The Printing Press
What Gutenberg Invented, What Came Before, and What the Record Shows

Johannes Gutenberg’s press in Mainz is often treated as the moment printing began. It was a turning point, but not that one. People in East Asia had been printing for centuries before him, and in Korea with metal type.

This page sets out what came before him, what he is credited with and how fast the new way of making books spread. It also looks at what printing did and did not change. Then it sets 9 popular claims beside the sources.

The press is also where the idea that knowledge is power meets the machinery that spread knowledge. Francis Bacon’s line on knowledge and power is traced in Information Is Power.

Bacon picked out three inventions unknown to the ancients: printing, gunpowder and the compass. He wrote that “these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world” (Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism 129, in Joseph Devey’s English edition).

In his Latin he adds that their origins, “though recent, are obscure and inglorious” (quarum primordia, licet recentia, obscura et ingloria sunt; our translation). This page is about those obscure origins.

Before Gutenberg: printing from wooden blocks

Printing began in East Asia. A Library of Congress librarian writes that it was invented around the year 700, in China under the Tang dynasty.

Among the oldest printed objects that survive are Japanese. They are the Hyakumantō darani, Buddhist prayers printed from woodblocks in Japan sometime between 764 and 770. The Library of Congress holds an example.

By the 9th century, Columbia University’s Asia for Educators explains, Chinese craftsmen had found a way to mass-produce books. They carved words and pictures into wooden blocks, inked them and pressed paper onto them. Each block held a whole page of text and pictures.

A famous example is the Diamond Sutra in the British Library (shelfmark Or.8210/P.2). The library calls it “the world’s earliest dated, printed book”.

A note at the end gives its date and its sponsor. In the library’s translation, Wang Jie had it made for universal distribution on behalf of his two parents. The date is the 15th day of the 4th month of the 9th year of the Xiantong reign period. That is 11 May 868 in our calendar.

Each section was printed from a single wood block. The sections were joined into a roll about 5 metres long. The finish of the picture at the front, the library says, shows that printing had already grown into a mature technology by the 9th century in China.

Even in China, block printing did not take over at once. The scholar Shen Kuo (1031–1095) says it was not yet in wide use under the Tang. In his account, canonical books were all printed from blocks only after Feng, the Prince of Ying (馮瀛王), first printed the Five Classics (Mengxi bitan, chapter 18; our summary).

Bi Sheng’s clay type

Shen Kuo is also the main witness for the first movable type. In the Qingli years, he writes, a commoner named Bi Sheng made movable type (慶曆中，有布衣畢昇，又為活版; our translation). The Library of Congress puts the invention between 1041 and 1048.

Here is how Shen describes the method:

• Each character was carved in sticky clay, as thin as the rim of a coin, one piece to each character. It was then fired to harden it.
• Common characters such as 之 and 也 had more than twenty pieces each, so that a page could repeat them.
• Wood was not used. Its grain is uneven and it swells unevenly when wet, Shen says. It also sticks to the fixing compound and cannot be lifted out.

Shen also gives the economics in one line. For two or three copies, the method was “not simple”. For tens, hundreds or thousands of copies, it was “extremely fast” (若止印三、二本，未為簡易；若印數十百千本，則極為神速; our translation).

When Bi Sheng died, Shen adds, his type passed to Shen’s own kinsmen, who still kept it.

Bi Sheng’s dates are uncertain. Columbia gives them as 990–1051 and the Library of Congress as 972–1051.

Movable type did not stop with him. Columbia notes that a Yuan-dynasty official, Wang Zhen, is credited with bringing in wooden movable type around 1297. It was a more durable option.

Korea’s metal type and Jikji

According to Columbia, cast-metal movable type began to be used in Korea in the early 13th century. The first font is believed to have been cast there in the 1230s.

The oldest book that survives from that tradition is a Buddhist anthology known as Jikji. UNESCO, which inscribed it on its Memory of the World Register in 2001, says it was printed at Heungdeok-sa temple in Cheongju in July 1377, using movable metal type.

UNESCO is careful about what this proves. Old Korean books mention some earlier printing with metal type, it says. But this book is “the world’s oldest movable metal type printing evidence available”.

The copy UNESCO registered is the second volume of the work. It is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which notes that it was printed 78 years before the Gutenberg Bible.

A woodblock edition of the full text, dated 1378, is kept in Korea, the BnF adds. So the same text was cut into wooden blocks the very next year.

