From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Printing / Typography Timeline

The earliest printing was the stamping of inscriptions into the soft clay of bricks before firing, done under the rule of the Sumerian king Naram-Sîn of Akkad (also transcribed Narām-Sîn, Naram-Suen), who built the Temple of Inanna. Prior to Naram-Sîn the inscriptions on the bricks were written by hand.

MS 5106 in the Schøyen Collection is a brick printing block, 13x13x10 cm, 3 lines in a large formal cuneiform script with large loop handle from the period of Naram-Sîn.

Only two other brick printing blocks of Naram-Sîn are known: one intact with a cylindrical handle in Istanbul, and a tiny fragment in British Museum.

The Phaistos Disc, a disc of fired clay from the Minoan Palace of Phaistos on the island of Crete, was discovered in 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier, and remains the most famous document found in Crete.

"It is about 15 cm (5.9 in) in diameter and covered on both sides with a spiral of stamped symbols. Its purpose and meaning, and even its original geographical place of manufacture, remain disputed, making it one of the most famous mysteries of archaeology. This unique object is now on display at the archaeological museum of Heraklion in Crete" (Wikipedia article on Phaistos Disc, accessed 07-26-2009).

Because of the unique features of the disc, and the mysteries surrounding its origin, many people have doubted its authenticity, but no one has yet been able to prove conclusively that it is a forgery.

"The disk has the distinction of being the world's first typewritten document. It was made by taking a stamp or punch bearing the sign to be written in a raised pattern, and impressing this on the wet clay. The maker therefore needed to have as many stamps as there were signs in the script. It has the advantage that even complicated signs can be quickly written, and every example of the same sign is identical and easy to read. The disadvantage is that a considerable outlay of time and effort is required to make the set of stamps before any document can be produced. It is therefore evident that the system was not created solely for a single document; its maker must have intended to reproduce a large number of documents, though it remains some way from being an anticipation of printing.

"It is therefore all the more remarkable that after more than eighty years of excavation not another single scrap of clay impressed with these stamps had been found at Phaistos, or at any other site in Crete or elsewhere. It would be very surprising if there were not somewhere more examples of the script waiting to be found, but the disk remains so far unique, and the suspicion must arise that it was an isolated object brought from some other area.

"This impression of foreign origin can be supported by two arguments. The work of cutting the stamps, whether made directly or perhaps more likely by making moulds into which metal was poured, is a technique very similar to gem-engraving. We might therefore expect the signs to bear a stylistic resemblance to those engraved on seal-stones. In fact the style of art is noticeably different. Secondly, some of the objects depicted by the signs have a distinctly foreign appearance to those familiar with Minoan art" (Chadwick, Linear B and Related Scripts  [1987]  57-58).

Under King Nebuchadnezzar II, the king who is named more than 90 times in the Old Testament, the restoration and enlargement of the Etemenanki ziggurat in Babylon was completed after 43 years of labor. The ziggurat was originally built around the time of Hammurabi. It has been calculated that for its construction at least 17 million bricks had to be made and fired.

Some of these bricks were stamped with inscriptions in cuneiform. Eventually the ziggurat became known as the Tower of Babel, and the few bricks from this that survive are known as "Tower of Babel bricks" or Nebuchadnezzar II bricks. In his Typographia: an historical sketch of the origin and progress of the Art of Printing (1825) p.2 printer and historian of printing Thomas Curson Hansard called these bricks "the first step toward the art of printing." 

“Babylon with the ziggurat was captured by Kyros 538 BC, Dareios I 519 BC, Xerxes ca. 483 BC, and entirely destroyed by Alexander I the Great in 331 BC. It is this tall stepped temple tower which is referred to in Genesis 11:1-9, and became known as ’The Tower of Babel’. The bricks are specifically mentioned in Genesis 11:3: ’Come, let us make bricks and bake them in the fire. — For stone they used bricks and for mortar they used bitumen’. The black bitumen is still visible on the back of the present baked brick. These bricks are considered so important and interesting that British Museum had their copy on exhibit with special handout descriptions, from where parts of the present information is taken. For a stele illustrating The Tower of Babel, see MS 2063. Nebuchadnezzar II was the founder of the New Babylonian empire. He captured Jerusalem in 596 and 586 BC, burnt down the temple and all of Jerusalem, carried its treasures off to Babylon, and took the Jews into captivity (2 kings 24-25). Nebuchadnezzar II is the king who is named more than 90 times in the Old Testament. Daniel 1-4 is almost entirely devoted to the description of his greatness and reign, his rise and fall, and submission to God” (Schøyen Collection MS 1815/1).

Completion of the inscription incised at the base of Trajan’s Column in Rome.

“This is perhaps the most famous example of Roman square capitals, a script often used for stone monuments, and less often for manuscript writing. As it was meant to be read from below, the bottom letters are slightly smaller than the top letters, to give proper perspective. Some, but not all, word divisions are marked with a dot, and many of the words, especially the titles, are abbreviated. In the inscription, numerals are marked with a titulus, a bar across the top of the letters” (Wikipedia article on Trajan's Column, accessed 08-09-2009).

♦ After the invention of printing by moveable type in Europe in the mid-15th century, Roman letters from stone inscriptions became a major source of inspiration for punch-cutters and type designers.  The fifteenth century Roman typeface designed by Nicolas Jenson, and the Roman typeface commissioned by Aldus Manutius and cut by Francesco Griffo, both of which are known as Antiqua, or "Venetian oldstyle", have been called syntheses of Roman stone inscriptions and Carolingian minuscule.

The earliest woodblock printed fragments to survive are from China and are of silk printed with flowers in three colors from the Han dynasty (before 220 CE).

Death of Wei Tan, to whom the Chinese attribute the discovery of ink used for writing, and later for printing.

Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 32.

The earliest Egyptian printed cloth dates from the 4th century.

"In his Natural History, Pliny states that this technique [printing on textiles] was particularly utilized in Egypt. Printed material is only represented by fabrics of the fourth century at the earliest and continues until the Arab period.  In those days, there were great textile centers such as Alexandria, Panopolis, Oxyrhynchus, Tinnis and Damietta, but regrettably we know this only from texts, because any trace of weaving shops and their fragile wooden looms has vanished.  However, by studying the fabrics themselves, scholars are often able to derive their origins. 

"Actually, only two groups of fabrics have been dated with any certainty. One group was a pair of medallions and a band of flax and purple wool coming from a tomb in Hwara in the Fayoum Oasis, which were found together with a coin dated to 340 AD. These medallions are adorned in a manner that is virtually identical with that of painted Egyptian shrouds of the Roman period and fabrics discovered in Syria. Next to the body of Aurelius Colluthus, in his tomb at Antinoe, were discovered sales contracts and his will, all written in Greek between 454 and 456 AD. He was wrapped in a large tapestry with an upper tier showing two busts under arcades supported by two large columns. A geometrical network with florets and leaves covers the space between the columns, which is a composition very similar to the decorations in paintings and mosaics of the same period" (http://touregypt.net/featurestories/fabrics.htm, accessed 01-29-2010).

First mention of printing in China: "an imperial decree of 593 in which Sui emperor Wen-ti ordered the printing of Buddhist images and scriptures, but no details with regard to this enterprise were given."

The Chinese practice of cutting in stone the text of the Confucian classics in order to ensure permanency and accuracy may date back as far as 175 CE. However, the earliest date to which ink rubbings on paper from these stones— a kind of pre-printing—can be assigned with certainty is the reign of Taizong of Tang (T'ai Tsung), during which "a rubbing was made which was discovered by Pelliot at Tun-huang" (Carter, History of Printing in China, 2nd ed [1955] 20).

Blockprinting on paper is thought to have started in China in the seventh century, but no examples survive. "The oldest surviving printing was found in 1966 in a stupa in the Buddhist temple Pulguk-sa, Kyongju, Korea. It is a small dharani scroll printed 704-751" (Schøyen Collection, 21. Pre-Gutenberg Printing).

Date of the earliest examples of Japanese printed silk in which the date forms part of the pattern.

"These dates [also 740] are the earliest examples in the world of block printed script, and it is not surprising to find that they antedate by only a few years the first block prints on paper from Japan" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 195).

The Japanese Empress Shotuku commissions one million copies of small wooden pagodas containing Buddhist charms, or dharani scrolls printed on paper from woodblocks, as thanks for the suppression of the Emi Rebellion by Fujiwara Nakamaro in 764.

"900,000 pagodas were distributed to temples around the entire country. 100,000 were divided between the Ten Great temples in the Nara area, which erected special halls for these pagodas, known as the Small Pagoda Hall, or the Ten Thousand Pagoda Hall.
4 different texts were printed, all from the Mukujoko sutra: Kompon Dharani, Storin Dharani, Jishin-in Dharani, and Rokudo Dharani." (Shoyen Collection MS 2489).

No more printing occurred in Japan until about 1080.

The Diamond Sutra is published in China. A scroll sixteen feet long by 10.5 inches wide, made up of seven strips of yellow-stained paper printed from carved wooden blocks and pasted together to form a scroll 16 feet by 10. 5 inches wide, the text, printed in Chinese, is one of the most important sacred works of the Buddhist faith, which was founded in India.

The Diamond Sutra is the earliest dated example of woodblock printing, and the earliest surviving complete printed book. The scroll bears an inscription which may be translated as follows:

"reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Chieh on behalf of his parents on the fifteenth of the fourth moon of the ninth year of Xian Long (May 11, 868)."

