The Printing Press

For most of European history, a book was not manufactured. It was written out, letter by letter, by hand. In the monasteries where most copying was done, a scribe sat at a sloping desk in a cold room, ruling faint lines and working through a text that had itself been copied from another copy. The process was extraordinarily laborious. A large Bible on parchment might occupy a skilled copyist for the better part of a year, and the parchment alone consumed the hides of a whole herd of calves. Books were therefore rare, and their price put them far beyond ordinary people: a single fine manuscript could cost as much as a house or a small farm. Reading was the privilege of the Church, the universities and the wealthy, and what was read was controlled by the institutions that owned the books. When paper began to arrive from the Islamic world, through Spain and Italy, the raw material grew cheaper — but the human bottleneck remained. Every copy still had to be made by a hand that could grow tired, bored or careless.

And hands make mistakes. This is the quieter tragedy of the manuscript age. Each time a text was copied, small errors were introduced — a skipped line, a misread word, a confident correction of something that had not been wrong. Those errors were then faithfully reproduced by the next scribe, and the next, so that over centuries the copies drifted steadily away from the original. Handwriting styles varied from region to region, and a script that was perfectly legible in one country could baffle a reader in another. Nothing was standardised: not spelling, not the shapes of letters, not even the way a page was laid out, so scholars comparing two versions often could not tell whether a difference was the author's or the copyist's. Diagrams were worse still, since each redrawing distorted them further, until an astronomical chart had quietly become useless.

Print, it should be said at once, was not a European idea. Woodblock printing had been practised in China for centuries, and it was there, in the eleventh century, that movable type made of ceramic is credited to a craftsman named Bi Sheng. Metal movable type was developed further in Korea, where the Buddhist text known as the Jikji was printed in 1377 — decades before anything comparable appeared in Europe. These were real, working technologies, used to spread scripture, law and literature. What they lacked was an alphabet of two dozen letters: for scripts with thousands of characters, casting a full set of type was a monumental undertaking, and woodblocks often remained more practical. Whether knowledge of these Asian methods travelled west is disputed by historians; no direct line of transmission has been proved. In Europe, at any rate, the problem was smaller — and the prize for solving it very large.

Johannes Gutenberg was a goldsmith from Mainz who knew metals, moulds and fine tools, and who spent years in secretive, debt-ridden experiment. His achievement was not one flash of invention but the assembly, around the 1440s, of a cluster of solutions into a single working system. He needed type that would survive thousands of impressions, so an alloy was developed — lead for cheapness, tin and antimony for hardness — that melted at a low temperature and did not shrink as it cooled. He needed thousands of identical letters, so a hand mould was devised: an adjustable box into which a letter punch was fitted, so that fresh type could be cast in seconds, each piece exactly the same height as the rest. He needed ink that would cling to metal rather than bead up on it, so a sticky, oil-based ink was mixed, closer to paint than to the water-based ink used by scribes. And he needed even pressure across a whole page, which was found in the screw press already used for wine and olives.

The process itself is best described in the order in which it was done. First, the type was cast and sorted into cases, capitals above and small letters below. Then the compositor, working from a manuscript propped in front of him, set the letters upside down and back to front in a composing stick, adding thin spacers to make each line the same width. Once a full page had been built line by line, the whole block was locked up tight in an iron frame so that not a single letter could shift. Ink was then applied with leather balls stuffed with wool, dabbed across the face of the type. Paper, slightly dampened so that it would take the impression cleanly, was laid on and held in place, after which the bed was slid under the press and the platen was screwed down hard. The sheet was lifted, hung on a line to dry, and the whole sequence was repeated.

What came out of that workshop was not a crude prototype but a masterpiece. The Gutenberg Bible, printed around 1455, was set in a dense Latin type imitating the finest handwriting of the day, and it remains one of the most beautiful books ever made. Roughly 180 copies are thought to have been produced, some on paper and some on vellum; fewer than fifty survive today, and many of those are incomplete. Gutenberg, however, did not grow rich on it. He had borrowed heavily from a financier, Johann Fust, and when Fust sued him — the case was settled in 1455, as the Bible was being finished — Gutenberg lost control of much of the workshop and its equipment. Fust, in partnership with Gutenberg's foreman Peter Schöffer, went on printing. Gutenberg's own later years are poorly documented; he died in Mainz in 1468, honoured but not wealthy — the man who solves the problem is rarely the man who collects the money.

The technology escaped almost immediately. Printers trained in Mainz scattered across Europe, and workshops opened in Italy, France, the Low Countries, Spain, England and beyond. By 1500 presses were operating in hundreds of towns, and millions of books were in circulation; the surviving works of that first half-century are known as incunabula, from the Latin for "swaddling clothes" — books from the infancy of print. Prices collapsed. What had been prohibitive became merely expensive, and then, for a pamphlet of a few pages, almost trivial. A whole trade grew up around the press: publishers, booksellers, editors, type-founders and apprentices. And because hundreds of identical copies could now be produced at once, an argument no longer had to be carried from town to town on horseback. It could be printed, packed onto a cart and disseminated across a continent in weeks.

The first great demonstration came in 1517, when an Augustinian friar, Martin Luther, set out ninety-five theses attacking the sale of indulgences. Similar complaints had been made before and had died quietly; this time they were printed, reprinted and translated, and within a few years Luther was the most published author in Europe. Cheap pamphlets in plain German carried the quarrel to shopkeepers and farmers, and his translation of the Bible into the vernacular put scripture into the hands of people never permitted to read it for themselves. The Church, which had held the written word for a thousand years, lost control of the argument. The response was censorship: books were banned, printers were licensed, and from 1559 a formal Index of prohibited books was maintained in Rome. Governments followed with the first laws against seditious printing, and writers and printers were persecuted, imprisoned and occasionally executed for heresy. None of it worked for long. Suppressing a manuscript meant seizing one object; suppressing a printed book meant finding a thousand.

The quieter effects ran deeper. Science was transformed less by the words than by the pictures and numbers: an astronomer in Kraków and one in Padua could at last consult the same diagram and the same star table, and argue about the sky rather than about whose copy was wrong. Knowledge became cumulative because it became reliable. Languages hardened, too. As printers chose one spelling over another for convenience, the vernaculars were standardised, dialects gave way to national tongues, and people who had never met began to feel they belonged to one reading public. Not everything printed was true, of course: forgeries, rumours and vicious propaganda were mass-produced as cheerfully as scripture. That is the honest comparison with the internet, which arrived five centuries later and did much the same double work: information was democratised, authority was destabilised, and a great deal of nonsense was disseminated at the speed of the truth. The press did not make Europe good. It made Europe loud, argumentative and impossible to govern in the old way.