Practice: READING

Although Johannes Gutenberg is widely credited with inventing the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century, movable type printing had already existed in East Asia for several centuries before his workshop began operating in the German city of Mainz. What distinguished Gutenberg's contribution was not the basic idea of movable type itself, but a combination of practical innovations — a durable metal alloy for casting individual letters, an oil-based ink suited to metal type rather than the water-based inks used for woodblock printing, and an adapted screw press borrowed from wine and olive presses — that together made mass production of books commercially viable in a way earlier systems had not achieved.

The effects of the press spread with remarkable speed: within fifty years of Gutenberg's first Bible, printing presses were operating in over two hundred European cities, and the total number of books in circulation across the continent rose from a few million to tens of millions. This sudden increase in the availability of written material is widely regarded by historians as a major contributing factor to the spread of literacy, the standardisation of European languages, and the rapid dissemination of new religious and scientific ideas during the following two centuries.

Not every effect was welcomed at the time, however; several European rulers and religious authorities attempted to control or restrict printing through licensing requirements, viewing the technology's capacity to spread ideas quickly as a genuine threat to their authority. Modern historians generally regard these restrictions as only partially effective, since printing had already become too decentralised, with presses operating simultaneously in many independent cities, for any single authority to fully suppress it.