A woodcut illustration at the beginning of  Diamond Sutra’shows the Buddha expounding the sutra to an elderly disciple called Subhuti.  That illustration is the earliest dated book illustration, and the earliest dated woodcut print.

"How did the Diamond Sutra get its name?

"The sutra answers that question for itself. Towards the end of the sermon, Subhuti asks the Buddha how the sutra should be known. He is told to call it ‘The Diamond of Transcendent Wisdom’ because its teaching will cut like a diamond blade through worldly illusion to illuminate what is real and everlasting" (http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/sacredtexts/diamondsutra.html, accessed 06-14-2009).

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of the Diamond Sutra at The International Dunhuang Project, accessed 01-29-2010.

Feng Tao, prime minister of China, orders the printing of the Confucian classics from wood blocks.

The work of editing and printing the Classics and their Commentaries lasted for 21 years and extended to 130 volumes.

"The chief purpose of printing was not yet to make literature more accesible to the masses, but rather to authenticate the text. For more than a century after Feng Tao--up to the year 1064—the private printing of the Classics was forbidden. All printing must be done by the government and must give the orthodox accepted text."

"The work of Feng Tao and his asssociates for printing in China may be compared to the work of Gutenberg in Europe. There had been printing before Gutenberg—block printing certainly and very likely experimentation in typography also—but Gutenberg's Bible heralded a new day in the civilization of Europe. In the same way there had been printing before Feng Tao, but it was an obscure art that had little efffect on the culture of the country. Feng Tao's Classics made printing a power that ushered in the renaissance of the Sung era" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 72).

"In spite of the inherent difficulties, Arabic writing was printed from an early date. Some form of xylography, or block printing, was practiced as early as the tenth century, as several amulets discovered in Egypt show. Most of the known examples were block-printed on paper, but one example was printed on papyrus, and two were printed on parchment. Although these examples are undated, the use of papyrus and parchment suggests an early date, confirmed by the style of script and by another bit of evidence; scholars have interpreted occurences of the obscure Arabic term tarsh in poems of the tenth and fourteenth centuries as references to printing amulets and charms with engraved tin plates. The headpieces on some of the surviving block-printed amulets have designs incorporating bold lettering and ornamental motifs, sometimes in reserve, which may have been printed with separate woodblocks. Early in the twentieth century the scholar B. Moritz noted the existence of six printing plates in the ancient Khedival Library in Cairo, which he dated to the Fatimid period (tenth-twelfth centuries), but their present location is unknown" (Bloom, Paper Before Print. The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World [2001] 218-19, figure 84).

"In the 600s there were local issues of paper currency in China and by 960 the Song Dynasty, short of copper for striking coins, issued the first generally circulating notes. A note is a promise to redeem later for some other object of value, usually specie. The issue of credit notes is often for a limited duration, and at some discount to the promised amount later. The jiaozi nevertheless did not replace coins during the Song Dynasty; paper money was used alongside the coins" (Wikipedia article on Banknote, accessed 08-13-2009).

Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955]103-04.

The whole Buddhist canon, usually called the Tripitaka, is printed from wood blocks in Ch'eng-tu, China.

"This collection consisted of 5,048 volumes covering 130,000 pages. It therefore required the cutting of 130,000 blocks. This massive work, together with additions, was reprinted frequently during the Sung" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 89).

Though Muslim countries trade extensively with the Chinese at this time, and widely adopt the use of paper, they do not adopt the Chinese technology of printing.

"China had been issuing paper money for more than a century when Christendom saw its first paper. China had been on a paper money basis for four hundred years when block printing began in Europe. Chinese paper money was still being issued during Gutenberg's lifetime. . . ."

"Paper money was the first form of Chinese printing met with by European travelers, was independently discussed by at least eight pre-Renaissance European writers [beginning with Marco Polo], and, so far as is known, the only form of Chinese printing described in European writings of the pre-Gutenberg days" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 108-9).

♦ Bank notes from the Song Dynasty, which issued the notes because of a shortage of copper for coinage, are essentially woodcuts with captions, representing some of the earliest woodcuts that survived.

"There is little doubt that both playing cards and dominoes originated in China and that both games were influenced by certain forms of divination and the drawing of lots and possibly by paper money. There are certain indications that the development of playing cards took place at about the same time as the transition from manuscript rolls to paged books. As the advent of printing made it more convenient to produce and use books in the form of pages, so was it easier to produce cards. These 'sheet-dice,' as they were called, began to appear according to Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-72) before the end of the Tang dynasty, and if this is true, they were one of the earliest forms of block printing in China, as they were in the West" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 184).

The Chinese alchemist Pi Sheng invents moveable type made of an amalgam of clay and glue hardened by baking.

Pi Sheng composed texts by placing the types side by side on an iron plate coated with a mixture of resin, wax, and paper ash.

Because the Chinese alphabet is primarily pictographic and ideographic rather than alphabetic, moveable type did not advance in China at this time.

Through the Arab conquest of North Africa and Southern Spain, papermaking first reached the Moorish parts of Spain (Al-Andalus)in the 12th century. A paper mill is recorded at Fez in Morocco in 1100, and the first paper mill on the Spanish mainland is recorded at Xativa, near Valencia, which was still under Arab rule, in 1151.

"Paper seems to have advanced less rapidly in Europe than it had advanced either in China or in the Arabic world. The European parchment with which paper had to compete was a far better writing material than either bamboo slips or papyrus. Furthermore, there were few in Europe who read, and the demand for a cheaper writing material, until the advent of printing, was small. While it was the coming of paper that made the invention of printing possible, it was the invention of printing that made the use of paper general. After Europe began to print, first from blocks and then from type, paper quickly took its place as the one material for writing as well as for printing, though, strange to say, the first paper mill in England was not set up until seventeen years after Caxton began to print at Westminster" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 137-38).

The first recorded issue of paper money in the Mongol Empire. "From 1260, when Kublai Khan completed the conquest of China and took the title of emperor, the issue of paper money became a settled and permanent feature of the Mongol government's financial policy. . . . Records have been preserved showing year by year the amount of notes issued through Kublai's reign and that of his successors for ninety-seventy years (1260-1356)" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 107).

"Paper money was the first form of Chinese printing met with by European travelers, was independently discussed by at least eight pre-Renaissance European writers, and, so far as is known, is the only form of Chinese printing described in European writings of pre-Gutenberg days. Marco Polo's description is the most detailed" (Carter, op. cit., 109).

King James I of Spain promulgates a "sumptutary law" forbidding certain groups of the population from wearing "estampados" or printed fabrics.

This is the earliest documentation that printed textiles existed in Europe.

Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed (1955) 198, footnote 8.

Pope Innocent IV sent John of Plano Carpini to an embassy to the court of the Grand Khan.

"He went by Prague and Kev to Mongolia, where he presented his letter and received his reply. This reply—the original—was discovered by accident in the year 1920 in the archives of the Vatican. It is written in Uigur and Persian and contains in lieu of his signature the seal of the Grand Khan Kouyouk (grandson of Jenghis). This is the first recorded appearance in Europe of an impression from a seal based on those in use in China and impressed with ink upon paper" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 159-60).

Wang Zhen, author of the Nong Shu, develops moveable type carved from wood in China.

The wood type was more durable than clay type, but worn pieces could only be replaced by carving new ones.

John of Monte Corvino, the first missionary sent by the Pope to China, arrived in Cambaluc soon after Marco Polo left for Europe. John remained at Cambaluc, as head of the mission until his death in 1328. This mission became the base for other Catholic missionary work in China.

"These missionaries, spending their lives in China, learning the language and mingling with the people, must have come in contact with printed literature at every turn. John of Monte Corvino in the first dozen years of his work, even before reinforcements had arrived, had already translated the New Testament and Psalter, and prepared pictures and text for the ignorant at just the time when in China it was the natural thing to have every important literary work printed. There is no question that the Chinese who were associated in the work of translation would have suggested that the translation and the pictures should be brought before the public in what to them was the usual and natural way. Whether the missionaries agreed and thus became the first European patrons of the art of printing, we have no means of knowing. That religious image prints, prepared, like the pictures of John of Monte Corvino, 'for the ignorant,' began to appear in Europe some time within the half century after these early missionaries laid down their work, may not be altogether a coincidence" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 161-62.)

"Tabriz is the only place in the Islamic world where there is a clear record of early block printing. In the year 1294 at this Mongol capital of Persia there was an issue of paper money with text in Chinese and Arabic.. . . . The notes. . .were direct copies of Kublai's, even the Chinese character being imitated as part of the device upon them. . .There was an Arabic inscription on each note to the effect that the notes were issued in the year 693 of the Moslem era (A.D. 1294), that all who issued false notes should be summarily punished, and that 'when these auspicious notes were put in circulation, poverty would vanish, provisions become cheap, and rich and poor be equal.' The prophecy was not fulfilled. After the constrained use of the new ch-ao for two or three days, Tabriz was in an uproar; the markets were closed; Izzudin, the minister who had proposed the issue, became the object of intense hatred and according to some accounts was murdered; and the whole project had to be abandoned.

"This dramatic issue of a printing project a century and a half before Gutenberg in a great comsopolitan community near the confines of Europe could have not gone unobserved in the commercial republics of Italy" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 170-71).

While in prison in Genoa from 1298 to 1299 Marco Polo supposedly dictated a book to a romance writer, Rustichello da Pisa. His work, which was very frequently copied, was a rare popular success in the period before printing. 

