Gutenberg's invention spread with astonishing speed. Within fifty years, printing had reached most of Europe, and millions of books were in circulation. Books printed before 1501 are called incunabula, from the Latin for “cradle,” because they come from the cradle years of print.

Scattered from Mainz

For a few years, printing was concentrated in Mainz. Then, in 1462, the city was sacked during a war between rival archbishops. Many printers fled, carrying their skills with them, and new workshops opened across the German lands and beyond. German printers were soon at work in Italy, France, Spain and the Low Countries. Printing reached Rome in the 1460s, Paris in 1470 and Kraków and Seville by the 1470s.

By 1500, presses were operating in some 250 towns across Europe. Historians estimate that around 30,000 different editions were printed before 1501, amounting to millions of copies; estimates of the total range from about eight million to twenty million. More books may have been produced in those fifty years than European scribes had copied in the previous thousand.

What was printed

The first printers were business people who printed what would sell. Most incunabula were in Latin, the language of the church, universities and law, and a large share were religious: Bibles, prayer books, sermons and works of theology. Classical authors such as Cicero and Virgil were popular too, along with grammars, legal texts, medical books, calendars and almanacs. Printers also produced small jobs: indulgences, government announcements and broadsheets. Over time, books in the everyday spoken languages, the vernaculars, grew in number.

Venice and Aldus Manutius

By the end of the century, Venice had become the leading center of European printing, thanks to its wealth, trade networks and supply of paper. Its most celebrated printer was Aldus Manutius, a scholar who founded the Aldine Press in 1494. He set out to publish the great works of ancient Greek literature and philosophy, many of them printed for the first time, including Aristotle. He also introduced italic type, cut by the punch-cutter Francesco Griffo and first used in 1501, and popularized small, portable books in the octavo format, which readers could carry in a pocket. His trademark, a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, is still used by publishers today.

Caxton and English

In England, printing was introduced by William Caxton, a merchant who learned the craft on the continent. He printed the first book in English, a history of Troy that he had translated himself, in Bruges around 1473 to 1474, then set up a press at Westminster in 1476. He printed Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Malory's tales of King Arthur, among many others. Caxton faced a problem: English varied greatly from region to region. In one preface he told a story about merchants who asked a farmwife for “eggys” and were not understood, because in her region the word was “eyren.” His choices, mostly following the English of London, helped standardize the language.

Changes in the book

Early printed books looked like manuscripts, but they soon developed new features. Printers added title pages, page numbers, tables of contents and indexes, all made more useful by the fact that every copy now had the same pages in the same order. Illustrations were added using woodcuts, which could be printed alongside type. These features made books easier to search, cite and compare.

The picture book of the world

One of the most ambitious incunabula shows how quickly print grew in scale. In 1493 the Nuremberg printer Anton Koberger, who ran one of the largest printing businesses in Europe, published the Nuremberg Chronicle, a history of the world from creation to the author's own day. It contained more than 1,800 woodcut illustrations of cities, kings and biblical scenes, printed from several hundred blocks, some reused for different cities. Editions appeared in Latin and German. It was a commercial gamble on a grand scale, and a sign that printing had become an industry.

Resistance and fears

Not everyone welcomed the new technology. Some scribes worried about their livelihood. Some scholars complained that printers were careless, filling books with errors and flooding the market with trash. A Venetian friar named Filippo de Strata, around 1474, attacked printing in verse, arguing that it corrupted texts, cheapened learning and put dangerous material into the hands of the ignorant. The same complaints would return with every new medium.

Worked example: one book, two worlds

Compare the experience of a student in 1450 and one in 1500 who both want to study Cicero's speeches.

• 1450. The student must borrow a manuscript from a teacher or library, copy it himself or pay for a copy, and hope it is accurate. If his copy differs from a friend's, they cannot easily tell which is right.
• 1500. He can buy a printed edition, perhaps a cheap pocket-sized one from Venice. His classmates have the same edition. They can refer to page numbers, compare an editor's notes and buy a newer, corrected edition when it appears.

The change was not just more books. It was the creation of a shared text that many people could read at once, in different places, and argue about. That shared ground made new kinds of scholarship, and new kinds of controversy, possible.