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From WinkyPedia, the free encyclopedia that tells you what you already knew
The printing press is a machine that presses ink onto paper so that a page can be written once and read many times, by people who never met the writer and would not have been able to read their handwriting anyway.[1]
In Europe, the movable-type printing press was developed by Johannes Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz in the mid-15th century. Before then, a book was copied out by hand, which meant every spelling mistake was original, signed, and one of a kind.
Movable type was not new. In China, Bi Sheng made movable type from baked clay in the 11th century, and in Korea the book known as the Jikji was printed with metal movable type in 1377. Gutenberg's contribution was to combine metal type, an oil-based ink and a screw press of the kind already used for pressing grapes and olives, so that Europe's first great printing machine was, technically, a wine press that had changed careers.[2]
Each letter was a small metal block cast in reverse, so that it came out the right way round on paper. Typesetters therefore spent their working lives reading backwards, and are said to have been the only people in Mainz who found mirrors easy.
Capital letters were kept in the upper case of the type cabinet and small letters in the lower case, which is where the terms upper case and lower case come from. A rival proposal to call them "top drawer" and "bottom drawer" was not adopted, as nobody could be bothered to write it down by hand.
Gutenberg's best-known work, the Gutenberg Bible, was printed in the mid-1450s. Fewer than fifty copies survive today, making it one of the few mass-produced objects that is now rare.[3]
William Caxton set up the first printing press in England at Westminster in 1476. Books printed in Europe before 1501 are known as incunabula, from the Latin for "swaddling clothes", because printing was still in its cradle, and because historians enjoy a long word for a short period.