"The impact of Polo's book on cartography was delayed: the first map in which some names mentioned by Polo appear was in the Catalan Atlas of Charles V (1375), which included thirty names in China and a number of other Asian toponyms. In the mid-fifteenth century the cartographer of Murano, Fra Mauro, meticulously included all of Polo's toponyms in his map of the world. Marco Polo's description of the Far East and its riches inspired Christopher Columbus's decision to try to reach Asia by sea, in a westward route. A heavily annotated copy of Polo's book was among the belongings of Columbus. Polo's writings included descriptions of cannibals and spice growers" (Wikipedia article on The Travels of Marco Polo, accessed 04-04-2010).

"His book, Il Milione (the title comes from either 'The Million', then considered a gigantic number, or from Polo's family nickname Emilione), was written in the Old French and entitled Le divisament dou monde ('The description of the world'). The book was soon translated into many European languages and is known in English as The Travels of Marco Polo. The original is lost, and we have several often-conflicting versions of the translations. The book became an instant success — quite an achievement in a time when printing was not known in Europe."

"An authoritative version of Marco Polo's book does not exist, and the early manuscripts differ significantly. The published versions of his book either rely on single scripts, blend multiple versions together or add notes to clarify, for example in the English translation by Henry Yule. Another English translation by A.C. Moule and Paul Pelliot, published in 1938, is based on the Latin manuscript which was found in the library of the Cathedral of Toledo in 1932, and is 50% longer than other versions. Approximately 150 variants in various languages are known to exist, and without the availability of a printing press many errors were made during copying and translation, resulting in many discrepancies" (Wikipedia article on Marco Polo, accessed 01-29-2010).

♦ From the standpoint of printing before its invention in the West, Polo's work contained the earliest detailed account of Chinese printed paper money that was widely available in Europe.  Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed (1955) 109-11.

In spite of its wide fame, recent scholars question whether Marco Polo actually went to China.

Rashid al-Din Tabib writes in the Persian language an enormous history entitled Jami al-Tawarikh. Portions survive in lavishly illustrated manuscripts, some produced during the lifetime and perhaps under the direction of Rashid al-Din. This history contains a discussion of printing in China.

"This is the earliest notice of Chinese printing, aside from the making of paper money, outside of East Asiatic sources. It is evident that Rashid had a reasonably reliable source of information and that the printing in which he was interested was the printing of books, especially historical records. Where he failed was in not grasping the importance of the new art as an economical means of disseminating literature and in seeing it merely as a means of authenticating the exact text—a characteristic of Chinese official printing that has already been noticed . . . ." (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed[1955] 173).

Though he was obviously aware of the new technology, Rashid al-Din seems never to have contemplated having his history printed, probably because the new technology was not available in the Middle East. Instead he left instructions in his will and provided funds for the purpose so that "each year two full copies of all his works should be made by hand, one in Arabic and one in Persian, until gradually there should be a complete copy in the mosque of every large city of the Moslem world" (Carter).

"Earliest use of paper money in Japan. The Japanese notes were smaller than those of China, being about 2 by 6 inches. This paper money was secured by a gold or silver or other metallic reserve" (Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft 2nd ed [1947] 474).

Two color (black and red) printing is produced in China.

Fragments of block-printing on paper in Arabic and Hebrew from the Cairo Genizah preserved in the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library indicate that block-printing may have been practiced by Arabs and Jews as early as the mid-14th century.

Examples of wood block printing in Arabic excavated in 1880 in the region of El-Fayyum (Faiyum) in Egypt are also thought to date from this time. They are preserved in the Erzherzog Rainer Collection in the Austrian National Library, Vienna.

Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed (1955) 176-181.

"The earliest references to playing cards in Europe that can be clearly differentiated from chess, follow each other with rapid succession in various countries—Germany 1377, Spain 1377, Luxemburg 1379, Italy 1379, Belgium 1379, France 1382. . . "(Carter, Invention of Printing in China, 2nd ed. [1955] 185).

At this time playing cards in Europe were probably not printed.

The earliest surviving book printed from moveable type is an edition, the title of which translates as Selected Teachings of Buddhist Sages and Son Masters, printed from bronze moveable type in Korea. It bears a date corresponding to 1377. A copy is preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

In Korea a set of 100,000 copper types are cast by command of the king. 

These were used for printing "many books" in Korea until 1544.

Jan de Printere of Antwerpe is earliest textile printer whose name is documented in Europe.

Carter, History of Printing in China 2nd ed (1955), 198.

The earliest dated European form of xylographic or woodblock prints are religious souvenirs known as helgen. The earliest recorded helgen is a portrait of the Virgin dated 1418 in the Royal Library of Brussels.

Previously the earliest known dated woodblock print or woodcut was thought to be a portrait of St. Christopher dated 1423 and preserved at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, England

Card makers, who presumably are card printers printing from wood-blocks, are mentioned five times in the city records of Augsburg and Nuremberg by this date. About the same time the records of the city of Ulm in Germany show that cards are being shipped in barrels to Sicily and Italy.

Carter, History of Printing in China 2nd ed (1955) 186.

The king of Korea orders the Publications Office to cast a bronze font of 200,000 pieces of type named Kabin-Ja.

"This momentous event in Korean typographical history is recorded in the Yi Dynasty Annals and in the Third Foreword to the Yoktae janggam bakui of 1437. These accounts state the that the king, regretting that the type in use, though beautiful, was difficult to read because of the small size of the characters, suggested that a new font be cast from written characters of a larger size. Within two months more than 200,000 were cast, so clear and exact that it was possible to print more than forty sheets per day" (Schøyen Collection 21. Pre-Gutenberg Printing MS 2923).

The first artist known to produce copperplate engravings, and the "first personality" in the history of printmaking, the "Master of the Playing Cards," is active in Germany at this time. Of this artist about 100 engravings are known. He is associated with playing cards because sixty of his engravings are playing cards—the first cards printed from intaglio plates.

Il Libro dell Arte, often translated as "The Craftsman's Handbook," by Italian painter Cennino d' Andrea Cennini, includes a description of methods used by Europeans for textile printing.

Cennino Cennini's work was first printed in 1859.

In Strasbourg, Germany Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith, working with partners, produces small cast metal mirrors for the  "great Aachen pilgrimage." As many as 100,000 of these mirrors were cast from a mixture of lead, tin and antimony—the three basic ingredients that Gutenberg later used in the casting of metal type. The Aachen pilgrimage of 1439-40 was postponed because of an outbreak of plague.

Much of what is known about Gutenberg comes from the collection of 28 legal documents that mention him by name. These records were transcribed verbatim before the originals were destroyed in a fire in Strasbourg in 1870. The documents were first published in Festschrift zum fünfhundertjährigen geburtstage von Johann Gutenberg, im auftrage der stadt Mainz, 1900. A revision and amplification of two of the texts was published in Gutenbergfestschrift zur feier des 25jährigen bestehens des Gutenbergmuseums in Mainz, 1925. The documents were translated into English in McMurtrie, The Gutenberg Documents. With translations of the texts into English, based with authority on the compilation by Dr. Karl Schorbach (1941).

Lehmann-Haupt, Gutenberg and the Master of the Playing Cards (1966) 58-60.

An edict of the Council of Venice indicates that the card printing industry in this city is being interfered with by outside competition.

Printed newsletters begin circulating in Europe.

The Göttingen Model Book, preserved at Niedersächische Staats- und Universitäts Bibliothek Göttingen,

 "is a painting book for the drawing of leaves, initials and patterned backgrounds in different color combinations; even the composition of the colors is described in detail. The book decorations described in this manuscript can be found in the earliest period of printing in several Gutenberg Bibles, including the Göttingen copy of the B42" (http://www.gutenbergdigital.de/gudi/eframes/texte/framere/mubu_1.htm, accessed 08-12-2009).

The manuscript arrived in Göttingen in 1770 with the bequest of the library of Johann Friedrich Armand von Uffenbach.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile at this link: http://www.gutenbergdigital.de/gudi/eframes/index.htm. accessed 01-17-2010).

The Sibyllenbuch fragment, also known as Fragment vom Weltgericht, a small portion of a leaf from an early printed medieval poem containing prophecies of the fate of the Holy Roman Empire, may be the earliest surviving remnant of any European book printed by movable type.  It is printed in an early state of the DK font later used in the 36-line Bible. This state of the type was assigned by George D. Painter to the press of Johannes Gutenberg prior to his partnership with Johann Fust.

The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC no. is00492500) dates the Sibyllenbuch fragment to "about 1452-53," making it older than any other European document printed by moveable type.

"The Sibyllenbuch fragment consists of a partial paper leaf printed in German using Gothic letter. It is owned by the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany. The fragment was discovered in 1892 in an old bookbinding in Mainz. The text on the fragment relates to the Last Judgment and therefore sometimes is also called “Das Weltgericht” (German for "Last Judgment"). The text is part of a fourteenth century poem of 1040 lines known as the 'Sibyllenbuch' (Book of the Sibyls) . . . . The British Library identifies the fragment as coming from a quarto volume, which is a book composed of sheets of paper on which four pages were printed on each side, which were then folded twice to form groups of four leaves or eight pages. From analysis of the location of the watermark on the fragment and the known length of the entire poem, it has been estimated that the complete work contained 37 leaves (74 pages) with 28 lines per page.

