Printing press

Economic conditions and intellectual climate

The rapid economic and socio-cultural development of late medieval society in Europe created favorable conditions for Gutenberg's improved version of the printing press. The entrepreneurial spirit of emerging capitalism was changing medieval modes of production, encouraging economic thinking and improving the efficiency of traditional work processes. At the same time, the sharp rise of medieval learning and literacy amongst the middle class led to an increased demand for books which the time-consuming hand-copying method fell far short of accommodating.^[13]

Technological factors

Technologies preceding the press that led to the press's invention included: manufacturing of paper, development of ink, woodblock printing, and invention of eyeglasses.^[14] At the same time, a number of medieval products and technological processes had reached a level of maturity which allowed their potential use for printing purposes. Gutenberg took up these far-flung strands, combined them into one complete and functioning system, and perfected the printing process through all its stages by adding a number of inventions and innovations of his own.

The screw press which allowed direct pressure to be applied on a flat plane was already of great antiquity in Gutenberg's time and was used for a wide range of tasks.^[15] Introduced in the 1st century AD by the Romans, it was commonly employed in agricultural production for pressing grapes for wine and olives for oil, both of which formed an integral part of the Mediterranean and medieval diet.^[16] The device was also used from very early on in urban contexts as a cloth press for printing patterns.^[17] Gutenberg may have also been inspired by the paper presses which had spread through the German lands since the late 14th century and which worked on the same mechanical principles.^[18]

During the Islamic Golden Age, Arab Muslims adopted the Chinese craft of papermaking and developed it widely across the Muslim world, leading to a major increase in the production of manuscript texts. They also printed texts, including passages from the Qur'an. In Egypt during the Fatimid era, texts were reproduced on paper strips by hand and supplied in multiple copies to meet demand.^[19]

Gutenberg adopted the basic design, thereby mechanizing the printing process.^[20] Printing, however, put a demand on the machine quite different from pressing. Gutenberg adapted the construction so that the pressing power exerted by the platen on the paper was now applied both evenly and with the required sudden elasticity. To speed up the printing process, he introduced a movable undertable with a plane surface on which the sheets could be swiftly changed.^[21]

The concept of movable type existed prior to 15th century Europe; sporadic evidence that the typographical principle, the idea of creating a text by reusing individual characters, was known and had been cropping up since the 12th century and possibly before (the oldest known application dating back as far as the Phaistos disc). The first movable type was invented by Chinese engineer Bi Sheng in the 11th century during the Song dynasty, and a book dating to 1193 recorded the first copper movable type.^[22]

This received limited use compared to woodblock printing. The technology spread outside China, as the oldest printed book using metal movable type was the Jikji, printed in Korea in 1377 during the Goryeo era. Other notable examples include the Prüfening inscription from Germany, letter tiles from England and Altarpiece of Pellegrino II in Italy.^[23] However, the various techniques employed (imprinting, punching and assembling individual letters) did not have the refinement and efficiency needed to become widely accepted. Tsuen-Hsuin and Needham, and Briggs and Burke suggest that the movable-type printing in China and Korea was rarely employed.^[24][25]

Gutenberg greatly improved the process by treating typesetting and printing as two separate work steps. A goldsmith by profession, he created his type pieces from a lead-based alloy which suited printing purposes so well that it is still used today.^[26] The mass production of metal letters was achieved by his key invention of a special hand mould, the matrix.^[27] The Latin alphabet proved to be an enormous advantage in the process because, in contrast to logographic writing systems, it allowed the type-setter to represent any text with a theoretical minimum of only around two dozen different letters.^[28]

Another factor conducive to printing arose from the book existing in the format of the codex, which had originated in the Roman period.^[29] Considered the most important advance in the history of the book prior to printing itself, the codex had completely replaced the ancient scroll at the onset of the Middle Ages (AD 500).^[30] The codex holds considerable practical advantages over the scroll format: it is more convenient to read (by turning pages), more compact, and less costly, and both recto and verso sides could be used for writing or printing, unlike the scroll.^[31]

