IV.

Printing in the West

Movable metal type was first cast in Europe and printed with a printing press on paper by the middle of the 15th century. The invention appears to have been unrelated to earlier developments in the Far East, and the techniques differed considerably in detail. Whereas Eastern printers had used water-soluble inks, Western printers used oil-based inks from the beginning (see Ink). In the East, printers made impressions simply by pressing the paper against the wood block with a flat piece of wood. The earliest Western printers in the Rhine River valley used mechanical presses derived in design from winepresses, and made of wood. The Eastern printers who had used movable type held the letters together with clay or with rods pushed between the types. Western printers developed a technique of casting types with such precision that the letters could be held together by pressure applied to the edges of the tray containing the type for the page. In this system, a single letter a fraction of a millimeter too big could cause the letters surrounding it to fall out of the page. The development of a method of casting letters to precise dimensions was the essential contribution of the Western invention.

The principles involved in printing had been used by European textile workers, in printing designs on cloth, for at least a century before printing on paper was invented. The art of papermaking, introduced into the West in the 12th century, spread throughout Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. By the mid-15th century paper was available in abundance. During the Renaissance, the rise of a prosperous and literate middle class increased the demand for quantities of reading matter. The rise of Martin Luther and of the Reformation and the subsequent religious wars were heavily dependent on the printing press and on the steady stream of printed pamphlets.

Johannes Gutenberg, of the German city of Mainz, is traditionally considered the inventor of Western printing. The date associated with the invention is 1450. Both Dutch and French historians of printing have attributed the invention to people in their own countries and have produced considerable supporting evidence. The books of the first Mainz printer, however, particularly the book known as the Gutenberg Bible, far surpass in beauty and artisanship all the books that reputedly preceded them. Gutenberg's great accomplishment undoubtedly contributed decisively to the immediate acceptance of the printed book as a substitute for the handwritten or manuscript book. Books printed before 1501 are said to belong to the incunabula era of printing.

In the period between 1450 and 1500, more than 6000 separate works were printed. The number of printers increased rapidly during the same period. In Italy, for example, the first press was established in Venice in 1469, and the city had 417 printers by 1500. In 1476 a Greek grammar was printed wholly in Greek type in Milan, and a Hebrew Bible was printed at Soncino in 1488. Also in 1476 printing was brought to England by William Caxton; in 1539 Juan Pablos set up a press in Mexico City, bringing printing to the New World. Stephen Day, a locksmith by profession, came to Massachusetts Bay in 1628 and helped establish the Cambridge Press. He is often considered the earliest printer in the New England region. In 1639The Freeman's Oath, a broadside, was issued from this press, followed in 1640 by the Whole Book of Psalmes or Bay Psalm Book and an almanac.

The printers of northern Europe produced mostly religious books, such as Bibles, Psalters, and missals. Italian printers, on the other hand, printed chiefly secular works, for example, the newly revived Greek and Roman classics, the stories of secular Italian writers, and the scientific works of Renaissance scholars. An important early use of printing was in pamphleteering: in the religious and political controversies of the 16th and 17th centuries propaganda pamphlets were widely circulated. The production of these pamphlets made considerable work for the printers of those days.