In the fifteenth century, a monk copying a Bible by hand might spend a year or more on a single volume. Within a generation of the invention of the printing press in Europe, a single workshop could turn out hundreds of copies of a book in the time a scribe made one. That change, in how fast and how cheaply words could be multiplied, transformed religion, science, politics and everyday life. But the story does not begin in Germany. It begins with paper, and with printing in East Asia centuries earlier.

The world of manuscripts

Before printing, every book in Europe was a manuscript, from the Latin for “written by hand.” In the early Middle Ages, most were made in monasteries, in rooms called scriptoria, where monks copied religious texts and some classical works. From the twelfth century onward, as universities grew, professional scribes and booksellers in cities such as Paris and Oxford produced books for students and wealthy readers.

Manuscripts were expensive. Most were written on parchment or vellum, prepared animal skin; a large Bible could require the skins of well over a hundred animals. Copying was slow, and every copy introduced new errors, as scribes misread, skipped lines or “corrected” what they did not understand. Two copies of the same work were rarely identical. Books were treasures, often chained to library desks, and only a small fraction of people could read.

Paper's long journey

Paper was invented in China. Chinese tradition credits a court official named Cai Lun with improving papermaking around 105 CE, though earlier forms existed. The technique spread slowly westward. By the eighth century it had reached the Islamic world; Samarkand and then Baghdad became centers of papermaking, and paper helped fuel a golden age of scholarship and book production in Arabic. From the Islamic world, papermaking reached Spain in the eleventh or twelfth century and Italy in the thirteenth. Paper was much cheaper than parchment, and without it, mass printing in Europe would hardly have been possible.

Woodblock printing

Printing itself also began in East Asia. In woodblock printing, a whole page of text or images was carved in reverse on a block of wood, inked and pressed onto paper. Buddhist monks in China, Korea and Japan used it widely to reproduce sacred texts and charms. The oldest surviving printed book with a date is a copy of the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist scripture, printed in China in 868 CE. It was discovered in 1907 in a sealed cave library at Dunhuang, in western China, and is now in the British Library.

Movable type in China and Korea

Around the 1040s, a Chinese craftsman named Bi Sheng invented movable type: individual characters made of baked clay that could be arranged to form a page, then taken apart and reused. We know about him from the scholar Shen Kuo, who described the method in a book written in the late eleventh century. Later Chinese printers experimented with wooden and metal type.

Korea went further. Korean printers were casting metal type by the thirteenth century. The oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type is a Korean Buddhist text known as the Jikji, printed in 1377, nearly eighty years before Gutenberg's Bible. A copy survives in the National Library of France in Paris.

Why movable type did not take over in Asia

If movable type existed in China and Korea first, why did woodblock printing remain dominant there? A major reason is the writing system. Chinese uses thousands of distinct characters, so a printer needed an enormous stock of type, and finding and sorting characters was slow. For many jobs, carving a whole block was just as efficient. In 1443 the Korean king Sejong introduced a new alphabet, Hangul, with a small number of letters, but it took centuries to displace Chinese characters in formal writing. European languages, written with an alphabet of a few dozen letters, were far better suited to movable type.

Whether Gutenberg knew anything of Asian printing is unknown. Most historians think he developed his system independently, but the earlier inventions are a reminder that major technologies often have several origins.

Worked example: the cost of a book

Imagine a university in about 1400 wants a new copy of a standard legal textbook of several hundred pages. Work through what it takes.

• Materials. If written on parchment, it needs dozens of animal skins, scraped, stretched and cut. On paper it is cheaper, but paper is still imported and costly.
• Labor. A professional scribe might copy a few pages a day. The book takes months.
• Checking. Someone must compare the copy against the original and correct errors, adding more time.
• Result. One book, costing as much as a skilled worker might earn in months, with its own unique mistakes.

Now imagine a printing shop around 1480 producing the same textbook. Setting the type for each page takes time, but once a page is set, hundreds of sheets can be printed from it in a day. The cost of each copy falls sharply, and every copy has the same text, including the same mistakes, which can be corrected in the next edition. The difference is not only speed. It is the shift from unique copies to identical ones, which made it possible for readers in different cities to point to the same page and argue about the same words.