"The type face used in the Sibyllenbuch is the same as that used in other early fragments attributed to Gutenberg, an Ars minor by Donatus (a Latin grammar used for centuries in schools) and several leaves of a pamphlet called the Turkish Calendar for 1455 (likely printed in late 1454), and has been called the DK type after its use in the Donatus and Kalendar. Scholars have identified several different states of this type face, a later version of which was used in about 1459-60 to print the so-called 36-line Bible. For this reason, the various states of this type have collectively been called the '36-line Bible type.'

"Due to the 'less finished state of the [DK] font', scholars have concluded it was 'plausibly earlier than 1454', the approximate date of the publication of Gutenberg’s Bible. Although at one time some believed it dated to the 1440s, it is now believed to have been printed in the early 1450s. George D. Painter concluded that 'primitive imperfection' in the type face of the Sibyllenbuch indicated it was the earliest of the fragments printed in the DK type" (Wikipedia article on Sibyllenbuch fragment, accessed 07-10-2009). 

The so-called “Giant Bible of Mainz,” one of the most magnificent Middle-Rhenish manuscript books of the fifteenth century, is written out on parchment in gothic letters on leaves measuring 570 and 400mm. The identified scribe dated his work in various places in the manuscript. The manuscript is preserved in the Lessing Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress.

The similarity in format and calligraphic style between this manuscript and the typography of the Gutenberg Bible issued just two years later is striking, suggesting that this manuscript might be the model for the typography Gutenberg used in his 42-line Bible. There is also a striking similarity between the illumination of this manuscript and the illumination of the William H. Scheide copy of the Gutenberg Bible at Princeton University. In addition, both styles of illumination bear a strong relationship to the style of certain engraved designs by the Master of the Playing Cards, the first "major master" in the history of printmaking, and "the first personality in the history of engraving." In Gutenberg and the Master of the Playing Cards (1966) Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt suggested that the creators of these illuminations and the Master of the Playing Cards may have used a common model book which is now lost.

Johannes Gutenberg has printed at least part of the 42-line Bible (Gutenberg Bible) by this date.

It has been stated that printing by moveable type was the first major invention in Europe associated with the name of an individual inventor, though ironically no documents have survived proving that Gutenberg actually invented the process.

For centuries the Catholic church sold Indulgences as a method of raising funds. These sheets of parchment, and later paper, were reproduced by manuscript copying. After the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, a new round of Indulgences were sold in order to finance a crusade against the Turks.

The earliest document with a fixed date printed by moveable type is a 31-line Letter of Indulgence, printed in the so-called DK type, issued at Erfurt on October 22. The year 1454 is printed; the month and day is filled in by hand. This Indulgence, of which the only surviving copy is preserved in the Scheide Library at Princeton, was probably printed by Johannes Gutenberg.

The earliest printed Indulgence in the British Library is dated 1455.

Johannes Gutenberg, working with merchant and money-lender Johann Fust and printer Peter Schöffer, completes printing the 42-line Bible (B42) (Gutenberg Bible), the first book printed in Europe from moveable type.

To accomplish this monumental task Gutenberg, previously a goldsmith,  invented a special kind of printing ink, a method of casting type, and a special kind of press derived from the wine press. This complex set of integrated technologies has been called the first invention in Europe attributed to a single individual. Printing books was also the first process of mass production—the process that centuries later became the model for the Industrial Revolution.

Yet the process of printing from moveable type, for centuries attributed to Gutenberg, without supporting documents on the technical aspects of the process, except for the surviving examples of his printing, seems to have evolved in stages from the early 1450s to the 1470s, and also seems to have involved other inventors besides Gutenberg. In 2002 physicist and software developer Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Paul Needham, Librarian of the Scheide Library at Princeton University, working on original editions in the Scheide Library, used high resolution scans of individual characters printed by Gutenberg, and image processing algorithms to locate and compare variants of the same characters printed by Gutenberg. From this research it appears that the method of producing moveable type attributed to Gutenberg developed in phases rather than as a complete system, and that Gutenberg's technique of type casting was a precursor to the definitive process developed in the 1470s.

"We may now surmise that the method of manufacture of type with steel punches and matrices, which became the standard for more than four centuries of typography, was introduced a few years later by Nicolas Jenson, who from early days on was praised as a co-inventor. Jenson's contribution was apparently based on the early part of his career at the Mint in Paris, where striking medals with elaborate lettering would have given him specialized expertise. Jenson became one of the most influential type designers of all ages —as well as an excellent printer —when he worked in the 1470s in Venice, but this may have been preceded by an interlude in Mainz, where he probably made a type, first used in 1459, which unlike Gutenberg's types, was able to withstand many years of intensive use" (Lotte Hellinga, "The Gutenberg Revolutions," Eliot & Rose (eds) A Companion to the History of the Book [2007] 208).

"The irregularities in Gutenberg's type, particularly in simple characters such as the hyphen, made it clear that the variations could not have come from either ink smear or from wear and damage on the pieces of metal on the types themselves. While some identical types are clearly used on other pages, other variations, subjected to detailed image analysis, made for only one conclusion: that they could not have been produced from the same matrix. Transmitted light pictures of the page also revealed substructures in the type that could not arise from punchcutting techniques. They [Agüera y Arcas and Needham] hypothesized that the method involved impressing simple shapes to create alphabets in "cuneiform" style in a mould like sand. Casting the type would destroy the mould, and the alphabet would need to be recreated to make additional type. This would explain the non-identical type, as well as the substructures observed in the printed type. Thus, they feel that 'the decisive factor for the birth of typography', the use of reusable moulds for casting type, might have been a more progressive process than was previously thought. They suggest that the additional step of using the punch to create a mould that could be reused many times was not taken until twenty years later, in the 1470s" (Wikipedia article on Johannes Gutenberg, accessed 02-08-2009).

References:

Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Paul Needham, "Computational analytical bibliography," Proceedings Bibliopolis Conference The future history of the book', The Hague: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, (November 2002).

Agüera y Arcas, "Temporary Matrices and Elemental Punches in Gutenberg's DK type", in: Jensen (ed) Incunabula and Their Readers. Printing , Selling, and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century (2003) 1-12.

ISTC no. ib00526000

It has been determined that there were three phases in the printing process of the B42:

1. The first sheets were rubricated by being passed twice through the printing press, using black and then red ink. This process was soon abandoned, with spaces left for rubrication to be added by hand.

2. Some time later, after more sheets had been printed, the number of lines per page was increased from 40 to 42, presumably to save paper. Therefore, pages 1 to 9 and pages 256 to 265, presumably the first ones printed, have 40 lines each. Page 10 has 41, and from there on the 42 lines appear. The increase in line number was achieved by decreasing the interline spacing, rather than increasing the printed area of the page.

3. The print run was increased, probably to 180 copies, necessitating resetting those pages which had already been printed. The new sheets were all reset to 42 lines per page. Consequently, there are two distinct settings in folios 1-32 and 129-158 of volume I and folios 1-16 and 162 of volume II. 

It is believed that  approximately 180 copies of the Bible were produced, 135 on paper and 45 on vellum. When illuminated, the vellum copies would have even more closely resembled traditional medieval manuscripts. 47 or 48 copies survived, but of these only 21 are complete. Others are missing leaves or whole volumes. The 48 copies include volumes in Trier and Indiana which seem to be two parts of one copy. There are a substantial number of fragments, including numerous individual leaves. Twelve vellum copies survived, of which four are complete, and one is the New Testament only.

♦ When I checked the ISTC in January 2010 there were four different digital facsimiles available online, from the British Library, Keio University, Niedersächische Staats- und Universitäts Bibliothek Göttingen, and the Library of Congress. The British Library site offers the opportunity to compare their copies printed on paper and on vellum.

♦ In 2008 Stephen Fry made an excellent 60 minute film on Guterberg's development of printing by moveable type for the BBC entitled The Machine that Made Us. For the film Fry's team reconstructed what may have been Gutenberg's original press, cut punches, made matrices, cast type, and even made paper, before printing a page on the press. In March 2010 you could watch the film at this link: http://www.dontpressme.com/video/gutenberg.html. The film did not take into account the recent discoveries at Princeton regarding the method that Gutenberg probably used to cast his type.

Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, reported that in Frankfurt the year before, "a marvelous man" had been promoting the sale of a printed Bible. Piccolomini stated that he saw parts of the book and that it had such clear, large lettering that one could read it without eye glasses. He also noted that every copy had been sold.

Johann Fust, a merchant and money-lender, files a lawsuit against Johannes Gutenberg to recover money that he had advanced to Gutenberg beginning in 1450. This is one of the few extant documents that may imply Gutenberg's place in the history of printing by moveable type, though nothing concerning printing is specifically mentioned in the document. It is also possible, according to Paul Needham, that the document may be Gutenberg's personal copy, endorsed in his hand.

Fust's total claim against Gutenberg was 2026 gulden with interest. As a result of the lawsuit Gutenberg most probably paid back Fust's investment plus interest. Whether Fust gained possession of Gutenberg’s press and equipment, used for what the document calls the "Work of the Books," is unclear. Gutenberg seems to have resumed printing before 1460.

The record of this lawsuit, preserved at the Niedersächische Staats- und Universitäts Bibliothek Göttingen, is formally known as the The Helmasperger Notarial Instrument.

