Gutenberg (ca. 1450-1480) & The Impact of Printing
Before the printing press, books were produced by scribes (at first, primarily based in monasteries, although by the 12th century there were many lay copiers serving the university market). The process of writing out an entire book by hand was as labor-intensive as it sounds (try it some time): so much so that a dozen volumes constituted a library, and a hundred books was an awe- inspiring collection.
This remained true until the invention of movable type, the
perfection of which is attributed to Johannes Gutenberg
(although the Chinese had it several centuries earlier, and
a Dutch fellow named Coster may have had some crude
form a decade earlier). Gutenberg, although a man of
vision, did not personally profit from his invention. He
worked for over a decade with borrowed capital, and his
business was repossessed by his investors before the
first mass-produced book was successfully printed---the
Gutenberg Bible of 1454, printed in Mainz by Fust and
Schoeffer.
Gutenberg's basic process remained unchanged for
centuries. A punch made of steel, with a mirror image of the
letter is struck into a piece of softer metal. Molten metal is
poured into this, and you get type. The type is put into a matrix
to form the page of text, inked, then pressed into paper.
Within several decades typesetting technology spread across Europe. The speed with which it did so is impressive: within the first fifty years, there were over a thousand printers who set up shops in over two hundred European cities. Typical print runs for early books were in the neighborhood of 200-1000 books. Some of these first printers were artisans, while others were just people who saw an opportunity for a quick lira/franc/pound. The modern view of a classical era in which craftsmanship predominated appears unjustified to scholars: there has always been fine craft, crass commercialism & work that combines both.
To those who have grown up with television, radio, magazines, books, movies, faxes and networked computer communications it is difficult to describe just how much of a revolution printing was. It was the first mass medium, and allowed for the free spread of ideas in a completely unprecedented fashion. The Protestant Reformation might not have occurred, or might have been crushed, without the ability to quickly create thousands of copies of Luther's Theses for distribution.
Scribes fought against the introduction of printing, because it could cost them their livelihoods, and religious (and sometimes secular) authorities sought to control what was printed. Sometimes this was successful: for centuries in some European countries, books could only be printed by government authorized printers, and nothing could be printed without the approval of the Church. Printers would be held responsible rather than authors for the spread of unwanted ideas, and some were even executed.
