Economic conditions and intellectual climate

The economic and cultural changes of late medieval Europe helped to create conditions in which Gutenberg's printing press could succeed commercially. The growth of trade and commerce had expanded the urban middle class, while the multiplication of universities from the twelfth century onward had increased demand for books. Hand-copying was slow and expensive, and by the fifteenth century the supply of manuscripts fell far short of this growing demand.^[1]

Technological factors

Gutenberg's press combined four pre-existing technologies that had each reached a level of development sufficient for printing by the mid-fifteenth century: the screw press, movable type, the codex book format, and mechanized paper production. Gutenberg integrated these into a single working system and added a number of innovations of his own, including a hand mould for casting type and an oil-based ink suited to metal type.^[2]

The first of these was the screw press, which allowed direct pressure to be applied on a flat plane. It was already of great antiquity in Gutenberg's time and was used for a wide range of tasks.^[3] 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.^[4] The device was also used from very early on in urban contexts as a cloth press for printing patterns.^[5] 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.^[6]

Gutenberg adopted the basic design, thereby mechanizing the printing process.^[7] 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.^[8]

The second element, movable type, existed in some form 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.^[9]

Woodblock printing remained the dominant technique in East Asia. 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.^[10] 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, in part because the large number of characters in logographic writing systems made movable type less practical than in alphabetic systems.^[11][12] Gutenberg's use of the Latin alphabet was a practical advantage in this respect because it allowed the type-setter to represent any text with a relatively small set of characters.^[13]

The third element was the codex book format, which had originated in the Roman period.^[14] 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).^[15] 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.^[16]

The fourth element was paper. Medieval papermakers had succeeded in mechanizing paper manufacture: the introduction of water-powered paper mills, the first certain evidence of which dates to 1282,^[17] allowed for a massive expansion of production and replaced the laborious handcraft characteristic of both Chinese^[18] and Muslim papermaking.^[19] Papermaking centers 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 centers reached Germany a century later.^[20]

Despite this it appears that the final breakthrough of paper depended just as much on the rapid spread of movable-type printing.^[21] Codices of parchment, which in terms of quality is superior to any other writing material,^[22] still had a substantial share in Gutenberg's edition of the 42-line Bible.^[23] 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.^[24]

Gutenberg's press

Gutenberg's work on the printing press began in approximately 1436 when he partnered with Andreas Dritzehn, who had previously instructed in gem-cutting, and Andreas Heilmann, owner of a paper mill.^[25] However, it was not until a 1439 lawsuit against Gutenberg that an official record existed; witnesses' testimony discussed Gutenberg's types, an inventory of metals (including lead), and his type molds.^[25]

Having previously worked as a professional goldsmith, Gutenberg made skillful use of the knowledge of metals he had learned as a craftsman. He was the first to make type from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, which was critical for producing durable type that produced high-quality printed books and proved to be much better suited for printing than all other known materials. To create these lead types, Gutenberg used what is considered one of his most ingenious inventions,^[25] a special matrix enabling the quick and precise molding of new type blocks from a uniform template. His type case is estimated to have contained around 290 separate letter boxes, most of which were required for special characters, ligatures, punctuation marks, and so forth.^[26]

Gutenberg is also credited with the introduction of an oil-based ink which was more durable than the previously used water-based inks. As printing material he used both paper and vellum (high-quality parchment). In the Gutenberg Bible, Gutenberg made a trial of color printing for a few of the page headings, present only in some copies.^[27] A later work, the Mainz Psalter of 1453, presumably designed by Gutenberg but published under the imprint of his successors Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer, had elaborate red and blue printed initials.^[28]

Function and approach

A printing press, in its classical form, is a standing mechanism, ranging from 5 to 7 feet (1.5 to 2.1 m) long, 3 feet (0.91 m) wide, and 7 feet (2.1 m) tall.^[30] A compositor set the small individual metal letters known as type into the desired lines of text.^[31] Several lines were arranged at once and placed in a wooden frame known as a galley. Once the correct number of pages were composed, the galleys were laid face up in a frame called a forme,^[31] which was placed onto a flat stone known as the bed.^[31]

The type was inked using two ink balls, pads of leather stuffed with wool or horsehair and mounted on wooden handles. The leather was usually sheepskin, though calfskin and dogskin were also used.^[31] The ink was distributed evenly by pressing the two balls together before applying them to the type. A sheet of dampened paper was placed on the tympan and held in position with small pins. A frisket, a thin frame covered in paper with cut-out apertures matching the type, was folded over the sheet to protect the margins from ink.^[31]

