- The Gutenberg bible is still a rather unique book. It used many specialized ligatures and used variations of letters to achieve a typesetting quality that's still regarded a benchmark today. In total some 300 different glyphs have been used (for a latin text).
- It took almost two decades, a lot of people and money to develop this technology. Two decades later it has spread across all of Europe. This is a typical pattern of groundbreaking inventions you can observe many times across history.
- The major improvement devised by Gutenberg was not press printing, but the movable type. Presses have been used for printing before, though not much in Europe. Similarly, printing wasn't really new, but carving one wood block for each individual page was an insane amount of work, and even beech wood (fun fact: beech is called Buche in Germany, and that's the root of the word Buch / book, both in English and German. Buchstabe (letter) is related as well.) didn't last that long.
According to the Wikipedia article on movable type [1], it existed long before Gutenberg, in East Asia. It seems like Gutenberg's contribution was to introduce some additional innovations and popularize it in Europe.
Comments
Couple notes:
- The Gutenberg bible is still a rather unique book. It used many specialized ligatures and used variations of letters to achieve a typesetting quality that's still regarded a benchmark today. In total some 300 different glyphs have been used (for a latin text).
- It took almost two decades, a lot of people and money to develop this technology. Two decades later it has spread across all of Europe. This is a typical pattern of groundbreaking inventions you can observe many times across history.
- The major improvement devised by Gutenberg was not press printing, but the movable type. Presses have been used for printing before, though not much in Europe. Similarly, printing wasn't really new, but carving one wood block for each individual page was an insane amount of work, and even beech wood (fun fact: beech is called Buche in Germany, and that's the root of the word Buch / book, both in English and German. Buchstabe (letter) is related as well.) didn't last that long.
The typesetting does look amazing. Here's a scanned copy: http://bav.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/arch-b-b10
According to the Wikipedia article on movable type [1], it existed long before Gutenberg, in East Asia. It seems like Gutenberg's contribution was to introduce some additional innovations and popularize it in Europe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type