100 Fun Facts About Printing Press

In which German city did Johannes Gutenberg set up the workshop where he printed his famous Bible?

It was his home town, a wealthy Rhine city; the Gutenberg Museum was founded there in 1900 for the 500th anniversary of his birth.

Around what year did Gutenberg develop his movable-type printing press?

He combined four technologies that had matured by the mid-15th century: the screw press, movable type, the bound-book format and mechanised paper-making.

What was Gutenberg's trade before he turned to printing?

His knowledge of metals let him devise a durable type alloy and a hand mould for casting letters quickly and in quantity.

Gutenberg's type metal was an alloy of lead, tin and which third metal?

The mix melted at a low temperature for cheap, fast casting yet produced hard, durable letters.

Gutenberg's printing fluid, unlike the traditional water-mixed inks, was made with what base?

Water-based mixtures soaked the paper and would not stick to metal; the new formula was closer to a paint.

How many lines per page does the standard Gutenberg Bible have, giving it its nickname?

The first pages were set at 40 lines; the count was raised part-way through, presumably to save paper, by tightening the line spacing.

How much did a copy of the Gutenberg Bible sell for, equivalent to about three years' wages for a clerk?

That was still far cheaper than a manuscript Bible, which could take a single scribe more than a year to copy.

Roughly how many Gutenberg Bibles are known to survive in at least substantial portion?

Only 21 are entirely complete, and many fragments survive because leaves were reused as stiffening in the bindings of later books.

What did the complete Gutenberg Bible sold at auction in 1978 fetch?

That copy is now in Austin, Texas; as of 2025 no complete copy had come to market since, and one is estimated at $25-35 million.

Which moneylender financed Gutenberg's press with two 800-guilder loans, then sued him and won the Bible workshop?

With 6% interest the debt had grown to 2,026 guilders by 1456; the archbishop's court found for the creditor and Gutenberg was effectively bankrupt.

Which former Paris scribe, later Fust's son-in-law, is thought to have designed some of Gutenberg's first typefaces?

His shop with the financier was the first in Europe to issue a book carrying the printer's name and date, the Psalter of 1457.

Which future pope wrote in March 1455 that he had seen Gutenberg Bible pages in Frankfurt?

His letter is the most reliable evidence for dating the Bible and cites reports of both 158 and 180 copies being printed.

Around 1439 Gutenberg lost money making metal mirrors for pilgrims to which city's relic exhibition?

The mirrors were believed to capture holy light from the relics; a flood delayed the exhibition by a year and the capital could not be repaid.

In which city was Gutenberg living when he is said to have perfected 'Aventur und Kunst'?

He had relatives there on his mother's side and served in the city militia; a public square there is now named for him.

Gutenberg's 1465 title of Hofmann came with a stipend, a court outfit and tax-free allowances of what?

The allowance was 2,180 litres of grain and 2,000 litres of wine a year; he died three years later and his grave is now lost.

Who invented the world's first movable-type system, in China around 1040?

His method was recorded by the scholar Shen Kuo, and later experiments showed his fired-clay type was 'as hard and tough as horn'.

The first movable type, made in Song-dynasty China in the 11th century, was formed from what material?

Wooden type was tried too but abandoned because the grain and uneven swelling after inking spoiled the impressions.

What is the name of the oldest surviving book printed with metal movable type, produced in Korea in 1377?

It is a Buddhist text from the Goryeo era, printed 78 years before Gutenberg's Bible.

Around 1298 the Yuan official Wang Zhen carved more than 30,000 wooden types to print 100 copies of what?

The Records of Jingde County ran to more than 60,000 characters; he then wrote a treatise describing his revolving-table method.

Why did movable type see only limited use in China despite being invented there?

Gutenberg's Latin alphabet was a practical advantage: a compositor could set any text from a relatively small set of characters.

Gutenberg modelled his machine on the screw press, which the Romans had used mainly for what?

The same device was used in towns as a cloth press for printing patterns, and paper presses in German lands worked on the same principle.

Which book format, which had replaced the scroll by about AD 500, was one of the technologies Gutenberg combined?

It is more compact and cheaper than a scroll and, crucially, both sides of the page can be used.

Late-13th-century Italian paper mills cut paper's price to what fraction of parchment's cost?

Water-powered paper mills, first securely documented in 1282, replaced the hand labour of Chinese and Muslim papermaking.

By 1500, printing had spread from a single German shop to roughly how many European cities?

By 1480 printers were already active in 110 places, and historians conclude the printed book was in universal use in Europe by then.

How many copies had Western Europe's presses produced by 1500?

Output rose tenfold in the following century to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies.

Who became Europe's most published author in 1518 and 1519, with 45 works reprinted in 291 editions?