A fourth development was the early success of medieval papermakers at mechanizing paper manufacture. The introduction of water-powered paper mills, the first certain evidence of which dates to 1282,^[32] allowed for a massive expansion of production and replaced the laborious handcraft characteristic of both Chinese^[33] and Muslim papermaking.^[34] Papermaking centres began to multiply in the late 13th century in Italy, reducing the price of paper to one-sixth of parchment and then falling further. Papermaking centres reached Germany a century later.^[35]

Despite this it appears that the final breakthrough of paper depended just as much on the rapid spread of movable-type printing.^[36] Codices of parchment, which in terms of quality is superior to any other writing material,^[37] still had a substantial share in Gutenberg's edition of the 42-line Bible.^[38] After much experimentation, Gutenberg managed to overcome the difficulties which traditional water-based inks caused by soaking the paper, and found the formula for an oil-based ink suitable for high-quality printing with metal type.^[39]

Mass production and spread of printed books

The invention of mechanical movable type printing led to a huge increase of printing activities across Europe within only a few decades. Demand for bibles and other religious literature was one of the main drivers of the very rapid initial expansion of printing.^[50] From a single print shop in Mainz, Germany, printing had spread to no less than around 270 cities in Central, Western and Eastern Europe by the end of the 15th century.^[51] As early as 1480, there were printers active in 110 different places in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Bohemia and Poland.^[5] From that time on, it is assumed that "the printed book was in universal use in Europe".^[5]

In Italy, a center of early printing, print shops had been established in 77 cities and towns by 1500. At the end of the following century, 151 locations in Italy had seen at one time printing activities, with a total of nearly three thousand printers known to be active. Despite this proliferation, printing centres soon emerged; thus, one third of the Italian printers published in Venice.^[52]

By 1500, the printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million copies.^[5] In the following century, their output rose tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies.^[5]

European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of producing between 1,500^[53] and 3,600 impressions per workday.^[3] By comparison, Far Eastern printing, where the back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page,^[54] did not exceed an output of forty pages per day.^[4]

Of Erasmus's work, at least 750,000 copies were sold during his lifetime alone (1469–1536).^[55] In the early days of the Reformation, the revolutionary potential of bulk printing took princes and papacy alike by surprise. In the period from 1518 to 1524, the publication of books in Germany alone skyrocketed sevenfold; between 1518 and 1520, Martin Luther's tracts were distributed in 300,000 printed copies.^[56] Printed literature later played a major role in rallying support, and opposition, during the lead-up to the English Civil War, and later still the American and French Revolutions through newspapers, pamphlets and bulletins.^[57] The spread of printing also raised issues of censorship and freedom of the press.^[58]

The rapidity of typographical text production, as well as the sharp fall in unit costs, led to the issuing of the first newspapers (see Relation) which opened up an entirely new field for conveying up-to-date information to the public.^[59] Surviving pre-16th century print works, known as incunable, are collected by many of the libraries in Europe and North America.^[60]

Beyond Europe, the printing press spread primarily through colonial and missionary networks. Jesuit missionaries established the first press in Asia at Goa in 1556, where João de Bustamante served as the first printer; the press had originally been intended for Abyssinia but remained in Goa after the patriarch-designate was persuaded to stay during a stopover.^[6][61] The Portuguese Jesuit Diogo de Mesquita acquired a press during a visit to Europe in 1586 and established it at Nagasaki, where it produced ecclesiastical works in Japanese until his death in 1614.^[6] In the Philippines, the Dominicans set up the first press, which published the Doctrina Christiana in 1593.^[6] In the Ottoman Empire, non-Muslim communities operated presses from an early date: Sephardi Jews established a Hebrew press in Constantinople in 1493, followed by an Armenian press in 1567 and a Greek press in 1627. The first press to print in Arabic script for a Muslim readership was established by İbrahim Müteferrika in 1729, producing seventeen works before 1742.^[62]