What Gutenberg combined

Johann Gutenberg lived from about 1400 to about 1468. The Library of Congress says he is generally credited with two things. One is inventing the process of making uniform and interchangeable metal types. The other is solving the many problems of finding the right materials and methods for printing.

The International Gutenberg Society in Mainz describes the achievement as a whole system. It lists the hand-casting instrument, the type case, the composing stick, the press, the ink and the ink balls (our translation).

Japan’s National Diet Library, in its online exhibition on early European printing, breaks the method into three parts:

• Type. A letter was cut into the end of a hard steel punch. The punch was struck into softer copper to make a matrix. Two L-shaped blocks on the matrix formed a casting mould, and an alloy of molten lead, tin and antimony or bismuth was cast into it. Repeating this gave many identical pieces of each letter.
• Ink. Printing ink had to stick easily to the metal type and dry quickly. Linseed oil varnish was used, imitating the oil paints used by painters. Gutenberg’s ink has been found to contain lamp black and linseed oil, among other ingredients.
• The press. The model was the wine press, a machine that uses a screw to apply strong pressure.

He did not do it alone. The Gutenberg Society says that Peter Schöffer, a former scribe in Paris, probably had a large share in developing and making the type.

The economic historian Jeremiah Dittmar describes the Mainz workshop as a for-profit enterprise from the outset. It was set up around 1447 by Gutenberg and his business partners. Its research was paid for by local capitalists and done in great secrecy.

The most famous product is the Bible. Most of its pages have 42 lines, which is why it is also called the 42-line Bible or B42. Its date depends on the source:

• The Library of Congress says its printing was probably completed late in 1455 at Mainz.
• The Gutenberg Society says it was printed between 1452 and 1454.
• A Yale News article says it was first available in about 1455.

So the dates run from about 1452 to 1455. The coloured capitals and headings were added by hand, so each copy was finished like a manuscript. According to the Gutenberg Society, about 180 copies were printed, around 150 on paper and around 30 on parchment (vellum).

Two gaps in the record are worth knowing. None of the prints now credited to Gutenberg carries a name, the Gutenberg Society notes. And there is no picture of him from his own time, so we do not know what he looked like.

How fast it spread

Slowly at first, then quickly. In the decade after the 42-line Bible, the Diet Library says, only five men in four cities are known to have been printing, apart from Fust and Schöffer.

Then, between 1466 and 1470, printing began in ten more cities. How the craft spread in detail is not yet known, the library adds.

The library’s count of known fifteenth-century editions (it calls them titles), by decade and country, shows the same curve:

Decade	Italy	Germany	France	Netherlands	Spain and Portugal	England	Others
1451–1460	0	24	0	0	0	0	0
1461–1470	137	232	1	1	0	0	0
1491–1500	4,144	3,655	2,846	866	646	245	62

By 1480, the library says, more than 1,000 titles were published in Europe in a single year. Of the books in its count, it adds, 68% were printed in Italy or Germany, and about 83% from 1481 onwards. Its own table works out at nearer 79%, though.

The exhibition counts 26,550 known incunabula titles in all, its term for books printed with metal type up to the year 1500.

Print runs grew as well. Dittmar reports that they rose from typically about 500 copies in the 1470s to 1,000 by 1500.

In a 2011 study, he found that European cities where presses were set up in the 1400s grew 60% faster between 1500 and 1600 than otherwise similar cities. Had the presses simply gone to cities that were already set to grow? To check, he used each city’s distance from Mainz as a test, since the method spread outwards from there.

What it did, and what it did not do

What it did.

• It made copying far faster. The Diet Library says the process let the work be done more than eight times faster, and brought a dramatic fall in the price of books.
• It changed what books looked like. The title page began to appear only in the 1480s.
• It gave new ideas a fast way to travel. Within months of October 1517, Dittmar and Skipper Seabold write, Luther’s theses were printed in several German cities. (Whether Luther also nailed them to a church door is a separate question, covered in our 25 turning points in history.)

What it did not do.

• It did not make printing a factory process. Until steam-driven presses arrived in the first half of the nineteenth century, printing was basically done by hand, the Diet Library notes.
• It did not create readers from nothing. Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden estimated book production in Western Europe over thirteen centuries. They found that medieval and early modern book production was a dynamic economic sector, growing by around one percent a year on average. They also found that universities and laypeople dominated the later medieval demand for books.
• It did not break with the manuscript at once. The first printed books in Europe were made to look like manuscripts, with decoration added by hand.

