The printing press spread within several decades to over cities in a dozen European countries. By , printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than 20 million volumes. In the 16th century, with presses spreading further afield, their output rose tenfold to an estimated to million copies.
The operation of a press became so synonymous with the enterprise of printing that it lent its name to an entire new branch of media, the press. Having previously worked as a professional goldsmith, Gutenberg made skillful use of the knowledge of metals he had learned as a craftsman. He was the first to make type from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, which was critical for yielding durable type that produced high-quality printed books and proved to be much better-suited for printing than all other known materials.
To create these lead types, Gutenberg used what is considered one of his most ingenious inventions, a special matrix enabling the quick and precise molding of new type blocks from a uniform template. His type case is estimated to have contained around separate letter boxes, most of which were required for special characters, ligatures, punctuation marks, etc. In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication, which permanently altered the structure of society.
The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and revolutionary ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation, and threatened the power of political and religious authorities; the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class.
By then, he had been losing money in his business and began looking for a way to make money to pay off his debts. He started working on a device that would make it possible to print texts using movable blocks of letters and graphics.
These blocks, used with paper, ink, and a press, would make it possible to print books much faster and more cheaply than ever before. He used metals that he was familiar with — lead, antimony, and tin — to cast blocks of letters and symbols, and he created a linseed- and soot-based ink of the consistency he believed to be ideal for printing on handmade paper. He adapted a wine press that allowed him to slide paper in and out of it and to squeeze water from the paper after printing.
He tested his moveable type machine by printing a Latin book on speech-making in When this endeavor was successful, he embarked on his most famous project, the printing of "The Gutenberg Bibles. The bibles, printed in Latin, gained fame as the first books ever printed in Europe and the first bibles printed in history. Two hundred copies were made, each complete with beautiful illustrations and vibrant colors. Characters and illustrations were later hand-illuminated.
Metal type — made from bronze and perhaps tin — was also used in China for the printing of books and paper money until at least the 18th century. Historical evidence suggests that metal movable type was also developed independently in Korea in the late 14th century. In , a Korean monk named Baegun is credited with printing a compilation of Buddhist sayings using movable metal type. The two-volume book, known as "Jikji," is believed to be the oldest book in the world printed with metal type.
One volume of the work is held at the National Library of France. Despite early successes with movable type, this method of printing didn't catch on as quickly in Asia as it did in Europe. This lukewarm reception was most likely due to the complexities of Asian writing systems.
Unlike the concise, alphabetic script of many Western languages, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are made up of thousands of characters, which would each have to be cast individually for printing using movable type. Such a daunting task may have made woodblocks seem like a more efficient option for printing in these languages. Europeans, however, took to movable type quickly. Before the invention of the printing press — sometime between and — most European texts were printed using xylography, a form of woodblock printing similar to the Chinese method used to print "The Diamond Sutra" in Manuscripts not printed with woodblocks were painstakingly copied by hand.
Both processes were extremely labor intensive and, as a result, books in Europe were very expensive and few could afford to buy them.
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