The rain was pouring  and banging  against the window where Johannes  sat, smiling as he read a wonderful book. The smile turned into a frown as he looked at the chains chained to the book and to the reading table. He longed for a better way to make books so they were not so precious. He shook his head in dismay and Johann put the book back in the church's library shelf...
 
      Six hundred years ago people had to hand write a book because they didn't have any presses. The books were so rare that the most precious books in a church's library were chained to the reading tables. A book back then would cost as much as a house in town or a good-sized farm!  Johannes Gensfleisch Gutenberg was the man who saved the trouble of writing books by hand. When he was young he loved to read books, but making a single book would take months, even years, and Johann didn't want to wait that long so he planned to do something about it some day.
       Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany in 1398. He moved to Strasbourg in 1428 because townspeople and rich families were rivals  (Johann's family was ver y rich and powerful). Johann had an early start. His father used to work at the Mainz Mint and Johann usually went with him, he learned tips from jewelers and goldsmiths about how to carve or how to make metal. So little that he knew those tips would later on in life help him with his invention.He stayed in Strasbourg for twenty years. In his spare time he fell in love with Ennelin zu der Iserin Thure. Unfortunately along the engagement he changed his mind for one reason or another and he decided not to marry her. Ennelin was outraged. She sued Johann for breaking his promise to marry her. Though it was her lawsuit, he won it.   
  Johann started his invention by making metal letters. With the techniques he learned from the Mainz Mint, but Johann had to carve out the metal. He arranged them into a sentence and pressed a pieces of paper against the letters with his hands. When he did it with his hands the ink did not come out evenly. One day he watched people make paper out of
 

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