9 popular claims, checked

1. “Gutenberg invented printing”

Doesn't hold up Others were printing long before him. Printing from carved wooden blocks was in use in East Asia for centuries before him. The Diamond Sutra is dated 11 May 868, and the Hyakumantō darani were printed in Japan between 764 and 770.

The claim starts from something real: his Bible is the first major book printed in Europe with movable metal type (claim 4 below). But Europe had printing before him too.

Ed Potten was formerly Keeper of Printed Books at the John Rylands Library. On its blog, he writes that around 70 surviving woodcut prints are known that can securely be dated to before 1440. If printing means making many copies from a pattern, the Diet Library says, then perhaps Gutenberg was not the father of printing.

Even within Europe his place has been argued over. H. Junius’s Batavia, published in 1588, gave the invention to Laurens Coster of Haarlem. The Diet Library notes that there is no objective evidence that Coster was the true inventor of printing.

2. “Gutenberg invented movable type”

Doesn't hold up Movable type is centuries older than his press. It was first created by Bi Sheng (990–1051), who used baked clay, according to Columbia University’s Asia for Educators. Shen Kuo’s account places him in the Qingli years, between 1041 and 1048 by the Library of Congress’s dating.

Korea was casting metal type by the 1230s, and Jikji was printed with metal type in 1377.

Still, the claim sits close to something true. What Gutenberg is credited with, in the Library of Congress’s words, is “the process of making uniform and interchangeable metal types”. He is also credited with solving the many problems of materials and methods. Those are achievements in metal type and printing, not the idea of movable type itself.

3. “Gutenberg got rich from his invention”

Doesn't hold up No record we found shows him growing rich. The records that survive show debts and a lawsuit he lost.

According to the Gutenberg Society, Johann Fust, a businessman from a wealthy family, lent him 800 guilders in 1449. He lent another 800 four years later, for their shared “work of the books” (our translation). For comparison, the Society notes, a townhouse in Mainz could be bought for 500 guilders around 1450.

The partnership ended in court. A notary, Ulrich Helmasperger, drew up a record of the case on 6 November 1455. It survives in the State and University Library at Göttingen, which calls it the only source from the time on the two men’s business.

It records that Fust swore he had advanced Gutenberg 1,550 guilders. He also swore he had borrowed that money himself, at six per cent interest. The record also reports a judgment that went against Gutenberg on repayment. The Gutenberg Society summarises the ruling as repayment of the first 800 guilders with interest.

What happened to the workshop is less clear, because two sources differ.

The Diet Library says Gutenberg was ordered to surrender all printing equipment to his partner. But the library that holds the document says it records nothing about the final decision on Fust’s demand to end the partnership. In its words, the document “still leaves a series of questions open” (our translation).

Nor do the later records show poverty. In 1465 the Archbishop of Mainz, Adolf II of Nassau, made him a member of his court, the Gutenberg Society says.

Each year this brought a court outfit, about 2,200 litres of grain and about 2,000 litres of wine. It also freed him from city service and taxes. He died early in 1468; the exact date is not known.

4. “The Gutenberg Bible was the first printed book in Europe”

Partly It is the first major book printed in Europe with movable metal type, but not the first printed thing in Europe.

The Library of Congress calls it “the first great book printed in western Europe from movable metal type”. It also calls it one of the very first books to come off the press.

Earlier printing in Europe includes:

• Woodcuts. Woodcuts were being printed before 1440.
• Smaller pieces from his own workshop. The oldest item from Gutenberg’s own press that can be dated is a letter of indulgence, the Gutenberg Society says. Its date of issue, 22 October 1454, was filled in by hand.

A woodcut of Saint Christopher carries the printed date 1423. It was once hailed as the earliest dated printing in Western Europe. But Potten writes that its paper and style suggest it was likely made in the mid- to late-1430s.

Nor was the Bible necessarily the first book from Mainz, and here the sources differ. Eric Marshall White, writing in the rare-books journal RBM in 2014, calls it “Europe’s first substantial printed book”. But he writes that it had several predecessors: smaller books and short-lived pieces made while the new methods were worked out at the first Mainz press.

Perhaps the earliest, in his view, is a German poem, the Sibyllenbuch, known only from a fragment. He dates it from about 1450 to 1454 at the latest. The Diet Library, by contrast, calls the Bible “the first actual book that Gutenberg printed”.

