I am much taken by the discovery at Mainz that nobody actually knows what Gutenberg looked like.

In order to turn him into a brand as the founder of movable type printing (in Europe), the Germans felt he needed to have an identity. They came up with the idea of an old guy with a beard. But to distinguish him from God and Father Christmas, they gave him a distinctive ‘mediaeval’ hat. Over the centuries this look has stuck and now you can see his statue in the town square and an engraved ‘portrait’ set against pretty much any online article you want to look up about the birth of printing. His beardy behatted visage has even appeared on banknotes at one point. And yet it is all completely bogus. For all we know he could be beardless, hatless, with three ears.

Do you not perhaps think it is the same with John Foxx or the Bunnymen? What you saw in them was not what they actually were. They posed for album covers, slapped on make-up, wore what their manager told them to wear, copied the haircuts of others – until they were quite unlike their own selves. With painted cross-dressers like Bowie and Bolan it was a bit more obvious – a way for the girls to join in with the identity-hunt maybe. But hard to think of someone entirely authentic who you might meet in the street and know them to be the same person as the poseur on the front cover of NME. Not anyone from the 80s anyway.

As I told you, John Foxx’s real name is Dennis Leigh. He sounds like someone I might meet up at the allotment where we’d share concerns about water pressure, or swap notes on the potential problems associated with fermented banana as a growth accelerant for pumpkins. Perhaps his next album will be called “Growth Accelerant for Pumpkins”.

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Salman Rushdie has been stabbed and I am standing in the Guttenberg Museum, looking at a vast collection of centuries-old books and ancient printing presses – each exhibit a shining example of the human urge to write, to publish, to offend. 

There are Bibles, Korans, news pamphlets, song books, folk tales, medical tomes, plant identification manuals, pocket books, philosophical treatises, political propaganda, moral tales for children, law books, astrological charts. It feels like every educated/monied person in Western Europe (well Germany definitely) had been bursting to tell the world a thing or two about something – about God, about the King, about plants, about the stars, about good and evil.

And it seems doubtful that anyone was waiting around to worry about offending their peers. Yes, a lot of people were executed. A lot of books were burned. That can’t be denied. But human beings generally didn’t decide that independent writing and publishing was a terrible thing that must be stopped. It continued as a practice to thrive and grow exponentially and spread across the globe.

What makes the idea of Gutenberg so powerful, it seems to me, is the sheer accessibility of it all – how simple it became to set up a press and publish whatever views you wanted to spout. In the museum, I find that the Europeans were behind the curve, in fact. The Chinese had already been printing for several hundred years. So too the Koreans. Everybody was at it.

Stabbing a writer with a knife is a senseless and cruel thing to do. And it’s also *pointless*. History proves that human beings love to write and publish and read, even when threatened or imprisoned or beaten or stabbed.

I hope to hell that Salman Rushdie survives and gets back writing and publishing as soon as he can. He’s a symbol of what could happen to the rest of us, and an inspiration to keep writing, keep offending.

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Mainz, by the way, is another German town that was bombed to hell by the Allies in WW2. And yet when you visit it on a sunny Saturday, the war seems far away. There is a vibrant food and drink market. The rebuilt red-stone Dom towers over the square where locals quaff fizzy wine and stuff their bags with fruit and veg and cheese. A short walk away is the Rhine with a rough and ready riverside boulevard, and a string of laid back ‘beach’ bars. There are municipal fountains spouting out water even though there’s a drought on. And a statue of Schiller benevolently looks down on little kids licking ice-creams and splashing in the water. A rather decent medium-sized town has grown out of the ashes of a Nazi fortress. Life seems to find a way.