Printing Revolution

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Mainz (1450 AD)
• Three names recur in the sources – Johann
Gutenberg, Johann Fust and Peter Schoffer
• But it is impossible to determine accurately the
contribution of a particular individual to the
development of typography and its commercial
exploitation
• an invention in any case not the creation of an
individual, as is a poem or a painting, but a
social product
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Earlier beginnings
• Two Chinese inventions block printing
and paper, are linked with the beginnings
of typographic printing in Western
Europe
• Xylography, or block printing, originated
in China in the early 8th century

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Xylography or Block Printing
• The printer drew in reverse on a block of wood
the text or the picture he wished to reproduce,
carved the wood so that the graphic pattern
stood out in relief, inked the block, and
transferred the design to paper

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Its transmission to the West
• Probably during the century from 1250 to 1350, when
European contact with China was unusually close – had
little direct importance for the development of
typography.
• Its indirect importance, on the other hand, was great. It
probably suggested the next crucial step: cutting up and
old block into its constituent letters and then
rearranging these letters to spell out a new text. It
certainly diffused the idea of printing and of the printed
book
• While the lively commercial success staring in the late
14th century of printed playing cards (another Chinese
invention), religious prints, and crude block books
emphasized the magnitude of the market and the
potential profit to be got from it.
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Earlier Style of Writing
(Necessity of Paper)
• Paper was indispensable, but for economic rather than
technical reasons.
• Manuscript books were usually copied on parchment
(made from split sheep-skin) or on vellum (calf-skin),
and these materials were used also by typographic
printers when the aim was magnificence rather than
utility.
• But since a single large book like The Bible required as
many as 170 calf skins or 300 sheep skins, the absence
of paper soon would have nullified the promise of
mechanical duplication: the cheap, rapid production of
books in large numbers.
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Paper Manufacturing in Europe
• Paper manufacture was introduced in Spain
during the 12th century by the Arabs, who had
themselves received the technique from China.
• It spread slowly during the next two centuries
to much of Europe: Italy, France, Germany,
and Switzerland.
• By the time of Gutenberg’s youth, paper was
plentiful and sold for approximately one sixth
the price of parchment.
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
• In Europe the chief raw material was old rags.
• Papermakers shredded the rags in a stamping
mill driven by water-power, mixed the
macerated flax and hemp fibers with water,
and dipped their mold, a large flat wire sieve
with a wooden frame, into the liquid pulp.
• When the pulp was evenly distributed over the
wire mesh and the water had run out through
the holes, they put the sheets on alternate
layers of felt, squeezed them in a press, and
then dried and sized them.
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Use of Ink in Europe
• Printing, as it was practiced in Mainz by
Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoffer, required a
suitable ink, a press for transferring the ink to
paper, and metal type.
• To adhere to metal smoothly and evenly, ink
must have an oil base.
• By the early 15th century, Flemish artists had
begun to print in oils; a suitable printer’s ink,
consisting of a pigment ground in a linseed-oil
varnish, was simply an adaptation of oil print.
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 The invention of type
• The mirror image of each of the letters of the
alphabet made in metal by precision casting
from matrices.

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
The skills which contributed to the development of
type casting were understandably those connected
with the more delicate forms of metallurgy: those of
the metal engraver and the designer of coins and
medals, of the goldsmith adept at casting small
objects, of craftsmen who made punches for stamping
letters on bells, pewter vessels, and book bindings.

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Many parallel efforts were made to
replace the scribe by a mechanical device;
that the actual invention of printing – a
‘dramatic fusion’ of familiar techniques into
a new and workable process – also occurred
independently in several places; that,
finally, this new process was perfected and
first organized as an industry by Gutenberg
and his contemporaries.

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Gutenberg Bible
• Gutenberg Bible also more cautiously named the
forty-two-line Bible by Bibliographers was finished in
1455.
• The craftsmanship of its type and the art of its type
setting and printing are impeccable.

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Fust and Schoffer’s Psalms
• On August 14, 1457, Fust and Schoffer issued the
Psalms.
• The volume was printed on vellum. The type, printed
in red and black, is noble and fits handsomely on the
page.

