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Gutenberg knew, as every God-fearing German would have known, that pilgrims flocked to Aachen Cathedral every seven years to view a quartet of holy relics: the robe Mary wore on the night of Jesus’s birth; Christ’s swaddling clothes; the cloth used to wrap John the Baptist’s itinerant head;
and the loincloth worn by Jesus on the cross.
It is supposed that the young Johannes would have been exposed to the technologies of minting and goldsmithing from an early age—that he would have seen how the mint’s artisans sculpted letters and images onto steel punches that were then struck into molds for minting coins,
When it came to making tiny metal pilgrim mirrors, it is conceivable that Gutenberg would have known where to begin.
Statements given during the resulting court case hint at some shared, hidden project: there was talk of a press involved in the mirror-making, while
Gutenberg’s former partners were bought off with generous settlements;
Gutenberg sank the money into his new workshop and promptly defaulted upon the interest payments.
The prize that Gutenberg had dangled in front of his financier was, of course, the invention of movable type:
the promise that a book could be replicated over and over again with minimal effort.
a handwritten Bible commanded a price equivalent to a laborer’s yearly wage, the ability to print an endless run of books must have appe...
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but the fifty or so partial copies that do exist reveal what must have been a truly radical item,
Gothic textura,
scribes known as rubricators
Paleographers, who study historical handwriting and printed texts, agree that by 1450, Gutenberg had printed this, his first book.
In Iraq, for instance, archaeologists have unearthed 8,500-year-old stone seals with which the ancient Mesopotamians made marks on clay jars and boxes.36
The ancient Egyptians used wooden stamps to impress hieroglyphics on clay tiles
Well, no. Four hundred years before Gutenberg, a Chinese commoner named Bi Sheng preempted the German.
This is movable type, almost to its dictionary definition:
although Shen Kuo’s account of Bi Sheng’s system has the confident tone of an eyewitness account, no physical evidence survives to corroborate it.
his invention faded away before it made any lasting impact.44
Wang Zhen summarized Bi Sheng’s invention of earthenware type before explaining how he had improved upon it to create the new and intricate system of wooden type with which he had printed the book.
the resin in the entire tree will gather at the warm spot and flow out,” as one writer explained), which was then burned in a bamboo tunnel to capture the purified soot.51 The soot was mixed with animal glue and sundry other substances such as musk, mother-of-pearl, egg whites, cinnabar, black beans, and camphor in order to achieve the desired consistency, fragrance, and color.52 Finally, the gummy suspension was poured into a mold—decorated with delicate, sculpted designs, ink molds were works of art in their own right—to produce a cake of solid ink for safekeeping.53
Chinese paper was too delicate to withstand the pressure needed to form a crisp impression, requiring that printers use handheld brushes rather than firm mechanical presses to impress their paper onto their type.
font representing a usable fraction of the 50,000 or so extant Chinese characters could run to tens of thousands of individual types. (Others told of vast fonts of 200,000 types or more.)58 Wooden
printers found that it was often faster to cut entire pages in wood, as had been done since time immemorial, than it was to set, print from, and distribute movable type on a page-by-page basis.
Though he had not invented the idea of movable type, if Gutenberg is to be credited with anything it must be that he made it work—that he systematically tackled each aspect of a finicky, delicate process until he had perfected it.
seven millimeters in height.
a careful whack from a mallet. This produced a matrix (from the Latin for “mother”)
carrying an indented, forward-facing impression of the character.65
The device alluded to in the Strasbourg court case, the four-part contraption that was so sensitive it had to be dismantled in case someone might discover its use, was a mold for casting metal characters.
Once their composing stick was full of sorts, arranged upside down and left to right, a compositor would gingerly slide its contents onto a tray called a galley. Line by line, a page of type took shape upon the galley, and
Gutenberg used instead something closer to the vivid, viscid oil paints
had the right viscosity for printing.
each page of the Bible that came off the press was a revolution writ small.
The Bibles themselves betray the precise point at which their creator’s financial worries overcame his sense of aesthetics:
Like seeds blown before a forest fire, Mainz’s printers were scattered across the Continent: within fifteen years of the publication of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible there was a printing press in every country in Europe, and the making of books had changed forever.
More books were made in the first half century after Gutenberg’s Bible than in the preceding thousand years put together, and book production only accelerated from there:
and book production subsequently more than tripled every hundred years.
Not everyone was happy about the new development.
particularly among those who saw a moral value in the patient copying-out of texts.
Writing] is a maiden with a pen, a harlot in print.”
Books are a narcotic, as Franz Kafka wrote centuries later, and
By the nineteenth century, however, demand was outstripping supply, and Gutenberg’s centuries-old system was in dire need of an upgrade.
in 1772, a Swiss typefounder (that is, a maker of metal type) named Wilhelm Haas designed an all-metal screw press. His
More iron presses followed, culminating in 1803 with the “Stanhope” press, designed in London by a notoriously obsessive politician, inventor, and aristocrat named Charles Stanhope.
an impression could be made with a single pull of a lever rather than the laborious tightening and loosening of a screw.
There were more gears, levers, and decorations to marvel at, certainly, and it was physically much easier to print a page of type, but they remained painfully manual devices.
the nineteenth century’s continuous innovation in printing technology helped newspapers grow from four-page weeklies in the 1820s to sixteen-page dailies by the 1880s—
