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The Birth of the Printing Press in Europe

One of the most significant events in the history of writing was the completion,in the German city of Mainz around 1450,of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press,a machine that used movable type to enable mass printing.Movable type alone,however,could not change the world;the world had to be ready for it.In Europe’s case the stage had already been set for the impact of printing during the late Middle Ages.One important aspect of the preparation was the advent of paper.

Paper took a thousand years to reach Europe from China;it was first used in Constantinople in 1100 and in Arab-controlled Sicily in 1102.Accustomed to parchment,Europeans wrote with feather pens, rather than Chinese brushes or Islamic reed pens.They therefore needed paper that was strong,scratch resistant,and relatively impervious to ink (to keep the ink from spreading).The solution was to use a gelatin substance known as size-a thin layer of glue applied to the surface of the paper.The result still got mixed reviews: compared with parchment,paper tore easily and was clearly not going to outlast the millennium.Important documents therefore continued to use parchment.But paper was somewhat cheaper, rather lighter,and,most importantly,could be made in greater and greater quantities,at least so long as supplies of the raw materials- cotton and linen rags-held out.By the end of the fourteenth century the use of paper was finally well established;the printing press appeared not long thereafter.Without paper,a printing press would have been nearly pointless.With paper,printing could create the world’s first truly mass communication.

Paper also affected the way printing was done.Neither the eleventh-century Chinese inventor of movable type,Bi Sheng,nor the thirteenth-century Korean printers who also used movable type had ever used an actual press.Their printing was done by rubbing a sheet of paper over the inked type.Asian paper,made to be written on with a brush,was soft and absorbent,making printing easy but restricting it to one side of the paper.When printing was later reinvented in the West,it used a press,by which the paper was forcibly squeezed down into the inked type.That part of the technology was old, borrowed directly from olive and wine presses.But the reason for the force was European scratchproof paper:the stuff was so opaque and stubborn that a simple rubbing would not transfer the ink to the paper. And so a press was necessary;the advantage was that one could print on both sides of the paper.

The printing press was born,conveniently,into the waning years of the Latin empire.Across western Europe literate people (people who could read)were reading in Latin.With weak national borders,the press’s early products had an international customer base.The number of literate people had been rising since the tenth or eleventh century as cities and towns had grown,along with the merchant and professional classes.Literacy moved out of the monasteries (buildings housing monks)and upper nobility to meet the needs of urban laypeople (not members of the clergy).Italy saw the development of commerce and banking,and accordingly led the continent in literacy rates.

With the spread of literacy had come the founding of the first universities,starting with the University of Bologna in the late twelfth century.These universities were centers of an unprecedented demand for books.Lay scribes arose to fill the need for copying manuscripts,and the dense Gothic script developed to help get the books copied quickly and cheaply.

At the same time,the continental regional languages were starting to get their first literary attention.Latin was a very old language by this point:the world was changing,but Latin had been fixed by rule and was not changing to keep pace.It was well developed for philosophy and theology,but creativity demanded a living language. Epic,romantic,and chivalrous poetry began to be written in various vernaculars (native languages),and folktales were written down.The city of Florence,a wealthy center of literacy,produced Dante, Petrarch,and Boccaccio,literary giants who pioneered the use of Italian.Vernacular literature could reach a much wider audience than Latin could;even illiterates could enjoy listening to the stories read aloud,as they often were.The printing press was therefore a response to a growing market for books. 

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►One of the most significant events in the history of writing was the completion,in the German city of Mainz around 1450,of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press,a machine that used movable type to enable mass printing.Movable type alone,however,could not change the world;the world had to be ready for it.In Europe’s case the stage had already been set for the impact of printing during the late Middle Ages.One important aspect of the preparation was the advent of paper.

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