Alkuin
Charlemagne’s adviser732-804Alcuin was an important scholar, head of the palace school in Aachen and advisor to Charlemagne. These positions explain his influence in the Frankish imperial court.
Ludovico Vincentino degli Arrighi
A writer of Papal documents1475-1527Ludovico degli Arrighi hailed from the Italian city of Vincenza, which gave rise to his now commonly-used sobriquet of “Vincentino”. Very little is known about the circumstances of his life.
Assurbanipal
An Assyrian library founderc. 668-627 BCEThe literate Assyrian king Assurbanipal commissioned a cuneiform script archive in his palace in Nineveh (modern-day Iraq) that can be considered one of the very first national libraries. In amassing his collection, he commissioned scribes from all across his empire to copy texts.
Keith Bates
Pioneer of the Mailart movement*1951Keith Bates was born in 1951 in Liverpool, England. He studied graphic design at the Didsbury College of Education in Manchester and worked until 2009 as an art and design instructor.
Andreas Friedrich Bauer
Friedrich Koenig’s partner at the invention of the high-speed printing press1783-1860The son of a craftsman, Andreas Friedrich Bauer had been to grammar school in Stuttgart and university in Tübingen. He finished his apprenticeship as a Doctor of Philosophy at the instrument manufacturer Baumann. He subsequently went to England in 1805 out of technological interest and got to know the German book printer and mechanical engineer Friedrich Koenig in London.
Walter Benjamin
Analyst of cultural mass production1892-1940Walter Benjamin is considered one of the most significant art and media theorists of the first half of the 20th century, particularly for his relatively short essays A Short History of Photography (1931) and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). At the core of his theory is the artistic concept of the modern, whose essential characteristic Benjamin sees as the possibility for mechanical reproduction: in his view, before the 19th century artworks were primarily defined by an aura of singularity which lent them a ritualistic cult value.
Emil Berliner
Inventor oft the gramophone and record1851-1929Hanover-born Emil Berliner, not yet 20 years old, emigrated to the USA in 1870 to avoid conscription during the Franco-Prussian War. In New York he found work as a casual labourer while also studying physics on the side.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Founder of the World Wide Web and HTML*1955On Christmas Eve 1990, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, then employed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva (CERN), launched a new chapter in media and communications history – largely out of the public eye. Under the address http://info.cern.ch he presented the first online website on his NeXt computer and so laid the cornerstone for Internet technology which would radically change human coexistence around the globe within a few years.
Axel Bertram
Designer of magazines and objects for bibliophile collectors1936-2019In 1960, after studies in graphic design at the Hochschule für Bildende und angewandte Kunst (Academy of Visual and Applied Art) in the Berlin district of Weißensee, Axel Bertram began working as a freelance graphic artist in the same German city. In conjunction with three university classmates, he founded the studio collective Gruppe 4, which quickly rose to prominence thanks to projects such as the graphical redesign of Berlin’s Metropol Theatre.
Giambattista Bodoni
The best-known European printer around 18001740-1813The seed for Giambattista Bodoni’s interest in books was planted very early on. He was born in 1740 as the son of a printer and began his professional career at the age of 18 in Rome where he worked as a typesetter in the Vatican’s Propaganda Fide printing house.
