Calle de Gutenberg
The street takes its name from Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (Mainz, c. 1400 – 3 February 1468), inventor of the movable-type printing press in Western Europe, around 1450. In 1887 the City Council merged two stretches that ran under provisional letter names — C and D — and renamed them after him. The name fits the naming pattern of the Pacífico expansion, where figures of 19th-century technical and intellectual progress were honoured.
When the Pacífico district began to rise in the last quarter of the 19th century, within the Castro expansion, it was left as a transit zone between the residential east and the industrial south. The first maps did not bother to name the inner streets: they marked them with letters of the alphabet until the layout took hold. What is today Calle de Gutenberg was born split in two, stretches C and D, and in 1887 they were stitched under a single name, that of the printer from Mainz.
Johannes Gutenberg took his surname from the family house, the Zum Gutenberg of Mainz. Around 1450 he perfected the movable metal-type press, and with it printed the 42-line Bible, held to be the first book made on a large scale by that method in Western Europe. He died in his city in 1468. When he was born, on the other hand, no one knows for certain.
Naming a street after him in 1887 fits the 19th-century Madrid custom of sharing out the street map among the figures of print culture, just as the industrial press had turned Gutenberg into an emblem of progress.
Its names
- Calle C / Calle DAntes de 1887