Print Culture and the Modern World
Print comes to Europe
Explain how Gutenberg's press transformed book production.
Paper and print reach Europe. Silk and spices had long come from China along the silk route. In the 11th century, Chinese paper came the same way, so scribes could write manuscripts on it. In 1295, the explorer Marco Polo returned to Italy from China and brought the knowledge of woodblock printing. Italians began printing with woodblocks, and the technique spread across Europe.
Handwritten books could not keep up. Rich people and monasteries still wanted luxury books handwritten on vellum (a parchment made from animal skin) and looked down on printed books as cheap. Merchants and university students bought printed copies. As demand grew, booksellers exported books and held book fairs; one bookseller might employ more than 50 scribes. But hand-copying was slow, costly and tiring, and manuscripts were fragile and hard to carry. By the early 15th century, woodblocks were in wide use for printing playing cards, cloth, and holy pictures with a few words. Europe needed an even faster, cheaper way to copy text.
Gutenberg's press. Johann Gutenberg of Strasbourg, Germany, was a merchant's son who grew up on a farm estate, where he saw wine and olive presses. He became a master goldsmith and learnt to make lead moulds for trinkets. He combined what he knew:
- the olive press became the model for the printing press;
- moulds were used to cast metal type: one piece for each letter of the alphabet.
He built his first press in the 1430s and perfected the system by 1448. Because the metal letters could be moved around to make new words, it was called movable type, and it remained the basic print technology for the next 300 years. It printed 250 sheets on one side per hour.
The first printed Bible. Gutenberg's first book was the Bible: about 180 copies in three years, fast for those days. Printed books at first looked like manuscripts: the type copied fancy handwriting, and borders and pictures were painted by hand. For rich buyers, spaces were left blank so each owner could choose the decoration, making every copy unique. So print did not replace hand work all at once.
The print revolution. In the century from 1450 to 1550, most European countries got printing presses; German printers travelled abroad to start them. About 20 million printed books flooded Europe in the second half of the 15th century, and about 200 million in the 16th. This move from printing by hand to printing by machine is called the print revolution.
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