For digital humanists in the twenty-first century, Johannes Gutenberg is more than the inventor of mechanical printing technologies with movable type; he can be seen as having revolutionized all of Western written culture before the digital age. The impact of Gutenberg’s printing technologies and that of modern digital technologies have been compared and contrasted by many. As early as 1962 Marshall McLuhan in his Gutenberg Galaxy predicted the arrival of ‘electronic interdependence’ in a ‘global village’. Project Gutenberg, the world’s first digital library, was founded in 1971, and has initiated, encouraged and promoted the creation and distribution of the e-book. Google then launched their mass-digitization project in 2004 using optical character recognition technology in international collaboration with major university and public libraries. But in comparing the old with the new, Peter Shillingsburg looks at copies of the Gutenberg Bible in his From Gutenberg to Google and wonders ‘where, in 500 years, would anyone stand to look at a museum display of the first electronic book and would the words “endurance” and “beauty” come to mind?’

Keio University’s acquisition of a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, which was realized in the spring of 1996, was also more than symbolic for the development of digital humanities as well as for Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya’s career. Studies of books as material objects were still little known in Japanese universities in the 1990s. Takamiya, however, was already an acclaimed book collector and bibliographer in both the East and the West, recognized for owning a substantial collection of medieval manuscripts, incunabula and early printed books. He was also a devoted user of Keio University Library (Keio UL) and contributed to the expansion of its special collection by giving expert recommendations of Western rare books for acquisition. His postgraduate seminar at Keio offered a unique opportunity for Japanese students of English literature to appreciate and work with medieval manuscripts and early printed books, which were often from his private collection. He always emphasized the importance of examining original materials, and taught us the excitement of discovering individual stories embedded in specific copies.

Indeed, a hidden story about Keio and the Gutenberg Bible was first brought to light in 1996.