Printing was not new. The Chinese had been printing from carved wooden blocks for centuries and had experimented with movable type in ceramic and metal. Europeans printed playing cards and devotional images from blocks decades before Gutenberg.
The press was not new either. Screw presses had been squeezing olives and grapes and pressing paper and cloth since antiquity.
Paper was not new, though it was recent in Europe, and chapter ten described how it got there. It matters enormously that it arrived first, because printing on parchment would have kept the cost of a book roughly where it was.
What was new was a system, and its hardest component was the type. To print a page of Latin you need thousands of individual letters, every copy of the letter a identical in width and height to the thousandth of an inch, hard enough not to deform under pressure, cheap enough to cast in quantity, and reusable.
The solution had three parts. A punch cut in hard steel for each letter, struck into softer copper to make a matrix, which is then fitted into an adjustable mould so that any letter can be cast to the correct width but a uniform height. An alloy, lead with tin and antimony, that melts at a workable temperature, flows into fine detail, expands slightly as it sets rather than shrinking, and is hard enough to survive thousands of impressions. And an oil based ink, borrowed from painters, that would stick to metal, since the water based ink scribes used simply beads off.
That is the invention: not the press, but the mould, the alloy and the ink, and it is a goldsmith's problem set, which is what Gutenberg was.
Johannes Gutenberg spent years and other people's money on it. The evidence for much of this comes from lawsuits, which is a common fate for early technology.
He borrowed heavily from a Mainz financier named Johann Fust. The great Bible, printed around 1455 in about a hundred and eighty copies, is one of the most beautiful books ever produced, with a page whose proportions printers have imitated ever since. It was also enormously expensive to make, tying up capital for years before a single copy could be sold.
Fust sued for his money, won, and took the workshop and the type. He went into business with Gutenberg's foreman, who was also his son in law, and their firm prospered. Gutenberg appears afterwards in the records receiving a small pension from an archbishop, which suggests he was recognised and not rich.
This is worth noting because the pattern recurs throughout this book. The person who solves the technical problem and the people who make money from the solution are frequently not the same, and the second group is usually better capitalised.
Very fast, because the skills were portable and the demand was already there.
Mainz was sacked in a local political quarrel in 1462 and its printers scattered. Within a decade there were presses in Cologne, Basel, Rome, Venice, Paris, Nuremberg, Milan and Naples, and by 1480 in England, Sweden and beyond. By 1500 something in the order of two hundred and fifty European towns had a press.
The output is countable, because books printed before 1501 are catalogued as a class and have been for a long time. Surviving editions number in the tens of thousands, and the total number of copies printed in that half century is usually estimated somewhere between eight and twenty million. Against a European population of maybe seventy million, and against a prior stock of manuscripts that was a small fraction of that, this is a step change of a kind that has few parallels.
The economics moved as fast. A printed book in the 1470s cost perhaps a fifth to a tenth of what the manuscript equivalent had cost, and the price kept falling. That does not make books cheap. It makes them available to a schoolmaster, a merchant, a parish priest and a physician, which is a very different market from monasteries and princes.
Venice became the largest centre, partly because it had capital and shipping and paper, and it is where the trade's conventions were worked out: the title page, page numbers, the italic typeface, and the small affordable format that made a book something you could carry rather than something you visited.
It is worth walking through what actually happened in a printing house, because the labour explains both the speed and the errors.
A compositor stood at a case of type, reading from a manuscript propped in front of him, picking letters one at a time and setting them upside down and back to front into a hand held stick, adding spaces to justify each line to the exact width. A good one set perhaps a thousand to fifteen hundred letters an hour. A page might be two or three thousand.
Set pages were locked into a heavy iron frame, inked with leather pads, and pressed sheet by sheet, two men working the press, one inking, one pulling. A day's work was several hundred to over a thousand impressions. Because type was expensive, a shop owned enough for only a few pages at a time, so pages were printed, the type distributed back into the case, and reset. That is why an interrupted or abandoned edition is unrecoverable, and why the order of printing was planned as a production schedule rather than following the book.
