Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [7]
The availability of cheap paper in growing quantities was a key factor in making the invention of printing by movable type the central technological event in the Renaissance. Printing from wooden blocks was an old idea: the Romans used the technique for textiles and the Mongol Empire used it to make paper currency. By about 1400, playing cards and pictures of saints were being printed from blocks in Venice and southern Germany. The key novelty, however, was the invention of movable type for letterpress, which has three advantages: it could be used repeatedly until worn out; it could be easily renewed, being cast from a mold; and it introduced strict uniformity of lettering. Movable type was the work of two Mainz goldsmiths, Johannes Gutenberg and Johann Fust, in the years 1446–48. In 1450 Gutenberg began work on a printed Bible, known as the Gutenberg Bible or the Forty-two Line Bible (from the number of lines on a page), which was completed in 1455 and is the world’s first printed book. Gutenberg had to solve all the problems of punch cutting, typefounding, composing the type, imposing the paper and ink and the actual printing, for which he used a modification of the screw press. The resulting book, which amazes those who see and handle it for the first time for its clarity and quality, is a triumph of fifteenth-century German craftsmanship at its best.
Printing from movable type, therefore, was a German invention, which rather undermines the label “the Italian Renaissance.” Germans were quick to exploit the new possibilities for religious books, especially Bibles, and works of reference, but also for scarce classic texts. The first printed encyclopedia, the Catholicon, appeared in 1460, and the following year a Strasbourg printer, Johan Mentelin, produced a Bible for laymen. He followed this with a Bible in German, the first printed book in the vernacular. Cologne had its own press by 1464, Basle two years later. Basle quickly became famous for scholarly editions of the classics, later with Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch humanist, as their literary adviser. Nuremberg got its first press in 1470 and soon became the earliest center of the international printing trade, where Anton Koberger worked twenty-four presses and had a network of connections with traders and scholars all over Europe. In Augsburg the new presses were built alongside the Abbey of St. Ulrich, which had one of the most famous scriptoria in Europe. There seems to have been little commercial conflict between the scriptoria and the new presses, the scriptoria concentrating on luxury books of ever-increasing complexity and beauty, often illustrated by leading artists, the printers on quantity and cheapness. Thus the first best-seller in the new world of print was Thomas à Kempis’s De imitatione Christi, which went through ninety-nine editions in the thirty years from 1471 to 1500.
Though the Italians were not the first into printing, with their large papermaking industry, their experience in block printing and their strong scriptorium tradition they soon took the leadership in the new technology. Near Rome, the Benedictine monastery of Subiaco had links with Germany, and in 1464–65 it commissioned two German printers, Sweynheym and Pannartz, to set up presses alongside its scriptorium. Presses in Germany had one important disadvantage in international trade. Gutenberg and other German printers based their type on imitations of the calligraphic strokes of official writing, using German Gothic hands of the mid–fifteenth century as their model (known later in England as “black letter” type). Outside Germany, readers found these typefaces repellent and difficult to understand. The German printers of the Subiaco press were ordered to cut type based on the standard style of handwriting used by Italian humanists in the fifteenth century, itself based on the admirably clear Carolingian minuscule. This became known as Roman, and