The Machine That Changed Reading

Imagine a world in which every book has to be copied by hand, letter by letter and page by page. If you wanted your own copy of a long book, someone would have to sit at a desk and write the whole thing out, one word at a time. For centuries, that was how books were made in Europe. Because copying took a great deal of time and skill, books were rare and expensive, and most people never owned a single one.

In the middle of the fifteenth century, a man named Johannes Gutenberg changed this. Working in the German city of Mainz, he developed a printing press that used movable metal type. Each letter was a separate small piece of metal, and these pieces could be arranged into words and lines, covered with ink and pressed onto paper. When a page was finished, the letters were taken apart and used again for the next one.

What made Gutenberg's system so successful was not one brilliant invention but the way several ideas worked together. Along with metal type that could be used again and again, he used an oil-based ink that worked well on metal. The press itself was adapted from presses that were already being used to make wine or paper. Together, these parts allowed printers to produce pages far more quickly than anyone could copy them by hand. His most famous work, the Gutenberg Bible, was printed in the 1450s, and it is still admired today for the beauty of its pages.

Gutenberg, however, was not the first person to print with movable type. In China, a man named Bi Sheng had made movable type from clay as early as the eleventh century. In Korea, a book called Jikji was printed with movable metal type in 1377, long before the Gutenberg Bible appeared.

In Europe, the new technology caught on remarkably quickly. Within a few decades, printing workshops had opened in many European cities. As more and more books were produced, they became cheaper and far more common, and many more people could afford to own them.

Printing also changed the speed at which ideas could travel. A text that once had to be copied slowly by hand could now be printed many times and carried across borders. This became clear during the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century, when printed texts helped new religious ideas spread across Europe far faster than would have been possible before.

There was a quieter effect, too. Before printing, two handwritten copies of the same text might spell the same word in different ways. When many identical copies of a text are printed, every reader sees the same spelling and the same grammar. Over time, printing helped to make spelling and grammar more standard, which is one reason why spelling is so consistent in the books we read today.

Gutenberg did not invent reading, and he was not the first to use movable type. However, by making several ideas work together in the right place at the right time, he paved the way for the world of books that we know today. If you have ever bought a cheap book to read on a long journey, you have a workshop in Mainz to thank.