How did the printing press take over Europe in fifty years?

In the year 1473 41 of the 125 towns on our list have printers, the newest this year Esslingen am Neckar, Merseburg, Ulm, Erfurt and 9 more. Drag the year, or play all fifty.

Here is a test of how you picture it. Which town had a printing press first: Würzburg, 120 kilometres up the river Main from Mainz, or Rome, 950 kilometres away over the Alps?

Rome had printers in 1467, twelve years before Würzburg in 1479. And Rome was not even the first in Italy: two German printers, Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, set up in the monastery of Subiaco, in the hills east of Rome, in 1465.

Not a ripple

If printing spread like a ripple on a pond, every town would get its press in order of distance from Mainz: near towns first, far towns last. Below, each of the 125 towns on our list is a dot: how far it is from Mainz, against the year its first printer started. A ripple would put every dot on the dashed line. Instead they scatter. (Where the record gives only “about” a year, or a range, the dot sits at the earliest year it allows.) Naples, more than a thousand kilometres away, printed in 1470; Heidelberg, a short ride from Mainz, not until 1482.

Why the jumps? The dots can’t say on their own, but historians’ usual answer is business.² Printing was an expensive one. It needed metal type, a press, stocks of paper, skilled hands and, above all, buyers for hundreds of copies of the same book. Those were in the big cities: in Venice, with its merchants and ships, in Paris, with its university, in Rome, with the Church. Printers went where the money and the readers were, and travelled by the rivers and trade roads that already joined those cities. By 1500 Venice printed more books than any other city in Europe.⁵

There was a push as well. In 1462 Mainz was sacked in a war between two rival archbishops,⁶ and over the next years printers who had learned the craft there turned up all over Europe. Many of the first printers in Italy, France and Spain were Germans.²

What a press actually did

The machine was borrowed. Screw presses already squeezed grapes for wine and water out of paper; Gutenberg’s new parts were what went under it. He cast letters in metal, each one a separate piece, all the same height, so they could be set in lines, locked in a frame, inked, printed, then taken apart and used again for the next page. Every letter is cast backwards, so that it prints the right way round. Set your own name in type: , then pull the bar across.

By around 1600, a press like this made about 1,500 impressions a working day by one estimate, and 3,200 to 3,600 by another, which assumes two people at it, one inking and one pulling, for fifteen hours.⁷ By 1500, by one careful count, printers had made about twelve and a half million books in Western Europe.³ Fifty years earlier, printing with movable type was only beginning there.

Wait, but then…

Movable type was not new. In China, Bi Sheng made it from baked clay around 1040,⁹ and in Korea a Buddhist text called the Jikji was printed from movable metal type in 1377, more than seventy years before Gutenberg’s Bible.⁸ Printing itself was far older in East Asia, from carved wooden blocks, and most books there went on being printed that way.¹² So why did movable type take over in Europe? One answer historians give is the alphabet: Gutenberg’s Bible needed about three hundred different kinds of type (each cast many times over), counting its joined letters and abbreviations,¹⁰ while Chinese needs thousands of different characters, and a carved block could be kept and printed again whenever more copies were wanted. Others point to markets, workshops and governments, and nobody thinks the alphabet is the whole story.

So here is one to take away: Korea’s King Sejong finished his own alphabet, Hangul, in 1443 and published it in 1446,¹¹ at the very moment Gutenberg was at work. Why do you think it didn’t start the same explosion there?

Try it yourself

Each task ticks itself off when the page above shows it.

1. Find the first town south of the Alps to print, on the map or the chart.Subiaco, in 1465: two Germans, Sweynheym and Pannartz, in a monastery near Rome.
2. Set the year when the hundredth town on our list got its press.1487, when Faro in Portugal printed a Hebrew Pentateuch, about as far from Mainz as our list reaches.
3. Set your own name in type and print it.Each letter was cast backwards, so the forme reads like a mirror, and the paper reads true.
4. Turn on the ripple and find a year when it lags far behind the real map.From the mid-1460s, Italy is printing long before any even-paced ripple could have reached it.
5. In your own words: why did Rome get a press before Würzburg?

So printing took over Europe in fifty years by leaping between the places that could pay for it, and those places then filled in the map around them.