The tympan and frisket were then folded down so that the paper lay on the inked type. The bed was rolled under the platen using a windlass mechanism operated by a small handle called the rounce. The impression was made by turning a long handle known as the bar, which drove a screw to press the platen onto the paper.^[31] The springiness of the tympan assembly caused the bar to spring back after each pull. The bed was then wound out, the tympan and frisket opened, and the printed sheet removed. Such presses were worked entirely by hand until the development of iron presses after around 1800, some of which could be operated by steam power.^[32]

Printing revolution

The printing revolution occurred when the spread of the printing press facilitated the wide circulation of information and ideas, a process that Eisenstein termed an "agent of change" in the societies that it reached.^[33] Its consequences included the mass production of books, shifts in reading habits and the relationship between authors and texts, the decline of Latin as the language of scholarship, and new economic patterns in the book trade.^[33]

Mass production and spread in Europe

See also: List of early modern newspapers

The invention of mechanical movable type printing led to a rapid 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.^[35] From a single print shop in Mainz, Germany, printing had spread to around 270 cities in Central, Western and Eastern Europe by the end of the 15th century.^[36] 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.^[37] The historians Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin conclude that by this date the printed book was in universal use in Europe.^[38]

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 centers soon emerged; thus, one third of the Italian printers published in Venice.^[39]

By 1500, the printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million copies.^[40] In the following century, their output rose tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies.^[40] European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of producing between 1,500^[41] and 3,600 impressions per workday.^[29] By comparison, Far Eastern printing, where the back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page,^[42] did not exceed an output of forty pages per day.^[43]

The scale of the new industry can be seen in individual sales figures: of Erasmus's work, at least 750,000 copies were sold during his lifetime alone (1469–1536).^[44] In the early days of the Reformation, the volume of bulk printing took princes and papacy alike by surprise. In 1518 and 1519, Martin Luther became Europe's most published author; his 45 original works, written in both Latin and German, were reprinted by printers across Germany and reached a total of 291 editions.^[45] Many were short pamphlets of eight pages or fewer, which could be produced cheaply and distributed quickly.^[46] In the period from 1518 to 1524, the publication of books in Germany alone rose sevenfold; between 1518 and 1520, Luther's tracts were distributed in 300,000 printed copies.^[47]

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 provided a new means of conveying up-to-date information to the public.^[48] Pettegree argues that the market for printed news grew directly out of the Reformation: printers who had built a readership through Luther's pamphlets sustained it by producing news sheets covering battles, natural disasters, and public affairs. These news pamphlets closely resembled the Reformation Flugschriften in format, typically running to four or eight pages in quarto. In the early seventeenth century, a German publisher began issuing bulletins of news on a regular schedule, creating the first weekly newspaper; the format spread through German cities and remained the principal news medium of northern Europe for over a century.^[49] Surviving pre-16th century print works, known as incunable, are collected by many of the libraries in Europe and North America.^[50]

Industrial printing presses

Although the basic design of the wooden handpress remained recognizable throughout its long history, its construction and performance improved considerably between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Wooden screws were replaced by metal ones, probably by around 1550, and the tympan and frisket were adopted as standard fittings.^[55] Around 1620, the Dutch cartographer and printer Willem Blaeu introduced a press with a more advanced hose arrangement and a more reliable mechanism for moving the type form into position beneath the platen. Joseph Moxon, writing in the 1680s, considered the Blaeu press superior to the English presses then in use.^[56] Further refinements followed over the next two centuries: wooden components were progressively reinforced or replaced with metal, the straight lever bar was bent into a curve so that the pressman could swing it more easily, and the screw dimensions were adjusted to suit particular press sizes. By the closing years of the wooden-press era, the Ramage press incorporated a mechanism that returned the platen automatically after each impression, replacing the less reliable rebound action of earlier designs.^[57] Clapham estimates that the cumulative effect of these improvements raised the productivity of the press by a factor of three or four between the printing of the Gutenberg Bible and the late sixteenth century.^[56]

At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the mechanics of the hand-operated Gutenberg-style press were still essentially unchanged, although new materials in its construction, among other innovations, had gradually improved its printing efficiency. By 1800, Lord Stanhope had built a press completely from cast iron which reduced the force required by 90%, while doubling the size of the printed area.^[32] With a capacity of 480 pages per hour, the Stanhope press doubled the output of the old-style press.^[58]

Two ideas altered the design of the printing press radically: first, the use of steam power for running the machinery, and second the replacement of the printing flatbed with the rotary motion of cylinders. Both elements were for the first time successfully implemented by the German printer Friedrich Koenig in a series of press designs devised between 1802 and 1818.^[59] Having moved to London in 1804, Koenig soon met Thomas Bensley and secured financial support for his project in 1807.^[32] Patented in 1810, Koenig had designed a steam press "much like a hand press connected to a steam engine."^[32] In April 1811, the first production trial of this model occurred. He produced his machine with assistance from German engineer Andreas Friedrich Bauer.^[32]