Many were pamphlets of eight pages or fewer, cheap to print and quick to distribute; his tracts reached 300,000 copies in 1518-20.

What is the term for surviving books printed in Europe before 1501?

The word is Latin for 'swaddling clothes' or 'cradle', marking the infancy of printing.

Who built the first iron printing press by 1800, able to print a whole sheet in a single pull?

A wooden frame could not have withstood the extra force; the machine doubled the old press's output to 480 pages an hour.

Which newspaper was first printed on Friedrich Koenig's steam-driven cylinder presses in 1814?

The machines ran at 1,100 sheets an hour; a further patent covered a perfecting press that printed both sides of a sheet in one pass.

Who invented the steam-powered rotary printing press in the United States in 1843?

His original design ran at up to 2,000 revolutions an hour, printing four page images per revolution for 8,000 pages an hour.

The Linotype machine, operated from a keyboard, gets its name because it casts what?

The cast piece is called a slug, and the brass matrices are returned to the magazine automatically to be reused.

Who invented the Monotype hot-metal composing system in 1887, casting single characters rather than whole lines?

The rival Linotype had matrices available in more than a thousand languages; machine composition ruled until phototypesetting arrived.

Who introduced the printing press to England, setting up at Westminster in 1476?

The first book he is known to have produced there was an edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The first book printed in the English language, produced in Bruges in 1473, was a translation of what?

The translator-printer wrote that his pen had worn out and his eyes dimmed copying it by hand, so he learned to print instead.

In 1539 the printer Juan Pablos established the first press in the Americas. Where?

He worked on behalf of a Seville-based publisher, more than a century before the first press in the English colonies.

Jesuit missionaries set up the first printing press in India in 1556 in which city?

The press had been intended for Abyssinia but stayed behind when the patriarch-designate was persuaded not to continue his journey.

Who established the Ottoman Empire's first Arabic-script press for Muslims, in 1727?

Non-Muslim communities had printed in the empire much earlier: Sephardi Jews ran a Hebrew press in Constantinople from 1493.

Which Venetian printer's press introduced italic type with a 1501 edition of Virgil?

The edition was printed in a run of 1,000 rather than the usual 200 to 500 copies, and his Greek editions saved much of surviving classical literature.

The dolphin-and-anchor device of the Aldine Press illustrates which Latin motto?

'Make haste slowly' - the image was taken from a coin of Emperor Vespasian and was quickly pirated by French and Italian publishers.

Historian Elizabeth Eisenstein famously described the printing press as an 'agent of' what?

She argued the press turned 'a hearing public' into 'a reading public' and let scholars build on one another's findings across Europe.

Abbot Johannes Trithemius attacked printing in a 1492 treatise titled 'In Praise of' what?

He argued printing would make monks intellectually lazy and that paper books were less durable than parchment manuscripts.

Under which pope was the first Papal Index of forbidden books issued in 1559?

The 1564 Index of his successor Pius IV repeated the ban on vernacular Bibles; censorship of print had begun with an archbishop's licensing edict in 1485.

Dittmar found cities with presses by 1500 grew about how much faster than comparable cities from 1500 to 1600?

Jared Rubin found cities with a press by 1500 were also 52 percentage points more likely to have adopted Protestantism by 1530.

On a hand press, what was the paper-covered frame with cut-outs that kept the sheet's margins clean?

The tympan held the dampened sheet with pins; both were folded down together so the paper lay on the inked type.

What was the small handle on a hand press called, which was turned to wind the bed under the platen?

The impression itself came from pulling a long lever, the bar, which drove the screw down onto the paper.

At least how many copies of Erasmus's works were sold during his lifetime?

He lived from 1469 to 1536, almost exactly the first lifetime of the printed book.

Besides '42-line' and 'B42', what other name is used for Gutenberg's great printed book?

Whatever the name, it is the earliest major book printed in Europe with mass-produced metal movable type.

On a hand press, what were the leather pads stuffed with wool or horsehair used to ink the type called?

The leather was usually sheepskin, and the two balls were pressed together to spread the ink evenly before applying it.

At what rate did Koenig's steam-driven machines print The Times on 29 November 1814?

John Walter had ordered two double machines; a further 1814 patent covered a 'perfecting' press printing both sides at once.

Around 1473, Dominican friar Filippo de Strata likened the printing press to what, against the 'virgin' pen?

He argued printers valued profit over accuracy and classical scholarship; the first Papal Index followed in 1559.

The oldest dated printed book, a Diamond Sutra of 868, was found in walled-up caves near which town?

A Daoist monk guarding the Mogao Caves sold the five-metre scroll to the explorer Aurel Stein in 1907; it is now in the British Library.

