Report: “A Utah Expert Is Studying the World’s Oldest Movable-Type Book — and It’s Not the Gutenberg Bible”

From the Salt Lake City Tribune:

Ask most people what the oldest book made with movable metal type is, and they likely will say the Gutenberg Bible, printed around 1455 in Mainz, Germany.

That isn’t the case, and a University of Utah librarian is part of a research project to give proper due to what scholars say is the first such book, known as Jikji.

“People should learn the bigger picture,” said Randy Silverman, who’s head of preservation at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, and one of two principal investigators on the collaborative project “From Jikji to Gutenberg.”

Jikji is a Korean Buddhist book — the title translates to “pointing at it directly” — that was printed in 1377. It tells “a compression of the history of the Buddhists,” Silverman said. “It tells how the Buddhists attained enlightenment.”

The project — which involves 40 scholars, working in 14 different time zones worldwide — aims to bring Jikji’s existence to the forefront of printing history around the globe.

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Filed under: Libraries, News, Preservation