How the Printing Press Changed Reading

Letters Made of Metal

1Imagine a world where every book had to be copied by hand. For hundreds of years, that is how books were made in Europe. Skilled writers called scribes copied each page with a pen and ink, one letter at a time. A single book could take many months to finish. Because books took so long to make, they cost a great deal of money. Mostly churches, universities and wealthy families owned books, and most people never learned to read.

2Printing was not a brand-new idea. Centuries earlier, printers in China had carved whole pages into wooden blocks, and printers in Korea had made letters out of metal. In Europe, however, most books were still copied by hand. Then, in the middle of the 1400s, a German metalworker named Johannes Gutenberg put several tools together to make one printing system. He cast many small metal letters that could be arranged into words and lines. He mixed an oily ink that stuck well to the metal. He also built a press much like the ones farmers used to squeeze juice from grapes. The press pushed the paper firmly against the inked letters.

3The metal letters were the key. After a page was printed, workers could take the letters apart and use them again to build the next page. A team using the press could print many copies of a page in one day, far more than a scribe could write by hand. Because printing was so much faster than copying, printing shops soon opened in cities across Europe.

4Faster printing also made books cheaper. Over time, many more families could afford to own a book. As more books appeared, more people wanted to learn to read. As more people learned to read, printers had more buyers, so they printed even more books. Each change pushed the other one forward.

5Printing also changed the way ideas traveled. Copies made by hand often had small mistakes, and no two were exactly alike. Printed copies of a page matched one another word for word. Because of this, readers in faraway towns could study the very same words and drawings and compare what they found. Scientists could check and build on one another's work more quickly. Printed maps and news sheets spread from town to town as well.

6Gutenberg's press did more than make books faster. By joining several tools into one system, he set off a chain of changes that made books, and the knowledge inside them, available to many more people.