"Ulrich Helmasperger, clerk of the Bishopric of Bamberg, royal notary and certified public recorder at the Court of the Archbishop of Mainz wrote the Instrument which bears his name. This is the only contemporary account of the business relations between Gutenberg and Fust and of Gutenberg's invention, the "Work of the Books". This account of the legal proceedings documents that the citizen of Mainz, Johannes Fust, swore the following under oath: He had lent Gutenberg the sum of 1550 guilders which he himself had had to borrow at an interest rate of 6%. In his view the money he lent Gutenberg which was not used for their mutual benefit for the Work of the Books was a loan and thus he demanded that the interest on this loan be refunded to him. The Instrument briefly discusses the first legal complaint - the demand for repayment of the money - and describes the judgement which was unfavorable for Gutenberg. The Instrument does not mention the final judgement - Fust's demand that the partnership with Gutenberg be dissolved and the consequences of this" (http://www.gutenbergdigital.de/gudi/eframes/index.htm, accessed 01-17-2010).

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of the document, in whole, and in enlarged parts with transliterations and English translations, from the Niedersächische Staats- und Universitäts Bibliothek Göttingen website at this link: http://www.gutenbergdigital.de/gudi/eframes/index.htm, accessed 01-17-2010).

Needham, The Invention and Early Spread of European Printing as Represented in the Scheide Library (2007) 8.

The Aderlasskalender for the year 1457, also known as the Laxierkalender, is issued in Mainz, printed in the type of the 36-line Bible, presumably in 1456. 

It survives in only one incomplete copy in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (ISTC No. ia00051700).

"Bleeding- and purgation-calendars, which gave details of the lucky and unlucky days on which to bleed or take medicine in a given year, were popular in the Middle Ages. They maintained their popularity with the coming of the printed book. According to Osler, 'forty-six of these bleeding-and purgation-calendars were printed before 1480; one hundred of them before 1501 have been collected. . . .' The Mainz Kalendar for 1457 is much more a purgation-than a bleeding-calendar" (Berry & Poole, Annals of Printing (1966) 13.

Pope Calixtus III promulgates the Bulla Turcorum, announcing the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, and seeking funding for another crusade against the Turks, who were advancing into the Balkans.

"A copy of the Bull reached Mainz and was printed by Johann Gutenberg; only the present copy in the Scheide Library survives. A German translation was also printed by Gutenberg. It too survives in only one copy, in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Although no surviving example of early European printing is signed by Johann Gutenberg, early evidences and reports converge to show that he was the inventor of European typography. In particular, the “DK” (Donatus and Kalendar) type appears to be his first printing type. It was used in part to print the 31-line Cyprus Indulgence, of which the earliest datable copy, executed in Erfurt on 22 October 1454, is in the Scheide Library: this is the first fixed date at which we know that printing was being carried out in Mainz. Several other DK-type fragments, such as the Sibyllenbuch partial leaf at the Gutenberg Museum, Mainz, show a much less finished state of the font, and are plausibly earlier than 1454. In the late 1450s, the DK type was apparently sold to Bamberg, where it was used to print the 36-line Bible (not after 1461), and other books, some of which are signed by Albrecht Pfister. . . .

"Acquired by John H. Scheide from Maggs Bros., London, May 1939. The single gathering of 12 paper leaves was disbound from some unidentified volume; it appears that Maggs acquired the work from some European bookseller without knowing of its earlier survival context. On the first three pages of the two final blank leaves is a densely written tractate concerning crusades and crusading indulgences; it is signed at the end as from the Charterhouse of Erfurt. Unpublished research by Dr. Hope Mayo strongly suggests that the tractate was composed by the Erfurt Carthusian Johannes Indaginis, a prolific writer and determined ecclesiastical reformer. Presumably, therefore, this copy of the Calixtus Bull belonged to the Erfurt Charterhouse. Curiously, the unique Berlin copy of the German printing of the Bull likewise belonged to that convent" (http://diglib.princeton.edu/xquery?_xq=getCollection&_xsl=collection&_pid=whsS2.4-calixtus, accessed 07-10-2009).

ISTC no.ic00060000.

The Bulla Turcorum of Pope Calixtus III, announcing the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, and seeking funding for another crusade against the Turks, is translated into German by Heinrich Kalteisen and printed by Johannes Gutenberg in the DK type as Die Bulla widder die Turcken.

Like the Latin edition probably published only days earlier, only one copy survives, in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

ISTC no. ic00060100.

Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer, a scribe who adopted the new technology of printing, publish the Psalterium latinum at Mainz. The work is cited in the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue ip01036000 as Psalterium. With canticles, hymns, capitula, preces maiores and minores. There are two issues: "a) of 143 leaves b) of 175 leaves, the latter designed for use in the diocese of Mainz."
All known copies are printed on vellum.

This magnificent book was:

• The first printed book to include a colophon giving both the name of the printer and the date of printing.

• The first work to incorporate color printing, with initial letters printed in red, light purple, and blue (from an engraved metal plate).

• The first printed book to include music— two lines of music printed with a 4-line staff.

The colophon of the Mainz Psalter boasts of the new technology involved in its production. The colophon reads in translation:

“The present copy of the Psalms, adorned with beauty of capital letters, and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any driving of the pen. . . .”

Ten copies survived, and according to the ISTC, nearly all surviving copies are either incomplete or fragmentary.

The only complete copy of the 175 leaf version is preserved in the Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. That copy is also the only one to include on its colophon leaf the first printer's mark: the two linked shields of Fust and Schöffer hanging from a branch, the first of which was inscribed with the Greek letter χ for Christ, the second inscribed with the Greek letter Λ (for logos = word).  None of the other extant copies of the 1457 psalter include this mark, and it is unclear whether it was originally published with only some of the edition, or might have been added to the colophon leaf of unsold sheets at some later date, after much of the edition had been distributed. (My thanks for Paul Needham for clarifying the problem of the printer's mark in the first Mainz Psalter.)

Johannes Mentelin, formerly a scribe and illuminator, decides to embrace the new technology, and sets up a printing press in Strasbourg, Germany.

Mentelin's was the second printing press known to have been established after the Gutenberg/Fust and Schöffer press in Mainz.

"The manuscript records of the French royal mint note that on 4 October 1458, Charles VII the king ordered the masters of his mints to find a well qualified agent to go to Mainz to learn the art of printing which had recently been invented and brought to light there by Johann Gutenberg a man adept at cutting punches and 'caractères'. Nicholas Jensen, for some time mint master at Tours was selected for the mission.

"This is the first contemporary reference acknowledging Gutenberg as the inventor of printing" (Berry & Poole, Annals of Printing [1966] 14).

 ♦ According to the 2002 research by Paul Needham and Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Gutenberg did not actually cut punches; this technology may well have been invented later by Nicolas Jensen.

Fust and Schöffer complete a revised edition of their 1457 Psalter with twenty-three lines per page as compared to twenty lines in the 1457 edition, using the same types and initials as the 1457 edition.

The first edition of 1457 was intended for use in non-monastic churches. In the second edition the material was arranged for use in monastic services. The British Museum Catalogue states that the psalter was printed "in accordance with the reformed Monastic Breviary of the Union of Bursfield, known also as the Observantia per Germaniam. 

"The colophon states that the book was printed 'to the glory of God and in honour of Saint James' which suggests that the psalter was commissioned by, or associated in some way with, the Benedictine monastery of Saint James in Mainz" (Berry & Poole, Annals of Printing [1966] 14).

Thirteen copies are known, all printed on vellum.

ISTC No.: ip01062000

Printers Fust and Schöffer complete their edition of Rationale divinorum officiorum by Guillelmus Duranti (Durandus)—a work explaining the meaning of the various services of the Catholic church and the ceremonies used in them. The folio volume has one large (thirteen-line) capital letter, and two smaller capitals printed in two colors— red and dull blue-gray, and a number of small capitals mostly printed in red, though some were omitted by the printer and put in by hand. All surviving copies are printed on vellum except for one on paper preserved at Munich.

The 1459 Durandus was the first book printed in type based on rounded script—less formal than the Gothic Textura or Textualis bookhand, on which Gutenberg and Schöffer based their first types.

"The type cut by Peter Schoeffer on the model of this hand is rounder and more open that Textura, the ascenders are more pronounced and give more white on the page, 'there is a greater differentiation of letters and therefore inscribed legibility'. The letter 'shares some characteristics of the Renaissance and others of the Middle Ages. Hence it has been called the Fere-humanistica or Gotico-antiqua. . . .The hand is gothic but with considerable roman tendencies' (A.F. Johnson Type Designs, 1959.) It was a letter much copied in Germany; less so outside. It was taken as a pattern by William Morris for his Troy and Chaucer types" (Berry & Poole, Annals of Printing [1966] 14).

ISTC  No.: id00403000.

It appears that no blockbooks (block books) in the literal sense were published in France in the 15th century. An example of an intermediate form between a collection of prints and a blockbook printed in France about 1465 was a collection of three woodcuts with text, printed on one side of three sheets, entitled Les neuf preux. This is known from a single copy preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 

"It consists of three sheets of paper, each of which contains an impression from a block containing three figures. They are printed by means of the frotton in light-coloured ink, and have been coloured by hand. The first sheet contains pictures of the three champions of classical times, Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar; the second the three champions of the Old Testament, Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeaeus; the third, the three champions of mediaeval history, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Boulogne. Under each picture is a stanza of six lines, all rhyming, cut in a body type.

"These leaves form part of the Armorial of Gilles le Bouvier, who was King-at-Arms to Charles VII of France; and as the manuscript was finished between 9th November 1454 and 22 September 1457, it is reasonable to suppose that the prints were executed in France, probably at Paris, before the latter date. The verses are, at any rate, the oldest printed specimen of the French language" (Duff, Early Printed Books (1893) 17-18).

