Movable type1/14/2024 ![]() Reviewing a few histories of the printed word could lead one to believe that is the entire story. Two months after 95 Theses’ publication, Luther’s writing would begin to speed the transformation of Europe (and later the world) to the predominantly literate, information-flooded globe we know today. Luther was amazed to see his ideas spreading widely within weeks, an achievement that would have been impossible without mass printing. By 1517, when Martin Luther published his 95 Theses, those presses were producing a total of one million books per year. By 1500, printing presses had spread to 250 European cities. With the success of the Gutenberg Bible, a new era in European history dawned. The print run of about 160 to 180 copies soon sold out. That year, he produced a complete Bible, 1,275 pages of 42 lines each. But it took till 1454 for his world-altering work to truly succeed. Gutenberg’s plan began bearing fruit in 1450, when he printed a short text. Gutenberg saw a way to revolutionize printing with movable type: individual, three-dimensional metal letters that could be arranged in a frame, covered in ink, used to print many pages in rapid succession, and rearranged in new frames as needed. The book had become established in Europe long before, in the 4th century, but for a thousand years it could only be reproduced through impractical methods: either laborious hand-copying-which limited the number of copies and the diversity of the printed texts-or woodblock printing, which involved carving each individual page in one unchangeable piece. The history of mass printing in the West is often explained more or less like this: In the 1440s, a German man named Johannes Gutenberg founded a book-printing workshop. Some of those people-and some of the oldest printed texts in the world-were Buddhist. Rather, the arrival of mass-produced books relied on the actions of many people over centuries. But they did not emerge fully formed from the mind of any one person. “All we would have would be the results: an idea that changed the world, and a book that is among the most astonishing objects ever created, a jewel of art and technology, one that emerged fully formed.”īooks are astonishing pieces of art and technology. “A few records less, and we would not now be revering the Gutenberg Bible as his,” historian John Man has written about the 15th-century German printer Johannes Gutenberg. It’s movable type, and its story is well known, widely repeated-but often incomplete. It’s an invention that changed the world utterly, ushering in massive social change, splitting apart a religion once considered beyond question, and making the advent of Buddhism in the West possible.
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