he had completed a movable-metal-type system or printed a book by 1439, and the evidence is Strasbourg's, not Mainz's — Gutenberg is documented in Strasbourg from 1434 through 1444.

No surviving book can be securely assigned to his Strasbourg period; the Mainz historical portal notes that no book known to have been printed in Strasbourg before 1460 survives.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 3 audit passes Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

The lawsuit’s vocabulary—press, lead, forms and something “belonging to printing”—is suggestive but ambiguous; the same materials could also relate to metalworking or mirror manufacture. Source: https://www.gutenberg-gesellschaft.de/en/johannes-gutenberg/gutenberg-in-strasbourg/seite
No surviving book can be securely assigned to Gutenberg’s Strasbourg period, and the Mainz historical portal notes that no book known to have been printed in Strasbourg before 1460 survives. Source: https://www.gutenberg.de/en/zeit/gutenberg_mainz
Albert Kapr interprets “art and adventure” as a cover name for early printing and places the breakthrough around 1440, but explicitly presents this as a historical argument rather than a dated contemporary record. Source: https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/article/view/5523