Les neuf preux is described by Ursula Baurmeister in Catalogue des incunables de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (CIBN), Vol. 1, fascicule 1 (Xylographes) no. NN-1.

The Armorial of Gilles le Bouvier is BnF Ms. fr. 4985.

In "Prints in the Early Printing Shops," Parshall (ed) The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe (2009) 39-91 Paul Needham discusses publications related to Les neuf preux.

The Biblia Latina, printed by Johannes Mentelin by 1460 (ISTC No. b00528000), is the second edition of the Bible and first book printed in Strasbourg. Twenty-eight copies survive, all on paper. There is a copy in the Scheide Library at Princeton. "Until Scheide's purchase in 2001, no copy had been sold for more than 75 years."

An edition of the encyclopedic work by the 13th century Dominican of Genoa, Johannes Balbus, entitled the Summa grammaticalis quae vocatur Catholicon, is issued in Mainz by "the printer of the Catholicon", (ISTC No. ib00020000). It has been called the first work printed that was not entirely religious in content, though in this it was clearly preceded by the bloodletting calendar of 1456.

The colophon of this book reads in translation:

"This book was produced not with a reed, stylus, or quill, but by the admirable design, proportion, and adjustment of punches and matrices."

The means by which this book was printed continues to be the subject of research:

"As early as 1905 Gottfried Zedler recognized that the Catholicon edition dated Mainz 1460 exists in three impressions printed from a single setting of type but associated with three presses (with different pinhole patterns) and printed on three distinct paper stocks. In 1982 Paul Needham presented evidence that the three issues were printed at three different times, according to the datable use of their paper stocks: copies on Bull's Head paper (with which are classed the vellum copies) in 1460, copies on Galliziani paper ca. 1469, and copies on Crown and Tower papers ca. 1472. Moreover, Needham argued that the three impressions were produced, not from standing type, but from two-line 'slugs' cast from the type and capable of being reassembled for subsequent impressions. According to this theory, the first impression of the Catholicon was produced by Gutenberg himself in 1460; the 'slugs' then passed into the possession of Konrad Humery with Gutenberg's other typographic material after the latter's death in 1468 and were re-used by Humery, probably with the help of Peter Schoeffer, ca. 1469. In this view, which has aroused prolonged controversy among incunabulists, the 1460 Catholicon represents not only Gutenberg's last production but also his final achievement, the invention of an early form of stereotyping" (The Nakles Collection of Incunabula, Christie's New York, 17 April 2000, Lot 2).

"Three issues can be distinguished in spite of identical typesetting: a) printed on vellum or Bull's Head paper; b) on Galliziani paper; c) on Tower & Crown paper. This has given rise to the theory that issue a) was printed in 1460, issue b) in 1469 and issue c) about 1472; see P. Needham, in BSA 76 (1982) pp.395-456 and the articles "zur Catholicon-Forschung" in Wolfenbütteler Notizen zur Buchgeschichte 13 (1988) pp.105-232. For an alternative theory that all three states were printed about 1469, see L. Hellinga in Gb Jb 1989 pp. 47-96 and in the Book Collector (Spring 1992) pp. 28-54" (http://istc.bl.uk/search/search.html?operation=record&rsid=220621&q=0, accessed 12-28-2009).

A 36-line Bible printed at Bamberg in 1461 or earlier in the so-called DK types, is thought to be the third printed edition of the Bible. ISTC No. ib00527000.

There is a copy in the Scheide Library at Princeton. "Only 14 copies survive, all on paper. Scheide's copy once belonged to the Benedictines of Würzburg, whose convent was dissolved in 1803, and to Earl Spencer. When Scheide bought it at an auction in November 1991, no copy had been on the market for 200 years."

Albrecht Pfister of Bamberg, who is characterized as "a church dignitary and amateur printer" issues a book of fables, Der Edelstein by Ulrich Boner, a Dominican monk. ISTC no. ib00974500

Containing 101 woodcuts, this was also the first book printed in German, and the first dated book with woodcut illustrations. "The woodcuts were impressed by hand in blanks left for the purpose in the printed text—much as though they had been rubber stamps" (Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication [1969] xi).

Only one copy of the original printing survived. It is preserved in the Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel. A second edition issued by Pfister about 1462 contains 103 woodcuts. ISTC no. ib00974550.

Printing the Biblia pauperum, a kind of illustrated précis of highlights in the Bible— intended for laymen or lower clergy who could not afford a complete Bible— represented a major technical challenge in the integration of the relatively brief text with the numerous woodcuts on each page. In spite of these difficulties, the first printed edition may have employed moveable type.

The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue lists ten editions of the Biblia pauperum printed during the 15th century. The earliest of these are three editions issued in Bamberg by Albrecht Pfister, two of which are estimated to have been printed in 1462, one in German and the other in Latin, and another Latin edition in 1463. ISTC  nos. ib00652700, ib00652750, ib00652800.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of ib00652750 at the  Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München website at this link: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0002/bsb00026399/images/index.html?id=00026399&fip=67.164.64.97&no=3&seite=5, accessed 12-29-2009).

"The first woodcuts used to illustrate copies of the 'Biblia pauperum' printed with movable types were not produced in Mainz, where printing was first practised, but rather, using types from Mainz, in Bamberg in the printing workshop of Albrecht Pfister. Since 1460, Pfister had his printed editions illustrated with woodcuts. Initially, the integration of pictures in printed text proved to be a difficult task. . . . His edition of the 'Biblia pauperum' for the first time combined text and illustrations in one printing forme.

"Even after Pfister's edition was published, the 'Biblia pauperum' continued to be produced as a blockbook, which also allowed the combination of woodcuts with printed text. In the production of illustrated books for religious edification or for practical purposes which had previously been copied by hand, woodcuts successfully came to replace pen drawings. . . ." (Wagner, Als die Lettern laufen lernten. Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert [2009] no. 6).

Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer at Mainz issue the fourth printed Bible, and the first explicitly dated Bible, sometimes called the Biblia pulcra because of the new Gotico-Antiqua typeface which Schöffer developed specially for the edition. ISTC no. ib00529000.

After its colophon printed in red, the edition contains the first printer's mark ever used, also printed in red—two linked shields hanging from a branch, the first of which was inscribed with the Greek letter χ for Christ, the second inscribed with the Greek letter Λ (for logos = word). Fust and Schöffer's printer's mark first appeared in a single extant copy of the 1457 Mainz Psalter preserved in Vienna. The other 9 extant copies of that work do not contain the mark. The 1462 Bible is the work work to include the printer's mark in the entire edition.

"Printers' marks had no precedent in text manuscripts, though they had an affinity with notarial signets that had been in use for a long time in legal contracts and official documents. It may seem surprising that, in spite of these early examples, so many incunables were issued without the name of the printer, and often without place and/or date. Since it was not at all common for scribes to sign their names, printers presumably did not consider identification important until they saw in the complete imprint a detail which would increase their sale and satisfy their ego. E. von Kathen made a statisical survey of all the entries in volumes I-VII of the Gesamtkatalog and found in this sample (which covered ca 20% of the total XVth-century production) that up to the year 1480, 57.4% lacked indication of printer, 53% in the next decade, and 35.3% in the last decade of the XVth century" (Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550 [1967] 25).  

•The lack of printers' names, or even place or date of printing, in so many 15th century printed books created huge research challenges for historical bibliographers of early printing during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Wagner, Als die Lettern laufen lernten. Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert (2009) no. 53. Clair, A Chronology of Printing (1969) 11.

A feud between Archbishop Adolf II von Nassau, named archbishop for Mainz by the Pope, and Archbishop Diether von Isenburg, who was supported by the people, caused Adolf II to send troops to raid the city of Mainz, plundering and killing 400 inhabitants. At a tribunal that followed, those who survived lost all their property, which was then divided among those who promised to follow Adolf II. Those who did not promise to follow Adolf II (among them printer Johannes Gutenberg) were driven out of the city or thrown into prison.

The new Archbishop denied Mainz its town rights and made the city an archepiscopal capital. This debacle stopped printing in Mainz for the next few years and contributed to the spread of printing:

"It wiped out commerce there, and the consequent lack of money led printers, who were established in a kind of industrial group, to scatter widely. This accounts for the German names we find among the earliest printers in other countries throughout Europe" (Updike).

Peter Schöffer issues the first publication with a  printed title page with his edition of Pope Pius II's Bulla Cruciatae contra Turcos.  Most probably the title page was an experiment as "the Aschaffenburg copy has a title-page in Psalter type; the Paris copy has a woodcut title; the Musée Condé copy has a title in MS" (ISTC no. ip00655750 citing two copies in France, three in Germany and one in Holland).

• The title page did not begin to come into widespread use until the end of the 15th century.

The first book printed in Italy, an edition of Cicero’s De Oratore, is issued from the press of the German printers Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz at the monastery of Subiaco. ISTC no. ic00654000

This was also the first book printed in Roman type, and the first printed edition of any one of the Greek or Latin classics. The edition size has been estimated between 100 and 275 copies. 18 copies remain extant.

"The introduction of printing in Italy (Subiaco-Rome) was almost certainly arranged by highly placed persons in the entourage of Pope Paul II. This and other similar beginnings, especially common in Italy, i.e. the establishment of presses by invitation rather than upon printers' initiative, are nevertheless a sign that the importance of printing had been recognized" (Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550 [1967] 106).