Proofreading happened while the press ran. Correctors read sheets, errors were found mid run, the forme was stopped and fixed, and printing continued, which means that copies of the same edition are not identical: the early sheets carry the uncorrected text. Bibliographers use exactly this to reconstruct how a book was made.
The whole enterprise was capital intensive in a way that scribal copying was not. A press, several fonts of type, and above all a stock of paper had to be paid for months before any book could be sold, and paper was the largest single cost, commonly over half. Printing was therefore a business for people with credit, which is why it settled in commercial cities and why so many early printers went bankrupt.
The obvious effect is more copies. The more interesting effects are about what happens when copies are identical.
A manuscript tradition degrades. Every copy introduces errors, and copies of copies compound them, so that after a few centuries no two texts of the same work agree. Scholars spent enormous effort reconstructing what an author had actually written.
Print does not fix this automatically, and early printed books are full of errors, sometimes propagated in thousands of identical copies, which is a new failure mode. But it makes correction cumulative. A scholar can compare a printed edition with a manuscript, publish a list of corrections, and the next edition can incorporate them, and everybody's copy of the next edition is the same. Knowledge stops being something that decays and starts being something that can be improved.
This matters most for anything with diagrams and numbers. A hand copied astronomical table or anatomical illustration is worthless after a few generations of scribes who do not understand what they are copying. A printed one is exact, and can be checked against the sky or the body by readers a thousand miles apart. The scientific work of chapter thirty two depends on this quite directly.
It also changed who could read at all, slowly and unevenly. Cheap grammars, primers and catechisms were among the steadiest sellers, and printing in the vernacular grew from a minority of output to a majority over the following century. A technology that made the schoolbook cheap does more for literacy over two hundred years than any number of famous treatises.
And it changed what could be argued. A printed reference to page and line of a standard edition lets a reader in another country verify a quotation. That is the beginning of citation as we use it.
The first printers were commercial and conservative. They printed what sold, which meant Bibles, liturgy, grammars, law, medicine and the classics, and they printed indulgences, which were short, standard and profitable, in enormous numbers.
There is an irony there worth holding for two chapters. The single most reliably lucrative product of the early press was the printed indulgence, and the sale of indulgences is what set off the Reformation, which the press then made unstoppable.
The political effect took a generation to appear, and when it did, it was a matter of speed and scale rather than of anything printing made possible in principle. A short pamphlet in the vernacular could be set in a day, printed in thousands, and distributed along trade routes faster than any authority could respond. The controversy that begins in 1517 produced, within three years, hundreds of editions and hundreds of thousands of copies, and no institution in Europe had a mechanism for answering that.
Authorities noticed quickly. Licensing of presses, pre publication censorship and lists of forbidden books all appear within decades, and they worked partially and never completely, because presses could be moved, books could be smuggled, and a book printed in one jurisdiction could not be suppressed in another.
The permanent change is that any group with a modest amount of money could now address a large public directly, without the permission of anybody who had previously controlled what got copied.
Firm: the objects. Early printed books survive in large numbers, are catalogued, and can be analysed physically, down to identifying individual pieces of damaged type across different books to establish which workshop printed what.
Soft: Gutenberg himself. Almost everything known about him comes from legal and financial documents, and he put his name in none of his books. The Bible is attributed to him on strong but circumstantial grounds.
Soft: the output figures. The estimate of copies printed before 1501 depends on assuming an average edition size from a small number of known cases, and reasonable people differ by a factor of two.
Contested: how much printing caused. A very influential argument of the 1970s made print the driver of the Reformation, the scientific revolution and modern rationality. Later scholarship has pushed back, pointing out that manuscript circulation remained important for a long time, that many effects attributed to print were already under way, and that the same technology in other societies did not produce the same results. The current position is roughly that print was an amplifier of unusual power rather than a first cause.
One correction. Printing did not immediately drive out manuscripts, and for some purposes, court poetry, confidential political correspondence, music, and material too dangerous to print, handwritten circulation continued for centuries. New technologies rarely replace old ones as cleanly as the summaries suggest.