Circulation of information and ideas

The printing press changed the relationship between authors and their texts. Because each copy of a printed edition was identical, it became possible for the first time to cite references precisely, and the identity and exact wording of an author mattered in ways it had not when scribal copies of the same work varied between cities.^[63] For many works produced before the printing press, the name of the author has been entirely lost.^[63] The consistency of the printed page also encouraged the adoption of page numbering, tables of contents and indices as standard features of books, though all three had existed in some manuscript traditions.^[64]

Reading habits shifted in parallel. Eisenstein describes a gradual transition "from a hearing public to a reading public" as printed texts, cheaper and more widely available than manuscripts, encouraged silent and private reading over the communal oral recitation that had been common in medieval settings.^[65] Over the following two centuries, the wider availability of printed material contributed to a rise in adult literacy across Europe, though the pace of change varied between regions.^[66]

By the end of the fifteenth century, editions of the major classical authors had been printed and circulated throughout Europe, and the printed book had come to play a central role in the diffusion of classical literature.^[67] Book production became increasingly commercial, and the first copyright laws were passed.^[68] The press was also a factor in the establishment of a community of scientists who could communicate discoveries through widely disseminated scholarly journals, contributing to the Scientific Revolution.^[69]

Not all contemporaries welcomed these developments. The Dominican friar Filippo de Strata, writing around 1473, characterised the press as a "whore" (meretrix) compared to the "virgin" pen, and argued that printers valued profit over accuracy and classical scholarship.^[70] The Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius, in his 1492 treatise De laude scriptorum manualium, argued that printing would make monks intellectually lazy, that paper books were less durable than parchment manuscripts, and that hand-copying sacred text was a spiritual discipline that mechanical reproduction could not replace.^[71] The Florentine humanist Niccolò Perotti argued in 1470 that many printed books in circulation were badly inaccurate. Gerolamo Squarzafico claimed in 1481 that most printers were illiterate, and Giorgio Merula voiced concern that printing could damage classical scholarship. Some critics also feared that religious heterodoxy would spread as biblical texts became accessible to readers without formal training.^[70]

The spread of printing also contributed to the decline of Latin as the dominant language of publication. As works were increasingly issued in the vernacular language of each region, printed texts helped to standardise the spelling and syntax of these languages, reducing their variability. Febvre and Martin conclude that "printing certainly exercised a far profounder influence on the development of the national languages than any other factor", and identify the process as one of several forces contributing to the rise of nationalism in Europe.^[8]

The economic effects of the press were similarly far-reaching. The economist Jeremiah Dittmar has shown that the presence of a printing press was associated with higher levels of city growth in the period after 1500.^[9] The publication of trade manuals and books teaching techniques such as double-entry bookkeeping increased the reliability of commercial transactions and contributed to the decline of merchant guilds and the rise of individual traders.^[72]

Rotary press

The steam-powered rotary printing press, invented in 1843 in the United States by Richard M. Hoe,^[12] ultimately allowed millions of copies of a page in a single day. Mass production of printed works flourished after the transition to rolled paper, as continuous feed allowed the presses to run at a much faster pace. Hoe's original design operated at up to 2,000 revolutions per hour where each revolution deposited 4 page images, giving the press a throughput of 8,000 pages per hour.^[77] By 1891, The New York World and Philadelphia Item were operating presses producing either 90,000 4-page sheets per hour or 48,000 8-page sheets.^[78]

In the middle of the 19th century, a separate class of jobbing presses emerged for small-format commercial work such as cards, billheads, and leaflets. The modern platen jobber descended from presses built by Stephen P. Ruggles in Boston from the 1830s and was refined by George Phineas Gordon, whose Franklin press captured so much of the market that by 1894 at least eleven firms were manufacturing Gordon-type presses. Moran estimates that between 1840 and 1940 no fewer than 120 different kinds of treadle-driven jobbers were made in the United States alone. In its development, the jobbing platen played an important part in the transformation of the printing trade, speeding the production of the mass of small items required by industry and commerce.^[79]