In his preface to a corrected version of Aurelius Augustinus's (Augustine of Hippo's)  De arte praedicandi (Book IV of De doctrina christiana) printed in Strassburg by Johann Mentelin (ISTC no. ia01226000) an anonymous scholar described the value and difficulty of preparing as accurate a manuscript text as possible for printing, probably for the first time in any printed book:

"Nevertheless I have thought it by all means worthwhile that I should first expend much labour over what would be to the common utility of the Church: that I may have this most useful little book- worthy of all esteem - correct, in order that, after correction this way, I would be able to communicate it more usefully to all those wishing to have it. Therefore, as God is my witness, I have taken great pains in the correction of it, in such a way that I have sought out diligently all the copies which I have been able to discover for this purpose in any of the libraries in the school of Heidelberg, in Speyer and in Worms, and finally also in Strassburg. And since in the course of this I have learned by experience that that particular book of Augustine is rare to come by even in the great and well stocked libraries, and even rarer can it be had for copying from any of those same libraries; and also, what is worse, that when it can be found in there it is more rarely corrected or emended; on that account I have been moved to work most carefully to this end; that, according to my exemplar- now corrected at least by as much care and labour as I am capable of- the said little book can be multipled in this state, and in such a way that it may become rapidly and easily known in a short time, for the use of many and to the common advantage of the Church. On account of which, since I judged that this could not be done more expeditiously by any other method or means, I have persuaded by every means that discreet gentleman Johann Mentelin, inhabitant of Strassburg, master of the art of typography, to the end that the might see fit to undertake the responsibily and toil of multiplying this little book by means of printing, having my copy before his eyes. . . ." (M.B. Parkes, Introduction to Peter Ganz (ed) The Role of the Book in Medieval Culture [1986] 15-16).

Johann Mentelin of Strasbourg issues the first edition of the Bible in German—the first edition in any modern language. ISTC no. ib00624000.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of this book at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München website at this link: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0003/bsb00036981/images/index.html?id=00036981&fip=67.164.64.97&no=3&seite=5, accessed 12-29-2009).

Before July 20 of this year Adolf Rusch, the "R" printer, of Strasbourg issues the first printed edition of De sermonum proprietate, seu de universo, written by Hrabanus Maurus (Rabanus Maurus), Archbishop of Mainz, in the first half of the ninth century. This was the first printed encyclopedia, and the first printed book to contain a chapter on medicine. That section may also be the first significant printed text on a scientific subject.

ISTC no. ir00001000:

"Dating is based on a MS. note in a copy at Paris BN (cf. CIBN). P. Needham in Christie's, Doheny 16, disputes the date, placing the types 1473-75 and regarding Mentelin in association with Rusch as responsible for the work of the R-printer."

Printers Sweynheym and Pannartz issue the first edition of St. Augustine, De civitate dei from their press at the monastery of Subiaco, Italy. It is thought that the monks at the monastery participated in printing the edition. 

The manuscript from which they based this text is preserved there in the Monastery of St. Scholastica:

"That the codex was used for the printing is clearly shown by the frequent editorial corrections, the inky fingerprints, and the scored marks in the margins to indicate the end of the text page. The texts of the printed pages correspond almost exactly to these markings" (Wilson, The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle [1976] 34).

This may be the earliest printed book for which the printer's manuscript remains extant. ISTC no. ia01230000.

The first printed book with illustrations issued in Italy was an edition of the Meditationes seu Contemplationes devotissimae of the Spanish Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (Johannes de Turrecremata) issued in Rome by Ulrich Han (Udalricus Gallus).

The woodcuts, "though modeled after frescoes in Santa Maria di Minerva in Rome, were the work of a German artisan" (Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550 [1967] 120, footnote 25).

ISTC No. it00534800.

Humanist  Joannes Andrea Bussi, bishop of Aleria, and the chief editor for the printing house of  Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz after it moved from Subiaco to Rome, writes to Pope Paul II:

"In our time God gave Christendom a gift which enables even the pauper to acquire books. Prices of books have decreased by eighty percent" (Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550 [1967] 1).

Hirsch mentions in a footnote that this statement was printed by Sweynheim and Pannartz in their edition of St. Jerome, Epistolae, Rome, 1468 (ISTC no. ih00161000), but does not mention that Bussi edited that edition. 

"Bussi also produced for Sweynheym and Parnnatz editions of the Epistolae of Jerome (1468), the Historia naturalis of Pliny the Elder (1470), the complete works of Cyprian (1471), and the works of Aulus Gellius. Though his edition of Pliny [ISTC no. ip00787000] was not the first (a 1469 printing at Venice preceded it), nonetheless it was criticised by Niccolò Perotti in a letter to Francesco Guarneri, secretary of cardinal-nephew Marco Barbo. Perotti attacks Bussi's practice, then common, of adding one's own preface to an ancient text, and also the quality and accuracy of his editing.

"Bussi dedicated most of his editions to Pope Paul II, whom he served as the first papal librarian. In 1472 he requested assistance for Sweynheym and Pannartz from Pope Sixtus IV, since the printers, who typically published 275 copies in a single edition, had an enormous unsold stock" (Wikipedia article on Giovanni Andrea Bussi, accessed 01-04-2009).

That a cardinal and papal librarian served as chief editor for printers suggests a both a recognition of the importance of printing by the church and a close relationship between the printers and the Vatican, as confirmed by Bussi's request to the Pope for financial support for Sweynheym and Pannartz.  

Printers Sweynheym and Pannartz issue an edition of the Opera of Virgil at Rome (ISTC no. iv00149000), and printer Johannes Mentelin issues another edition at Strassburg (ISTC no. iv00151000).

These were the first printed editions of Virgil, and the ISTC estimates that the Mentelin edition appeared the year after the Sweynheym and Pannartz edition.

One of the most widely copied and read authors during the Middle Ages, Virgil was also one of the most frequently printed authors in the 15th century, with about 100 editions issued.

Though the names of the printers are not known, and the books are not dated, it is generally accepted that the six so-called "Rome incunabula" are the earliest books printed in Hebrew.

Printer Peter Schöffer issues a broadside offering for sale 21 printed books issued from 1458 to 1469. (ISTC no. is00320950).

"Sixteen of the items can be identied as products of Schöffer's own printing workshop in Mainz, while the rest probably were printed by Ulrich Zell in Cologne. All the works listed are in Latin, beginning with the edition of Bible co-produced by Fust and Schöffer in 1462, followed by theological, legal and humanist texts as well as a treatise dealing with merchants' contracts. The 13th book title, which has been cut off this copy, was certainly the Psalter edition of 1459, whose printing types are reproduced in a sample below the booklist. A note added by hand on the lower margin of the page indicates that the bookseller could be contacted in the in 'Zum wilden Mann', probably referring to a locality in Nuremberg.

"The advertisement is characteristic for the early phase of organised book trade. The intinerant bookseller — seldom the printer himself — travelled with an assortment of books wherever demand was to be found, leaving printed lists with a handwritten indication of where he was staying, for potential customers, the latter being mostly members of universities or monasteries, but also other citizens with some education. Such book lists contained no prices, since these were to be negotiated between the bookseller and the buyer" (Wagner, Als die Lettern laufen lernten. Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert (2009) no. 77).

Only a single copy of this broadside survived. It is preserved in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München:

"It survived, albeit as binders waste cut in two halves and pasted printed side down on the inner cover of a manuscript (Clm 458) with astronomical-mantic texts which was owned by the well-known humanist of Nuremberg, Hartmann Schedel. At the end of the 19th century, it was discovered and removed from the book binding" (Wagner, op. cit.).

♦ You can download a digital facsimile of this broadside from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek website at this link: http://inkunabeln.digitale-sammlungen.de/Exemplar_S-207,1.html, accessed 01-03-2010.

The Venetian Senate grants the German printer Johannes de Spira (Speyer) a five-year monopoly on printing in the city.

This was the first monopoly on printing granted by a European government.

Speyer initiated printing in Venice in 1469, issuing Cicero's Epistolae ad familiares in an edition of 100 copies (ISTC no. ic00504000). "Four months" later he issued a second edition of 300 copies (ISTC no. c00505000). He also published the first edition of Pliny's Historia naturalis in a printing of 100 copies (ISTC no. ip00786000). From the text of the decree it appears that the Venetian Senate granted the monopoly to Speyer as a way of supporting his ongoing work, which they much admired.

The manuscript of the grant is preserved in the Venetian State Archives (ASV, NC, reg. 1, c.55r). It is reproduced in color and translated in  Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org, from which I quote:

"The art of printing books has been introduced into our renowned state, and from day to day it has become more popular and common through the efforts, study and ingenuity of Master Johannes of Speyer, who chose our city over all the others. Here he lives with his wife, children and whole household; practices the said art of printing books; has just published, to universal acclaim, the Letters of Cicero and Pliny's noble work On Natural History, in the largest type and with the most beautiful letter-forms; and continues every day to print other famous volumes so that [this state] will be enriched by many, famous volumes, and for a low price, by the industry and fortitude of this man. Whereas such an innovation, unique and particular to our age and entirely unknown to those ancients, must be supported and nourished with all our goodwill and resources and [whereas] the same Master Johannes, who suffers under the great expense of his household and the wages of his craftsmen, must be provided with the means so that he may continue in better spirits and consider his art of printing something to be expanded rather than something to be abandoned, in the same manner as usual in other arts, even much smaller ones, the undersigned lords of the present Council, in response to the humble and reverent entreaty of the said Master Johannes, have determined and by determining decreed that over the next five years no one at all should have the desire, possibility, strength or daring to practice the said art of printing books in this the renowned state of Venice and its dominion, apart from Master Johannes himself. Every time that someone shall be found to have dared to practice this art and print books in defiance of this determination and decree, he must be fined and condemned to lose his equipment and the printed books. And, subject to the same penalty, no one is permitted or allowed to import here for the purpose of commerce such books, printed in other lands and places. . . ."