In 1814, Koenig and Bauer sold two of their first models to The Times in London, capable of 1,100 impressions per hour. The first edition so printed was on 28 November 1814.^[32] They improved the early model so that it could print on both sides of a sheet at once, beginning the long process of making newspapers available to a mass audience.^[32]

Later developments

During the twentieth century, printing technology moved beyond the letterpress principle. Offset printing, which transfers an image from a plate to a rubber blanket and then to paper, was developed in the early 1900s and had become the dominant commercial printing method by mid-century, valued for its speed and consistent image quality on large runs.^[64] The introduction of phototypesetting in the 1960s and 1970s replaced hot-metal type composition with photographic methods, and the spread of desktop publishing software from the mid-1980s shifted much of the typesetting process to personal computers.^[65] By the early twenty-first century, digital printing had made short-run and on-demand production commercially viable, while offset remained the standard for high-volume work.^[66]

Authorship and reading

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.^[67] For many works produced before the printing press, the name of the author has been entirely lost.^[67] 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.^[68]

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.^[69] She argues that this new reading public differed in kind from earlier audiences. Where a sermon or speech had required listeners to gather in one place at one time, a printed text could be read alone, in private, by people scattered across a city or a continent. The reading public was therefore more dispersed than a hearing public, and also more atomistic and individualistic: its members were often unknown to each other, and their links were impersonal ones formed through bookshops, coffeehouses, reading rooms and subscription lists rather than through physical assembly. Pamphlets and news-sheets could reach this dispersed audience directly, allowing arguments to circulate without the mediation of preachers, lecturers or town criers. Eisenstein adds that classical models of citizenship, which envisaged orators addressing assembled crowds in the public square, suited such a public less well than they had suited the audiences of the ancient world.^[70] 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.^[71]

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.^[72] Between 1495 and 1515, the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, drawing on the knowledge of Greek scholars who had arrived in Italy following the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, published the greater part of surviving Greek literature in printed editions; without the press, the equivalent recovery of Latin texts had taken over a century.^[73] Book production became increasingly commercial, and the first copyright laws were passed.^[74]

The press also changed how scholars worked. Eisenstein argues that historians of science have undervalued the role of printing in the Scientific Revolution: although Latin scientific treatises rarely became bestsellers, the shift from script to print preceded the conceptual revolutions of the sixteenth century rather than following them. In her account, Ptolemy's Almagest had remained authoritative as an astronomical text for some fourteen hundred years, whereas Copernicus's De revolutionibus (1543) was surpassed in less than a hundred. The difference, she argues, lay less in the genius of individual investigators than in the replacement of scribe by printer: printed editions of classical and contemporary texts allowed natural philosophers to compare different versions of a text systematically, to identify accumulated copyists' errors, and to build on each other's observations across a wider geographical range than scribal exchange could reach.^[75]

Science

Several features later associated with the modern scientific community had already begun to take shape in the era of incunabula, well before the appearance of the first learned journals in the late seventeenth century: serial publication of new findings, the preservation of data across generations, a shift from professional secrecy to public disclosure, and feedback between informed readers and responsive authors and editors.^[76] Eisenstein also stresses the role of repeatable images. Hand-copied medical and botanical illustrations had degenerated over time, with the result that classical authorities had warned against trusting pictures and counselled direct inspection of nature. Printed anatomical plates, herbal woodcuts and star charts could be reproduced without further loss of detail, allowing observers such as Andreas Vesalius to disseminate carefully drawn figures alongside their texts and making cumulative correction of the visual record possible for the first time.^[77]

Politics, state and church

Rulers and governments adapted quickly to the new medium. Princes who had previously relied on manuscript proclamations turned to print to publish declarations of war, treaties and disputed points of policy in pamphlet form.^[78] Eisenstein describes the campaign mounted by Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s in support of Henry VIII's break with Rome as the first by any European government to exploit the propaganda potential of the press, citing the historian Geoffrey Elton; Cromwell co-ordinated a coterie of printers and publicists to issue vernacular tracts in defense of royal supremacy, and Parliament was used in parallel to formalize the breach.^[79] On similar lines, the French monarchy used printed bulletins to evoke the patrie as the realm of France and to represent the king as its personification.^[78] Print thus gave early modern states a means of conducting what one source quoted by Eisenstein called a "psychological war" alongside their military and political operations.^[78]