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
• The lacy design of these letters, ornamented
with flowers and small, animals and printed in
red and blue, is masterly.

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
• Each Psalm, as the printers boasted in a note at
the end, is “adorned with the beauty of large
initial letters”;
• Fust and Schoffer’s Psalms is the oldest signed
and dated book printed in Europe that has
survived. In its sober magnificence it is also
one of the most beautiful.

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
• These first printed books have a further, and
curious, characteristic: their pages so closely
resemble those of manuscript books as to be
virtually indistinguishable to the unpracticed
eye.
• Clearly the printer’s technical, aesthetic, and
commercial aim was to reproduce exactly the
handwritten manuscripts.

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
• The practice suggests rather that the earliest
printers had no conception of the unique
potentialities of their invention, that they
considered printing only a new and particular
kind of writing or the art of writing artificially
without reed or pen
• They thought that what they had to sell
consisted simply of less expensive manuscripts
in greater numbers

Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,

Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Different types of printing
• Monasteries and cathedral chapters contracted for
the Latin Bibles, missals, Psalters, and
antiphonaries which were the printer’s most
important productions.
• The ecclesiastical authorities dominated job
printing; for example, a common order for
indulgence forms.
• The cheaper books, to judge from the earliest
publisher’s list, reflected traditional tastes;
biblical digests, works by St. Thomas Aquinas,
saint’s lives, brief guides to living well and dying
well, and for secular diversion, romances of
chivalry predominated.
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Rapid spread of printing
(1460 – 1500)
• Demand for books among the merchants, substantial
artisans, lawyers, government officials, doctors, and the
teachers who lived and worked in towns.
• Printing spread from Mainz to Strasbourg, Cologne,
Augsburg, Nuremberg, Leipzig, and Vienna.
• German printers, or their pupils, introduced the ‘divine’
art to Italy in 1467, Switzerland and Bohemia in 1468,
France and the Netherlands in 1470. Spain, England,
Hungary, and Poland between 1474 and 1476, Denmark
and Sweden in 1482-83.
• By 1500 the presses had issued about six million books in
approximately forty thousand editions, more books,
probably, than had been produced in Western Europe
since the fall of Rome.
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 Results
1. Removal of inaccuracy and unreliability
• The fundamental contribution of printing to learning is
that it halted this progressive corruption and made
possible the long and continuing effort to restore the great
texts of the past to something approaching their original
integrity.
• Printing gave scholars all over Europe identical texts to
work on. Referring precisely to a particular word in a
particular line on a particular page, a scholar in Basel
could propose an emendation which could be rapidly
checked by his colleagues in Rome or Florence.
• Comparison between two texts became easier now.
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 2. Changing mode of intellectual works
• Printing turned intellectual work as a whole into a
cooperative instead of a solitary human activity.
• Printing enlarged the amount of intellectual effort
applied to individual problems.
• Scientific research – and all scholarship –
became, through this new tool of the intellect, a
public dialogue, a published exchange of novel
results controlled by cooperative critical
examination and the repetition of experiments.
Example: Copernicus’ Theory and its publication
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 3. Increasing availability of books
• Printing not only made scholarship fuller and
more accurate; it also made it less difficult to
acquire.
• Because of the greater standardization of print,
learning to read was easier.
• Now individuals could afford to own books,
where before they had normally been owned
almost exclusively by institutions –
monasteries, cathedral chapters, and colleges.
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah
 4. End of the age of the walking encyclopedia
• Medieval students had to compile their own
dictionaries and reference books, and much of
their time in the lecture room was spent writing
out texts dictated by the teacher.
• Now the student could read the text at home. To
learn had been to memorize; printing freed the
memory.
• For Michel de Montaigne, the French essayist, the
walking encyclopedia was a pedant; but he could
legitimately brand him pedant only because
printed reference books now served the traditional
function of the human memory.
Prepared by Gautam Mukhopadhyay,
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur
Math Howrah