About the museum

As one of the oldest printing museums in the world, the Gutenberg Museum on Liebfrauenplatz in Mainz invited visitors on a journey through four millennia of book, printing and writing culture for several decades. At the beginning of October 2024, the Gutenberg Museum in the ‘Schellbau’, as the exhibition building opened in the 1960s is called, closed to make room for a new building.

After a six-week closure period, the interim exhibition ‘Gutenberg Museum MOVED’ opened in the premises of the Natural History Museum at the end of November 2024. In the lavishly restored rooms of the former monastery, the Gutenberg Museum is showing a presentation that breaks new ground in educational work.

The use of media technology and the curatorial approach of placing historical and current media-historical developments in relation to one another will turn a visit to the exhibition into an educational experience.

The museum is primarily dedicated to Johannes Gutenberg, a native of Mainz and  "Man of the Millennium" , who invented printing with movable metal type more than 550 years ago, initiating a media revolution. In addition to comprehensive information about his life, work, and inventions, as well as their reception and consequences, the museum, which was founded in 1900 by citizens of Mainz, presents important aspects of letterpress printing.

At the heart of the permanent exhibition there are two copies of the world-famous 42-line Gutenberg Bible that can be viewed and compared in the walk-in vault. Technical printing tools, typesetting machines, and printing presses bring the history of printing to life. Unique examples of the European book culture from the 15th century to this day exemplify the visual and thematic diversity of one of cultural history's most important chapters.

As a "World Museum for the Art of Printing", the Gutenberg Museum has established separate sections for the earliest history of printing in East Asia (since the 8th century), as well as scripts and printing in the Islamic World. A manuscript section explains the development of scripts, while other sections are dedicated to the history of presses, the craft of bookbinding, fine press printing techniques, as well as the manufacturing of paper and colors.

With its collection of several hundreds of thousands of items, many award-winning special exhibitions and innovative cultural touristic (facilitation) offers, the Gutenberg Museum annually brings more than 140,000 visitors from around 70 countries to Mainz where they can witness the entire universe of printing across an exhibition area of around 3,500 square meters.