The political reach of print provoked sustained efforts at control. Eisenstein traces a series of pre-Reformation papal and episcopal censorship measures, beginning with the Mainz archbishop's licensing edict of 1485 and culminating in the Leo X decree of 1515 that required all translations to be vetted by bishops or inquisitors. After the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation papacy went further: the first Papal Index under Paul IV in 1559 forbade lay Catholics to read certain books, and the 1564 Index of Pius IV reiterated the prohibition on vernacular Bibles. Secular governments introduced licensing systems requiring printers to obtain authorization before issuing new works, and in some jurisdictions banned imported books outright.^[80] These measures had only partial success, since printed material crossed borders easily and clandestine presses operated in many cities; the contest between authorities seeking to regulate the press and those seeking to circulate forbidden material became a recurring feature of European political life for the next three centuries.^[80] Andrew Pettegree argues that print was particularly important in the confessional conflicts of the later sixteenth century, including the French Wars of Religion and the Dutch Revolt: in territories where open Protestant preaching was suppressed, pamphlets, broadsheets and clandestine printing became the main vehicle by which Reformed ideas reached a wider public, and Catholic polemic in turn responded in kind.^[81] Printed literature later played a major role in rallying support, and opposition, during the lead-up to the English Civil War, and later the American and French Revolutions, through newspapers, pamphlets and bulletins.^[82]

Quantitative work in economics has tested some of these claims. Jeremiah Dittmar has shown that cities where printing was established in the fifteenth century grew around 60 percent faster than comparable cities without presses between 1500 and 1600, using distance from Mainz as an instrument for the timing of press adoption.^[83] Jared Rubin, using the same instrument, estimates that cities with at least one press by 1500 were 52 percentage points more likely to have adopted Protestantism by 1530, 42 by 1560, and 29 by 1600; the declining effect suggests that the press mattered most in the early phase of the Reformation, before politics and the wider diffusion of printing took over.^[84]

These findings have shaped a wider debate. In a survey of the literature, Sascha Becker, Steven Pfaff and Jared Rubin distinguish between supply-side accounts of the Reformation, which attribute its spread to institutional or technological factors such as the press, and demand-side accounts, which emphasize the religious, political and economic grievances that drew populations and rulers towards reform.^[85] Subsequent work has refined the picture: Davide Cantoni finds that German princes were much more likely to adopt the Reformation if their immediate neighbors had done so, attributing the apparent effect of distance from Wittenberg to strategic neighborhood interactions rather than print exposure alone.^[86] Becker, Yuan Hsiao, Pfaff and Rubin extend the analysis by reconstructing Luther's personal network from his surviving correspondence, recorded visits, and student enrollments at the University of Wittenberg before 1523. They report that 36 percent of cities with any documented contact with Luther had adopted the Reformation by 1530, against 6 percent of cities without such contact, and argue that personal ties combined with trade-route diffusion explain the spatial pattern of early adoption more fully than printing alone.^[87] Other studies have looked at university networks, pre-existing religious infrastructure, and competition within local printing markets, with the result that the press is now generally treated as one channel among several rather than the single decisive cause.^[88]

Some historians have placed printing in a longer arc of political change. Benedict Anderson argues that the gradual erosion of three older "axiomatic" cultural conceptions, namely that a sacred script offered privileged access to truth, that society was naturally organized under monarchs ruling by divine dispensation, and that time was indistinguishable from cosmology, was one of the preconditions for the rise of national consciousness in the late eighteenth century. Print-capitalism, by displacing sacred languages with vernaculars and by accustoming readers to news organized in homogeneous, calendrical time, was for Anderson a central mechanism in this displacement, and contributed to the long decline of the doctrine of the divine right of kings.^[89]

Negative views

Not all contemporaries welcomed these developments. The Dominican friar Filippo de Strata, writing around 1473, characterized the press as a "whore" (meretrix) compared to the "virgin" pen, and argued that printers valued profit over accuracy and classical scholarship.^[90] 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.^[91] 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. The Swiss physician Paracelsus and his followers urged practitioners to reject inherited textual authority, repeating the Galenic slogan that "the sick should be the doctor's books" and promoting direct observation over book learning. Eisenstein notes, however, that Paracelsus himself made full use of print to broadcast his views, and that the slogan made better sense in scribal culture, where hand-copied medical illustrations had been prone to degeneration, than in print culture, where repeatable woodblock images allowed observations from nature to be preserved more reliably.^[92] Some critics also feared that religious heterodoxy would spread as biblical texts became accessible to readers without formal training.^[90]

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 standardize the spelling and syntax of these languages, reducing their variability. Febvre and Martin argue that printing exercised a greater influence on the development of national languages than any other single factor, and identify the process as one of several forces contributing to the rise of nationalism in Europe.^[93]