5. “Printing made books cheap straight away”

Partly Books did become far cheaper, but over decades.

In one study, Jeremiah Dittmar gathered more than 2,500 recorded book prices. He concludes that by the 1480s books had fallen in price by around 80 percent, and that prices kept falling steadily through the 1500s. In an earlier paper he put the fall at over 95% by the early 1500s.

Some people at the time saw it sooner. In 1468, Dittmar notes, Giovanni Andrea Bussi observed that prices had declined by 80 percent.

The Gutenberg Bible itself was a luxury. Yale, which owns a copy, says Gutenberg hoped to profit from the market for luxury goods by printing on both paper and vellum.

Print runs were small at first, typically about 500 copies in the 1470s. Only 24 known titles date from the whole decade 1451–1460. So the fall in prices was real; “straight away” is the part that does not hold up.

6. “Literacy rose because of printing”

Partly Cheaper books gave readers more to read, but the cause may run both ways. Columbia’s Asia for Educators makes the same link for China. There, as in Europe centuries later, it says, printing dramatically lowered the price of books and so helped literacy spread.

But in Europe readers were buying books before print. Buringh and van Zanden found that book production was already growing in the Middle Ages. They suggest that the rise in book production after the middle of the fifteenth century “probably resulted from lower book prices and higher literacy”.

In other words, readers may have driven printing, not only the other way round.

There is also a measuring problem. The long-run estimates of European literacy that Our World in Data charts are, as it explains, worked out partly from estimated book consumption per person. So on their own they cannot show which came first.

That cheaper books helped fits these sources. That printing caused the rise on its own is not shown.

7. “The printing press caused the Reformation”

Partly Printing helped the Reformation spread, but “caused” goes further than the studies do.

Dittmar and Seabold write that historians broadly agree printing played a central role in spreading Protestant ideas. Those ideas, they write, spread first in the media and then by word of mouth in cities.

The economist Jared Rubin compared cities. His analysis “suggests that cities with at least one printing press by 1500 were at minimum 29 percentage points more likely to be Protestant by 1600”.

Rubin opens by noting that “the causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated”. Dittmar and Seabold also write that a debate exists over the role of printing in the Reformation.

Printing helped the ideas spread and take hold in cities. What started the Reformation, and why it took the course it did, is a wider question.

8. “Movable type failed in China because Chinese has too many characters”

Still argued Sources give different reasons, and the word “failed” does not fit. The claim has two parts.

First, movable type did not simply fail. It went on being used in China, from Bi Sheng’s clay to Wang Zhen’s wooden type around 1297, and in Korea with metal. What did not happen is that it replaced the woodblock. Columbia says it was never widely used in China.

Second, the sources give different reasons:

• Cost alone. Columbia says movable type was not widely used because whole-block printing was less expensive.
• Cost and the script. The Library of Congress gives two reasons together. Movable type was not widely used in China, except for very large jobs, because of the high upfront cost. And because Chinese uses a great many characters, and block printing cost relatively less, wood- or metal-block printing remained the main technology.
• Not the script alone. Dittmar argues against the script as the whole reason. He points to Korea, where printing with metal type grew up in a radically different economic and institutional setting and was never a capitalist enterprise.

Korea also adopted the Hangul script, which in his view made the language more amenable to printing. He writes that this “calls into question the idea that the fixed complexity in inherited written language is in and of itself what accounts for the divergence”.

Shen Kuo’s own account fits the cost reading: the method was not simple for a few copies, and extremely fast only for many.

Our reading: the sources agree that cost mattered, and the size of the script is one reason the cost was high. But the script alone does not explain why the woodblock stayed dominant. That is a lean, not a settled answer.

9. “Fewer than 50 Gutenberg Bibles survive”

Holds up Fewer than 50 survive, though the counts differ by one.

• The Library of Congress’s research guide, describing the British Library’s copies, says only 48 copies are known to have survived. Of these, 12 are printed on vellum and 36 on paper, and twenty are complete.
• The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas also gave 48 in 2003.
• The Gutenberg Society gives 49, and Yale counts 21 complete copies and another 28 partial copies, which also makes 49.

We could not find a source that explains the difference, so the figure is 48 or 49, of about 180 printed.

