The movable-type revolution

Movable type as a concept is older than Gutenberg. Bi Sheng in 11th-century China cast ceramic characters; Korean foundries printed with bronze type from the 13th century onwards. What Gutenberg’s Mainz workshop assembled around 1450 was a different thing: a system in which four components reinforced each other.

The punch–matrix–mould technique let a type founder cut a single hardened-steel punch for each letter, strike it into a soft copper matrix, clamp the matrix into an adjustable hand-mould, and pour molten lead alloy through it. Out came an identical sort, body-height consistent across the entire fount. Multiply across a Latin alphabet with ligatures, abbreviations and contextual variants — roughly 290 sorts in Gutenberg’s Bible type — and you have a typecase that can compose any text, redistribute the type, and compose the next.

Oil-based ink, distinct from the water-based inks used for manuscript copying and xylography, was thick enough to hold its position on a metal forme and transfer cleanly to dampened paper under pressure.

The screw press was an existing technology — wine, olive, paper and cloth presses had used the same principle for centuries. The printing press added a platen large enough to take a page-sized forme and a tympan-and-frisket assembly that held the paper in register over the type.

Paper was already a continental commodity. Italian and German mills had been producing rag paper at scale for over a century. Cheap paper made what the workshop did economically possible.

None of these components is impressive alone. The achievement was the system — and the realisation, presumably arrived at over the Mainz workshop years, that the system would scale.

The Mainz workshop fragmented in 1462, after Adolph of Nassau’s sack of the city. Printers trained at Mainz, or trained by people trained at Mainz, dispersed.

The fastest diffusion was south. Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer stayed in Mainz and built the standard from which others worked — the Mainz Psalter (1457) is theirs, as is the 48-line Bible (Mainz, 1462), attributed to their workshop. Johann Mentelin opened the first Strasbourg press around 1460. By 1465 the first Italian press was operating at Subiaco, near Rome; by 1469 print had reached Venice, which within a decade became the largest print centre in Europe.

Nicolas Jenson in Venice (c. 1470 onwards) cut the first fully resolved roman type — the humanist hand mapped to metal. Erhard Ratdolt, working between Venice and Augsburg, took on mathematical and astronomical books, demonstrating that the press could handle complex diagrammatic content without manuscript labour. Anton Koberger in Nuremberg ran twenty-four presses and a continent-wide distribution network — the first industrial-scale print operation.

William Caxton brought print to England, setting up at Westminster in 1476. Aldus Manutius opened the Aldine Press in Venice in 1495 and within five years had introduced the pocket octavo edition, the italic type, and the printed scholarly edition of the Greek classics. By 1500, presses were active in more than 200 European cities. The works printed in this half-century — the period scholars call the incunable era, from the Latin for “cradle” — number roughly 30,000 editions surviving today.