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.
Gutenberg died in poverty: his partner Johann Fust sued him in 1455 and took over the workshop and the type. The Bible that revolutionized Europe brought him no profit at all.
Its names
- Calle C / Calle DAntes de 1887