A colophon is the section of a book that details publication information. Ten copies of this edition of The Book of Psalms are known to still exist.
The spread of printing as a trade benefited from workers in Germany who had helped Gutenberg in his early printing experiments and then went on to become printers who taught the trade to others. By , Italian printers began to make a successful trade in printed matter. German printers were invited to set up presses at the Sorbonne in Paris in , and the librarian there chose books to be printed, mostly textbooks, for the students. By , other German printers had moved to Paris and set up private companies.
Spain welcomed German printers in in Valencia, spreading to Barcelona in In , Portugal invited printers to Lisbon. Caxton went to Cologne to learn to print in in order to set up a press in Bruges and publish his own translations of various works.
After returning to England, he set up a press in Westminster Abbey , where he worked as a printer for the monarchy until his death in The worldwide spread of the printing press meant a greater distribution of ideas that threatened the ironclad power structures of Europe. Twenty years later, books from John Calvin and Martin Luther spread, bringing into reality what Alexander had feared.
Furthering that threat, Copernicus published his On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres , which was seen as heresy by the church. By , the first official newspaper, Relation , was printed and distributed in Strasbourg. The Invention of Printing. Theodore Low De Vinne. Rebecca Romney. Joseph Needham, Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin. Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Patricia Buckley Ebrey. It is most notable for its wine, its cathedral and for being the home of Johannes Gutenberg, who introduced the printing press to Europe.
Although these things may seem unconnected at first, here they overlap, merging and influencing one another.
The three elements converge on market days, when local producers and winemakers sell their goods in the main square surrounding the sprawling St Martin's Cathedral. Although the Chinese were using woodblock printing many centuries earlier, with a complete printed book, made in , found in a cave in north-west China, movable type printing never became very popular in the East due to the importance of calligraphy, the complexity of hand-written Chinese and the large number of characters.
The German city of Mainz is most notable for being the home of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable metal type printing press Credit: Madhvi Ramani.
In the Middle Ages, Mainz was one of the most important cathedral cities in the Holy Roman Empire, in which the Church and the archbishop of Mainz were the centre of influence and political power. This was an incredibly slow and laborious process; one that could not keep up with the growing demand for books at the time.
At the Gutenberg Museum, I watched a demonstration of a page being printed on a replica of the press. First, a metal alloy was heated and poured into a matrix a mould used to cast a letter. In order to print a page, Gutenberg would arrange the necessary letters on the matrix and coat them in his ink. The matrix was then mounted on the contact end of the modified screw press and lowered until it struck the paper underneath.
The process, while labor intensive, allowed Gutenberg to print pages at a much greater rate than printers using the block printing method or those doing manuscript work.
Johannes Gutenberg's moveable type press marked the beginning of the Printing Revolution in the western world, a colossal moment in the history of information and learning. Then he arranged these pieces in a frame, coated them with ink, and used them to press sheets of paper. When he was done, he could reorganize the metal characters, eliminating the need to persistently chisel blocks.
It was faster—to a certain extent. He completed the project in AD. It is important to recognize what this means. The innovation that Johannes Gutenberg is said to have created was small metal pieces with raised backwards letters, arranged in a frame, coated with ink, and pressed to a piece of paper, which allowed books to be printed more quickly.
But Choe Yun-ui did that—and he did it years before Gutenberg was even born. Notably, Korea was under invasion, which hampered their ability to disseminate their innovation. In addition, Korean writing, then based closely on Chinese, used a large number of different characters, which made creating the metal pieces and assembling them into pages a slow process.
Most importantly, Goryeo rulers intended most of its printing projects for the use of the nobility alone. Nonetheless, it is possible that printing technology spread from East to West. Kublai Khan had access to Korean and Chinese printing technology, and he may have shared this knowledge with another grandson of Genghis Khan, Hulegu, who was then ruling the Persian part of the Mongol empire. This could have moved printing technologies from East Asia westward by thousands of miles.
In the middle of that route lay the homeland of the Uyghur people, a Turkic ethnic group that had been recruited into the Mongol army long before. This is because, in the 13th century, Uyghurs were considered distinguished, learned people—the sort for whom printing might be a welcome innovation. They had also something no one else in printing had had up till then: an alphabet, a simple group of relatively few letters for writing every word one wished to say.
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