5210 AM · 1450 CE · world history
Gutenberg's Printing Press
Movable type makes books cheap, and knowledge stops being a privilege.
Johannes Gutenberg combines three things: movable metal type, oil-based ink and a screw press. The result is a forty-two-line Bible and a revolution. Where a scribe needed a year for one book, a print run took weeks. By 1500 hundreds of presses had produced millions of copies across Europe.
Sources
Documents of the period
- fifteenth-century incunabula, the Gutenberg Bible — the 42-line Bible itself (c. 1455) and the Mainz court records concerning Gutenberg
Scholarship
- studies in the history of printing — hundreds of presses and millions of printed books by 1500
Basis: documents and evidence.