Your request that I also should contribute my mite to the semi-milliennial celebration in honor of Gutenberg gives me great pleasure and I feel highly honored that you have selected me for such a task.

All the world acknowledges that the invention of Gutenberg is the greatest event that secular history has recorded.

Gutenberg's achievement created a new and wonderful earth, but at the same time also a new hell. During the past 500 years Gutenberg's invention has supplied both earth and hell with new occurrences, new wonders and new phases.

It found truth astir on earth and gave it wings; but untruth also was abroad, and it was supplied with a double pair of wings.

Science was found lurking in corners, much prosecuted; Gutenberg's invention gave it freedom on land and sea and brought it within reach of every mortal.

Arts and industries, badly handicapped, received new life. Religion, which, during the Middle Ages, assumed tyrannical sway, was transformed into a friend and benefactor of mankind.

On the other hand, war, which was conducted on a comparatively small scale, became almost universal through this agency. Gutenberg's invention, while having given to some national freedom, brought slavery to others.

It became the founder and protector of human liberty, and yet it made despotism possible where formerly it was impossible.

What the world is to-day, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source, but we are bound to bring him homage, for what he said in dreams to the angered angel has been literally fulfilled, for the bad that his colossal invention has brought about is overshadowed a thousand times by the good with which mankind has been favored. Yours very truly,

Mark Twain

- "The Work of Gutenberg," published in Hartford Daily Courant, June 27, 1900, p. 7.