Printed Books

DETAILS:

Johann Gensfleisch zumGutenberg* (c 1400 – c 1468) was the first European to combine the winepress and the goldsmith's punch to create a Printing Press* using interchangeable metal typeface (letters cast in metal and used to build up a word). The resulting process combined economy, rapid production, and flexibility. Though printing did not, at first, change the appearance of books, since the printed pages were designed to look the same as "real" (handwritten) books did, it very quickly made changes in the way Europeans dealt with information.

It was no longer necessary to wait months or years for a scribe to finish a copy, so the quick and relatively cheap product of the printing press greatly accelerated the spread of discoveries, techniques and ideas. Along with this interchange of ideas came the printing of Bibles, which permanently established the languages in which these were printed. Another feature was the standardization of texts, which no longer suffered from changes and errors produced by individual copyists.

As the number of printing presses increased, more and more books on a wider range of topics became available to more and more people. Gutenberg’s 1452 Bible is generally held to be the first printed book in Europe. Forty-eight years later there were printing presses in 260 cities, and thousands of titles had been published. It is estimated that between 1452 and 1500, some ten million volumes had been produced.

ONELINER: Printed books facilitated the recovery of lost Greek and Roman texts (many via Islamic scholars), which kicked off the Renaissance and the Scientific and later Industrial Revolutions.

OTHER CONNECTIONS: None

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lerner, Fred. The Story of Libraries from the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age. New York: Continuum, 2002.

"The Gutenberg Bible". Images of various Gutenberg printings, including pages from the 42-line Bible as well as an indulgence and other items. The British Library. http://prodigi.bl.uk/gutenbg/ Accessed March 9, 2004.