Local Hero

Jeroen

This is Laurens Janszn Coster. The undeniable inventor of bookprinting, or at least undeniable when you're born and raised in the Dutch city of Haarlem like I am. I have no idea why the rest of the world keeps believing it was Johann Gutenberg who did the invention. Coster had his moment of genius when he carved a letter A out of a tree in the nearby park the Haarlemmer Hout. When the piece of bark fell into the sand he came up with the idea of how to print books. The rest is history