The largest European library in 1300 was the university library of Paris, which had 300 total manuscripts.īy the 1490s, when Venice was the book-printing capital of Europe, a printed copy of a great work by Cicero only cost a month’s salary for a school teacher. Palmer says that one hand-copied book in the 14th century cost as much as a house and libraries cost a small fortune. The operation to retrieve classic texts was in action long before the printing press, but publishing the texts had been arduously slow and prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich. Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and copy rare texts into Latin. Wealthy patrons funded expensive expeditions across the Alps in search of isolated monasteries. One of the chief projects of the early Renaissance was to find long-lost works by figures like Plato and Aristotle and republish them. The Italian Renaissance began nearly a century before Gutenberg invented his printing press when 14th-century political leaders in Italian city-states like Rome and Florence set out to revive the Ancient Roman educational system that had produced giants like Caesar, Cicero and Seneca. Sketch of a printing press taken from a notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci. “It made it normal to go check the news every day.” 2. “This radically changed the consumption of news,” says Palmer. Since literacy rates were still very low in the 1490s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports. Printers in Venice sold four-page news pamphlets to sailors, and when their ships arrived in distant ports, local printers would copy the pamphlets and hand them off to riders who would race them off to dozens of towns. The ships left Venice carrying religious texts and literature, but also breaking news from across the known world. “If you printed 200 copies of a book in Venice, you could sell five to the captain of each ship leaving port,” says Palmer, which created the first mass-distribution mechanism for printed books. ![]() Other German printers fled for greener pastures, eventually arriving in Venice, which was the central shipping hub of the Mediterranean in the late 15th century. Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded by his creditors. “What are you going to do with the other 197 copies?” “Congratulations, you’ve printed 200 copies of the Bible there are about three people in your town who can read the Bible in Latin,” says Palmer. Palmer, a professor of early modern European history at the University of Chicago, compares early printed books like the Gutenberg Bible to how e-books struggled to find a market before Amazon introduced the Kindle. His greatest accomplishment was the first print run of the Bible in Latin, which took three years to print around 200 copies, a miraculously speedy achievement in the day of hand-copied manuscripts.īut as historian Ada Palmer explains, Gutenberg’s invention wasn’t profitable until there was a distribution network for books. Gutenberg didn’t live to see the immense impact of his invention. Johannes Gutenberg’s first printing press. Here are just some of the ways the printing press helped pull Europe out of the Middle Ages and accelerate human progress. ![]() ![]() With the newfound ability to inexpensively mass-produce books on every imaginable topic, revolutionary ideas and priceless ancient knowledge were placed in the hands of every literate European, whose numbers doubled every century. Woodblock printing in China dates back to the 9th century and Korean bookmakers were printing with moveable metal type a century before Gutenberg.īut most historians believe Gutenberg’s adaptation, which employed a screw-type wine press to squeeze down evenly on the inked metal type, was the key to unlocking the modern age. German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436, although he was far from the first to automate the book-printing process. Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical movable type printing press helped disseminate knowledge wider and faster than ever before.
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