Printing Press: Gutenberg, Movable Type and Books

The scribe’s long work

A candle flickers, and a pen scratches across a sheet of calfskin. Before printing, every book in Europe was copied by hand, usually by monks or professional scribes, and a long book could take many months. Parchment came from animal skins, so one Bible could need the skins of hundreds of animals. Books were rare and costly, and mistakes crept in with every copy. Only churches, courts and rich families owned more than a few. We know how scribes worked from thousands of surviving manuscripts, with their corrections and the occasional tired note in the margin.

Clay letters in China

Small clay blocks, each carrying one character, are arranged in an iron frame and inked. Printing itself was older in China: carved woodblocks produced the Diamond Sutra in AD 868, the oldest dated printed book. Around 1040 the craftsman Bi Sheng made separate clay characters that could be reused. We know about it from the scholar Shen Kuo, who described the method in his Dream Pool Essays. Clay type broke easily, and Chinese needs thousands of characters, so woodblocks stayed popular. In Korea printers cast movable metal type by the 13th century, and the oldest surviving book printed that way is the Jikji of 1377.

Gutenberg’s workshop

Now a heavy wooden screw descends and presses a sheet against inked metal letters. Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz combined several tools: letters cast in a mould from an alloy of lead, tin and antimony, an oil-based ink that clung to metal, and a press adapted from those used for wine and olives. Cast letters were identical and could be reused for any text. Gutenberg borrowed money to start, and a lawsuit brought by his investor Johann Fust in 1455 is one of the few documents that tell us about him. The idea of a fast, repeatable page changed how texts were made.

The Gutenberg Bible

Rows of printed pages hang up to dry, then are folded and bound. The Gutenberg Bible, finished around 1455, has 42 lines on most pages, and about 180 copies were made, some on paper and some on vellum. Around 50 survive in whole or in part. Several libraries, including the British Library, have digitised their copies so anyone can look at the pages. Each page was set letter by letter, but the metal type could be reused for other pages, so a workshop could produce a whole edition of identical copies. Printers now worked as businesses and chose books by what would sell.

A flood of books

Stacks of books pile up and spread across a map dotted with towns. By 1500 printers worked in well over 200 European towns, and historians estimate that between about 8 and 20 million copies of early printed books, called incunabula, were made. The range is wide because many books were lost and counting is hard. Books became cheaper, so merchants, lawyers, doctors and ordinary readers could buy them. Printers also helped to standardise spelling and introduced page numbers, tables of contents and indexes, which made books easier to search.

Words that travel

Leaflets fly from one town and appear in many cities. In 1517 the monk Martin Luther wrote his 95 theses against the sale of indulgences in Wittenberg. Whether he nailed them to the church door is a tradition that historians question, but his texts were certainly printed and reprinted across Germany and beyond within weeks. Printing helped the Reformation, but it also helped its opponents, who printed replies. Later the same technology carried scientific books, maps and, from 1665, the first scientific journals. Printing spread knowledge, rumour and propaganda alike, and readers still need to check their sources.

The Printing Revolution