The Library of Congress copy was bought by an Act of Congress in 1930. It is, the library says, one of only three perfect vellum copies known to exist.

Questions to ask about any “first”

The printing press shows a pattern that recurs across this site’s history pages, from 25 turning points to the most influential people in history. One name takes the credit for a long chain of work. A few questions help when you meet the next “X invented Y”:

• First where? The Gutenberg Bible is a first for Europe and for its method, not for printing.
• First what? Printing, movable type, metal type and a full printing system are four different things, each with a different first.
• And who else? Gutenberg had partners and lenders, and the record of his life has many gaps.

The same questions work for claims about technology now. Who says this was first, compared with what, and what was already there before it? Our guide to checking something before you share it shows how to look for the earlier source.

Sources

Printing in East Asia

• British Library, “The Diamond Sutra” (Or.8210/P.2), read in the Internet Archive copy of 7 March 2020 because the library’s site would not load for us behind its bot check.
• Ryan Wolfson-Ford, “The History of Printing in Asia According to Library of Congress Asian Collections, Part 1”, Library of Congress, 22 June 2021.
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators, “Printing & Movable Type” (Song dynasty module).
• Shen Kuo, Mengxi bitan, chapter 18 (Wikisource); English ours. MacTutor, “Shen Kua”.
• UNESCO Memory of the World, “Baegun hwasang chorok buljo jikji simche yojeol (vol. II)”; Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Jikji, a treasure of the world of printing”.

Gutenberg and Mainz

• Library of Congress, “The Gutenberg Bible” (exhibition) and “The Gutenberg Bible at the Library of Congress: Related Resources” (research guide).
• Internationale Gutenberg-Gesellschaft in Mainz, “Gutenbergs Erfindung” and “Letzte Lebensjahre”; English ours.
• SUB Göttingen (State and University Library), Gutenberg Digital, “Das Helmaspergersche Notariatsinstrument”; English ours.
• National Diet Library (Japan), Incunabula: Dawn of Western Printing, “What are incunabula?”, “Art of printing” and “Gutenberg, man of mystery”.
• Ed Potten, “The Saint Christopher woodcut dated 1423”, Rylands Blog (John Rylands Research Institute and Library, Manchester), 14 August 2025.
• Eric Marshall White, “Printed for Performance: Ceremonial and Interactive Aspects of Books from Europe’s First Presses”, RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 15(1) (2014).
• Yale News, “World’s oldest printed objects join Gutenberg Bible in Beinecke display”, 24 January 2023; Harry Ransom Center, “The Digitization of the Ransom Center’s Gutenberg Bible”, 22 July 2003.

Economics and the Reformation (open-access versions, or the published abstract where the paper itself is not open)

• Jeremiah Dittmar, “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 126(3) (2011), 1133–72, doi:10.1093/qje/qjr035 (abstract on IDEAS/RePEc).
• Jeremiah Dittmar, “New Media, Competition and Growth: European Cities After Gutenberg”, CEP Discussion Paper 1365, London School of Economics (2015).
• Jeremiah Dittmar and Skipper Seabold, “New Media and Competition: Printing and Europe’s Transformation after Gutenberg”, CEP Discussion Paper 1600, London School of Economics (2019).
• Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries”, Journal of Economic History 69(2) (2009), 409–45, doi:10.1017/S0022050709000837 (abstract on IDEAS/RePEc).
• Jeremiah Dittmar, “Book Prices in Early Modern Europe: An Economic Perspective”, in Shanti Graheli (ed.), Buying and Selling: The Business of Books in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2019), 72–87, doi:10.1163/9789004340398_005 (author’s accepted version, LSE Research Online).
• Jared Rubin, “Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test of the Role of Printing in the Reformation”, Review of Economics and Statistics 96(2) (2014), 270–86 (record and abstract, Chapman University Digital Commons).
• Our World in Data, “Literacy”.

Bacon

• Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), Book I, aphorism 129: English, ed. Joseph Devey, Project Gutenberg; Latin, The Latin Library.

We read each source online on 6 October 2026. German and Chinese passages are our translations, marked where they appear. The two journal papers by Dittmar (2011) and Buringh and van Zanden (2009) are not open access, so we used only their published abstracts; the other papers were read in the open versions linked above. The British Library’s own page would not load for us, so we read an archived copy, and the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC), the census of fifteenth-century printed books, did not respond, so we could not check the census of Gutenberg Bibles against it.

Checked October 2026.