The 868 Diamond Sutra's colophon, the earliest public-domain statement, dedicates it to what?

A man named Wang Jie commissioned it on behalf of his two parents, making the world's first printed book also its first giveaway.

In the 760s Japan's Empress Kōken had printed charms sealed in how many miniature pagodas?

The Hyakumanto Darani project was an act of merit-making after a period of political turmoil, and many of the little pagodas survive today.

The surviving volume of Korea's 1377 metal-type book is held by which country's national library?

It reached the world's attention through a French sinologist's 1901 bibliography and was shown in Paris during UNESCO's International Book Year in 1972.

Laurens Janszoon Coster, whom the Dutch long credited with inventing printing, came from which city?

The claim rests on a 1568 book written more than a century after his death; he was the sexton of the city's great church and probably died of plague.

Johannes Gutenberg was born with which family surname?

His father was a patrician in the cloth trade; the exact year of his birth is unknown, and he was first named in print as the inventor of typography in 1504.

Alongside the Bible, Gutenberg's press ran off several thousand church certificates of what?

Seven editions in two type styles were ordered; a few decades later the same printed certificates would become a target of the Reformation.

In 1997 which publisher named Gutenberg's invention the most important of the second millennium?

The judgement came just before the 600th anniversary of his birth, whose exact year is unknown; estimates range from 1393 to 1406.

Gutenberg's Bible was set in which blackletter style, named for the woven look it gives a page?

Straight vertical strokes crossed by horizontals create the woven effect; Gutenberg also justified his lines to a clean right-hand edge.

Gutenberg's Bible font, mimicking scribal ligatures, needed how many master characters?

Six pages, some 15,600 pieces of type, were probably standing set at any one time, so the workshop needed a vast stock of cast letters.

A complete Gutenberg Bible runs to about 1,288 pages and was usually bound in how many volumes?

The first volume normally ends with the Psalms; heavier vellum copies were sometimes split into three or four.

The first Gutenberg Bible to cross the Atlantic, in 1847, now belongs to which institution?

For nearly four centuries every copy seems to have stayed in Europe; several long-lost copies only resurfaced during the 20th century.

Dealer Gabriel Wells broke up a damaged Gutenberg Bible in 1921 and sold the leaves as what?

Each leaf came in a portfolio with an essay by A. Edward Newton; a second damaged copy was dismembered by Scribner's in 1953.

A Gutenberg Bible stolen from a university in 2009 was recovered in a 2013 FSB sting. In which city?

It was a two-volume paper copy; the security service's operation took four years to get it back.

The 1457 Psalter, Europe's second major printed book, was the first printed in how many colours?

It was also the first book with a printed publication date and a printer's mark; only ten copies exist, making it rarer than the Gutenberg Bible.

The 36-line Bible of c. 1460, possibly set in Gutenberg's older type, is named for which city?

A rubricator wrote the date 1461 in one copy, so it cannot be later than that; no printer's name appears anywhere in the book.

Anton Koberger, printer of the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle, was godfather to which artist?

In the year of his godson's birth he gave up metalwork for printing, and went on to run 24 presses with offices from Lyon to Buda.

Wolgemut's workshop supplied the Nuremberg Chronicle with roughly how many woodcuts?

Many blocks were reused for different cities and people, so the 1,809 pictures were printed from far fewer distinct woodcuts.

In 1500 Wynkyn de Worde became the first printer to set up shop where in London?

He also built the first book stall in St Paul's Churchyard, and in 1495 printed England's first music from movable type, using non-musical symbols.

Italy's first printing press was set up in 1464–65 at a Benedictine abbey in which town?

Two Germans, Sweynheym and Pannartz, ran it; the first book they printed there, a Latin grammar, has not survived.

In 1470 three German printers set up Paris's first press inside which institution?

Its rector had invited them to print texts he selected himself; the subsidised venture produced 22 works before the trio set up shop on their own.

Whose 1476 Missale Romanum was actually the first book of music printed from movable type?

The credit usually goes to Petrucci's 1501 Odhecaton in Venice, but the Rome-based German had beaten him by a quarter of a century.

The 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili hides its author's name, Francesco Colonna, in what?

Read in sequence, the decorated opening letters spell out in Latin that 'Brother Francesco Colonna loved Polia dearly'.

Which Parisian printer numbered the verses of the New Testament in his 1551 Greek edition?

His system is the one in almost every modern Bible; he later fled to Geneva after Catholic theologians in Paris tried to censor his commentaries.

Claude Garamond, whose name lives on as a typeface, worked in 16th-century Paris chiefly as what?

