Type Technology: "The Four Revolutions"

Type Technology The Four Revolutions
Before the printing press, books were produced by scribes (at first, primarily based in monasteries, although by the 12th century there were many lay copiers serving the university market). The process of writing out an entire book by hand was as labor-intensive as it sounds (try it some time): so much so that a dozen volumes constituted a library, and a hundred books was an awe- inspiring collection.

This remained true until the invention of movable type, the perfection of which is attributed to Johannes Gutenberg (although the Chinese had it several centuries earlier, and a Dutch fellow named Coster may have had some crude form a decade earlier). Gutenberg, although a man of vision, did not personally profit from his invention. He worked for over a decade with borrowed capital, and his business was repossessed by his investors before the first mass-produced book was successfully printed - the Gutenberg Bible of 1454, printed in Mainz by Fust and Schoeffer.

Gutenberg's basic process remained unchanged for centuries. A punch made of steel, with a mirror image of the letter is struck into a piece of softer metal. Molten metal is poured into this, and you get type. The type is put into a matrix to form the page of text, inked, then pressed into paper.

Within several decades typesetting technology spread across Europe.