Johannes Gutenberg may be wrongly credited with producing Europe's first printed book, an Italian researcher said, causing an uproar among bibliophiles and academics who see him as the father of the modern hardback.
One of the world's most precious books, the Gutenberg bible was printed between 1452 and 1454. It sparked a literary boom in Europe.
Bruno Fabbiani, a lecturer at Turin Polytechnic, said Gutenberg used stamps rather than the individual, moveable letters he is said to have invented that accelerated printing and book production.
Before the invention of moveable type, craftsmen laboriously carved wooden stamps for each page. According to accepted academic research, German goldsmith Gutenberg was the first to break down the stamps into individual letters.
"Bruno Fabbiani has devised 30 experiments that show Gutenberg did not use moveable type to print the bible," Francesco Pirella of Genoa's Museum of Print said on Friday.
Fabbiani will perform his experiments in a mock trial of Gutenberg in the Italian port city of Genoa on Saturday.
But other print researchers dismissed Fabbiani's experiments as a stunt.
Eva Hanebutt-Benz, director of the Gutenberg Museum in the German town of Mainz, said the Gutenberg bible gave a strong hint on how it was produced - the imprint of a single piece of type that accidentally fell on one of the pages.
Gutenberg, whose real name was Johannes Gensfleisch, printed 180 copies of the bible, of which only 48 still exist. When he died in 1468, his invention had already spread across Europe.
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