A month ago, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic, visited me in Antwerp, Belgium. While I currently live in Boston, I was born and raised in Antwerp, and also started Drupal there.

We spent the morning together walking around Antwerp and visited the Plantin Moretus Museum.

The museum is the old house of Christophe Plantin, where he lived and worked around 1575. At the time, Plantin had the largest printing shop in the world, with 56 employees and 16 printing presses. These presses printed 1,250 sheets per day.

Today, the museum hosts the two oldest printing presses in the world. In addition, the museum has original lead types of fonts such as Garamond and hundreds of ancient manuscripts that tell the story of how writing evolved into the art of printing.

The old house, printing business, presses and lead types are the earliest witnesses of a landmark moment in history: the invention of printing, and by extension, the democratization of publishing, long before our digital age. It was nice to visit that together with Matt as a break from our day-to-day focus on web publishing.