The Press, and What It Actually Changed

Printing did not begin in Mainz. It began in China centuries earlier, and movable type was in use in Korea before Gutenberg was born. What Gutenberg assembled around 1450 was a workable European system, and the component that made the economics work is the one nobody remembers: an adjustable hand mould that let a workshop cast thousands of identical pieces of type quickly and cheaply. The press mattered. The oil-based ink mattered. The mould is the reason the sums came out.

And the sums are the whole story. A scribe copying a book produces one book, and the cost of the second copy is the same as the first. A press has a large fixed cost (setting the type) and a marginal cost that falls with every sheet. That single change in cost structure is what everything else runs through.

The first consequence is not the one usually named. Cheap copies did not immediately make more people literate; literacy rose later and slowly. What they did was change what it was worth writing down. Under scribal economics a text had to justify weeks of a skilled person's labour, so what got copied was what deserved to last. Under print economics a pamphlet that would be irrelevant in a month could still pay for itself, and that is where the pamphlet, the broadsheet, the printed sermon and eventually the newspaper come from. A whole register of disposable, argumentative, up-to-the-minute writing became possible because it stopped being absurd.

Then there is standardisation, which Elizabeth Eisenstein argued was printing's deepest effect. A hand copy drifts: every scribe introduces errors, and two copies of the same text diverge steadily over a century of recopying. Print stops the drift within an edition. Every copy is identical, which is what makes it possible to write 'page 42 of the 1543 edition' and have somebody four hundred miles away check it. Cumulative, correctable, citable knowledge depends on a fixed text, and a fixed text is what the press supplied.

But the claim this chapter exists to refuse is the biggest one: that printing caused the Reformation. Reform movements with substantially the same theology existed before print (Wycliffe in England, Hus in Bohemia) and were contained. Luther's were not. What the press changed was speed and reach: his pamphlets spread across German-speaking Europe in weeks rather than years, in quantities no authority could seize. That is a claim about scale, not about content. There were printers on both sides, and the Catholic press was substantial.

Which brings us to the pattern worth taking away, and it is visible in the numbers. Books printed in Europe before 1501 are called incunabula, from the Latin for swaddling clothes, and roughly thirty thousand distinct editions survive. What were they? Overwhelmingly religious works, classical texts and legal manuals. The first fifty years of the most disruptive information technology before the internet were spent making the existing canon cheaper.

This is normal. Early film was staged theatre shot from the stalls. Early websites were brochures. The native forms of a medium (the pamphlet, the close-up, the feed) arrive only once the thing is cheap and familiar enough that people stop asking what the old object would look like inside it. If a new medium's first decade is dominated by existing material, that is not evidence it will not matter. It is what mattering looks like from the beginning.