He was among the first to sell type as an independent service rather than working inside one printer's shop, helping make typefounding its own industry.

Christophe Plantin's workshop, now a museum holding the two oldest presses, is in which city?

The family business ran until 1876, when it was sold to the city; the complete archives are on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

Tyndale's 1526 English New Testament, smuggled home between other books, was printed where?

The free imperial city was in the process of turning Lutheran; the Bishop of London soon ordered copies bought up and burned.

The 1631 'Wicked Bible' got its name from a misprint that dropped 'not' from which commandment?

The royal printers were fined £300 and lost their licence; some suspect a rival sabotaged the forme.

Which 1644 pamphlet by John Milton attacked Parliament's licensing of printed books?

It takes its title from a speech by the Athenian orator Isocrates, and Milton published it unlicensed, defying the very order he was attacking.

Which university's press, the world's oldest, got its letters patent from Henry VIII in 1534?

Its first actual book did not appear until 1584, half a century after the royal grant.

The 1710 Statute of Anne, the first copyright law, vested the right for the first time in whom?

The Stationers' Company had lobbied for a return of its old licensing monopoly; Parliament instead handed the right to the people who wrote the books.

Who managed the first press in the English colonies, set up in Massachusetts in 1638?

He was a locksmith by trade, indentured to the widow Elizabeth Glover, whose husband had died on the voyage out with the press aboard.

What fetched $14.2 million at auction in 2013, a record price for a printed volume?

It was the first book printed in British North America; only eleven copies survive and just five of those are complete.

Which founding father was a Philadelphia printer, publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette at 23?

He made his fortune from the paper and from Poor Richard's Almanack, written under the pen name Richard Saunders.

What was the young apprentice who mixed ink and fetched type in a print shop traditionally called?

Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Ambrose Bierce all did the job; the name is usually traced to the boys' ink-blackened hands.

The words 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' come from the arrangement of what in a compositor's shop?

Capitals sat in a shallow tray above the one holding small letters; 'case' in this sense is first recorded in English in 1588.

Which everyday word began as French printers' slang for a cast plate, supposedly from a click?

It is the past participle of clicher, 'to click', first attested in 1825; a plate that printed the same thing over and over became a tired phrase.

Running a finger down the first two key columns of a Linotype produced which nonsense phrase?

The keys were laid out by letter frequency, and operators used the 'run down' to fill a botched line so it could be cast and discarded.

Printers' filler text 'lorem ipsum' is a scrambled passage from which Roman author?

It comes from De finibus bonorum et malorum, a treatise on ethics; a Latin scholar traced it around 1982 by hunting for the rare word 'consectetur'.

Mergenthaler's line-casting machine was first used commercially in 1886 by which newspaper?

The first book ever composed on it was The Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports, and the machine went straight to work on the daily paper.

How did William Bullock, inventor of the 1863 web-fed rotary press, die in 1867?

He tried to kick a drive belt onto a pulley, his leg was caught, gangrene set in, and he died during the amputation.

Clymer's Columbian iron hand press of 1813 carried a cast-iron counterweight shaped like what?

The 50-pound bird lifted the platen after each pull; French buyers sometimes had it swapped for a globe or a lion as a less political emblem.

Alois Senefelder invented lithography in 1796 after he could not afford to publish what?

The actor-playwright experimented with greasy ink on Solnhofen limestone; surveying offices across Europe were among the first to adopt the cheap process.

In 1881 Frederic Ives patented the first commercial method of which photo-printing process?

It breaks a photograph into dots of varying size; the first printed example, of Prince Arthur, had appeared in a Canadian paper in 1869.

Friedrich Koenig founded the world's oldest surviving press manufacturer in 1817 with which partner?

The Würzburg firm still carries both names, and a division of it now builds most of the machines that print the world's banknotes.

Baskerville's 1757 Virgil was printed on what, a smoother sheet he devised with James Whatman?

The Birmingham japanner worked with papermaker James Whatman; the edition took three years and made his name as a printer.

William Morris founded which private printing house in 1891, best known for its monumental Chaucer?

It issued 53 books in seven years, each hand-printed in runs of about 300 and many illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones.

To stop his ex-partner inheriting it, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson dumped the Doves Press type into what?

His journals record some 170 night-time trips to Hammersmith Bridge in 1916–17; a designer recovered 150 pieces from the riverbed in 2015.

Who published the 1605 'Relation', recognised as the world's first newspaper?

A trained bookbinder who had worked as a newsletter scribe, he used his contacts among postmen and traders to gather the news.

The 1578 Thambiran Vanakkam, the first book printed in an Indian script, was in which language?

The Jesuit Henrique Henriques translated the catechism and had it printed at Quilon, on the Kerala coast.