Academic Reading: 2

The Invention of the Printing Press

Before the middle of the fifteenth century, every book in Europe had to be copied by hand, usually by monks working in monastery workshops. Producing a single copy of the Bible could take a scribe more than a year of careful work, and the finished book was so expensive that only wealthy institutions, such as churches and universities, could afford to own one. As a result, very few people outside the clergy ever had the chance to read a book at all.

This situation changed dramatically after a German craftsman named Johannes Gutenberg developed a new method of printing in the city of Mainz around 1450. Gutenberg's key innovation was not the printing press itself, since simple presses already existed for pressing grapes and olives, but rather his system of movable metal type. Instead of carving an entire page onto a single wooden block, Gutenberg cast individual metal letters that could be arranged, used, and then rearranged to print completely different pages. This meant that a single set of letters could be reused endlessly, making it possible to produce many identical copies of a text far more quickly than any scribe could write them by hand. His most famous work, known today as the Gutenberg Bible, was completed around 1455.

Within fifty years of Gutenberg's invention, printing presses had spread to cities across Europe, and the number of books in circulation increased enormously. Because printed books were far cheaper than handwritten ones, more people could afford to buy them, and literacy gradually became more common among merchants, craftsmen, and other people outside the church. Printing also allowed new ideas to travel faster than before; writers no longer had to rely on a small number of hand-copied manuscripts to reach an audience. Many historians argue that this rapid spread of information helped fuel later movements such as the Reformation and the Renaissance, since both depended on the wide distribution of texts that questioned established authority and encouraged new ways of thinking.