"Scholars and writers too went more readily to Venice than to any other city, in their search for publishers, attracted by the excellence of the local paper stock and typography as much as relatively liberal atmosphere in the city. In contrast to other early modern states where censorship and state regulation took on early to encourage and protect the nascent trade, in Venice, the trade was left virtually uncontrolled in the first years of its development. It was only in 1515 when Andrea Navagero was appointed for the task of the official revision of books that the state began to exercise a degree of control over what was printed. Even then, this literary censorship was primarily concerned with the quality of printed books to secure commercially successful correct editions. Thus the natural play of economic forces had left printers free to establish their printing enterprises and compete against each other in an open market. In other words, Venice was an ideal place from which to begin the 'printing revolution.'

"The rapid expansion of the printing industry leaves no doubt that Venice was the first city in the world to feel the full impact of printing, and to experience the most important revolution in human communications, and a favourable territory in which the system of copyright could develop. This, however, did not make Venice into a champion of literary property. It would take a long time before the copyright holder was identified with the moral or aesthetic personality of the writer.

"The best-known explanation for the emergence of author's rights is a technological one, viewing the need to protect literary production as a consequence of the invention of printing. In a manuscript culture, texts were treated as common property, and copying another man's work was often considered more of a favour than an injury. . . .

"It is not so much printing as the existence of a market in books and ideas that introduced concepts of intellectual property. As the literary market increased in importance, authors, who might well be writing for a living and competing for recognition, began to stress the distinctiveness of their products, in other words their intellectual or literary originality. Printing encouraged the development of such a market and expanded the concept of a book as a commodity (selling object). However, the concept of a book as a particular category of commodity - the work of the mind - was slow to develop" (Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org, accessed 07-24-2009).

Johann Mentelin of Strassburg issues the first printing of St. Augustine's Confessions. The edition is undated but is not later than 1470. 

ISTC no. ia01250000.

"The first press in Paris, which was established at the Sorbonne, has often and mistakenly been called the first university press. It would be better to call it the first private press, established at the Sorbonne by Heynlein von Stein and Guillaume Fichet, who called Gering, Friburger and Crantz to Paris, probably selected the texts, and presumably guaranteed any deficit; the texts produced by these printers were slanted largely towards persons interested in new learning, among them of course teachers and students of the university" (Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550 [1967] 51).

Heynlin and Fichet's first publication with this press, and the first book printed in France, was a collection of letters by the fifteenth century grammarian Gasparinus de Bergamo (Gasparin de Pergame, Gasparinus Barzizius). Barzizius's  Epistolae (1470) were intended to provide exemplars for students for the writing of artful and elegant Latin. ISTC no. ib00260500.

The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue lists a total of 53 works from this press.

"Having attempted to define some features of the scribal culture that dominated that area of Europe which produced the printing press, I should like in conclusion to note three aspects of the book and its use that printing, for better or worse, drastically altered. . . . Print as an Agent of Change; its author [Elizabeth Eisenstein] curiously, does not treat these three aspects of change.

"(1) With the growth of print as the normal medium of the page, the main medieval vehicle for relating new thought to inherited tradition disappears— namely, the gloss and the practice of glossing. To be sure sure glossed books like the commentaries on the Decretum, the Liber sextus or Nicholas de Lyra on the scriptures are often printed; but the printed book is not itself an object in which one writes long glosses. Perusal of Chatelain, Paléographie des classiques latin (Paris, 1884-92), will uncover pages of Virgils, Lucans, Juvenals and Horaces, the set texts of the trivium, covered with interlinear and marginal glosses of all dates. The manuscript books had in fact been laid out to be glossed, namely, with the text in large letters down the center of the page, surrounded by white space. In contrast, one can think of only a handful of printed books in which the page has been set up in type to be glossed by hand. What effect this had on processes of thought, methods of instruction, and the structured comparison of new ideas to old, would be interesting to work out.

"(2) With the advent of print the book becomes a monolithic unit, compared to its handwritten predecessor. Medieval books, particularly those individualistic owner-produced volumes of the fifteenth century, are frequently made up of numerous pieces varying from one to several quires in length, which were initially kept in loose wrappers and were bound together by the institution which inherited the volume. A person interested in a given text could copy out what he wanted and no more: thus, of the two hundred manuscripts of the Lumen anime, only half can be classified accordng to one of three restructurings they represent, while the other half are all hybrids, adaptations to the needs and desires of the individual owner-producer. In contrast, although printed books are on occasion copied by hand or sections of them are copied out, the average printed-book library is comprised of whole books. Not until the advent of the Xerox machine were individuals again easily able to make up books in sections or produce tailor-made collections. It would be interesting to know what effect this had on patterns of reading.

"(3) Up to about 1450, the main vehicle par excellence for painting was the manuscript book: the monuments of medieval painting are in Gospel books, Psalters, Pontificals, Breviaries and Books of Hours. The advent of printing forces painting out of the book. It is a desperate wrench. Owners of incunabula have them filled with beautiful miniatures, printers hire illuminators to adorn books with initials and frontispieces, or to water-color woodcuts printed in Books of Hours, but it is a losing battle. By 1500-1520, the Book of Hours as the fifteenth century knew it is in the death throes of mannerism and sterility. With the excepiton of the producers of woodcuts—Holbein, Duerer, Pieter Breughel, all of whom also painted—not a single major artist  thereafter did his major work in the medium of the printed book. While panel painting as an art form clearly antedates the invention of printing, the transition to the printed page must have encouraged the growth of the new medium which was so important to Netherlandish art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" (Rouse & Rouse, "Backgrounds to Print: Aspects of the Manuscript Book in Northern Europe of the Fifteenth Century," Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 465-66).

Typefounder, typographer, printer and publisher Nicolas Jenson prints in Venice an edition of Eusebius Caesariensis, De evangelica praeparatione, translated by Georgius Trapezuntius (Georgios Trapezuntios),  with additions by Antonio Cornazzano.

This was the first book in which Jenson used the Roman typeface he designed. Jenson's Roman type was

"the first to be designed in accordance with typographical criteria, free of the conventions of written models. Jenson sought to create ideal individual letters, which by means of subtleties of fit and alignment would combine harmoniously on a page. He largely succeeded, and his books live to the claim made from them in an advertisement put out by Jenson's partners in about 1482: that they 'do not hinder one's eyes, but rather help them and do them good' " (Berry & Poole, Annals of Printing [1966] 21).

ISTC no. ie00118000.

Italian physician Paolo Bagellardo (d. 1494) has his treatise on pediatrics, De infantium aegritudinibus et remediis, printed in Padua at the press of Bartholomaeus de Valdezoccho and Martinus de Septem Arboribus. 

This was the first medical treatise, and probably also the first scientific treatise, to make its original appearance in printed form rather than having prior circulation in manuscript.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine, 1991) no. 102. ISTC no. ib00010000.

Scribes in Genoa, Italy petition the city council to restrain "strangers who print volumes" and to enjoin German printers from producing breviaries, missals, books of hours, and grammars, all of which are specialties of the scriptorium of Bartolomeo Lupoto in that city.

Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550 (1967) 28.

At Bruges, Belgium, English merchant, diplomat, writer, and printer William Caxton issues with scribe, bookseller and printer, Colard Mansion, the first book printed in English. It is Caxton's translation of Raoul Lefèvre's The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye. ISTC no.  il00117000.

It is thought that Caxton learned the art of printing from Mansion.

The so-called "Printer of Augustinus De fide" (Goiswin Gops or Johann Schilling?) issues the first printed edition of Richard de Bury's Philobiblon, a work on the love of books and book collecting, written in 1343.

ISTC no. ir00191000.

The earliest printed music, after the single line of music published in the 1457 Mainz Psalter, appears in the Missale Speciale Constantiense  (sometimes called simply Missale Speciale) perhaps issued in Basel by Johann Meister (Koch)?, or possibly issued in Mainz, probably about 1473. Much scholarship has been devoted to trying to determine the correct printing date, the printer, and the printing location of this exceptionally rare publication. Nearly all known copies are incomplete. The copy in the Morgan Library and Museum is the closest to complete in the United States, lacking only one leaf.

ISTC no. im00732500.

The first printed book to be issued with pagination rather than foliation is Werner Rolewinck's Fasciculus temporum published by Nicholaus Götz, probably in Cologne. ISTC no. ir00253000.

"Pagination began in England in the XIIIth century, making its way slowly from there to the continent where it was used, with very few exceptions, only in the northern parts of Europe and as far south as the middle and upper Rhine valley. Its first appearance in a printed book (Rolewinck's Fasciculus temporum , ca. 1474-4; H. 6917)) was in Cologne, one of many examples of the influence of regional characteristics of manuscripts on printed books. In retrospect it seems surprising that the advantages of foliation, pagination and alphabetical indexing were realized so late, but the reasons are quite clear. A manuscript, being unique, served one or few readers, the printed book many. When texts were produced by printing, all copies were identical and care was taken regularly to number folios or pages and to prepare careful tables of contents and indexes. During the manuscript period citations were cumbersome, since they had to refer to chapters or other clearly defined parts of texts. Accurate citations developed as the direct result of printing, when it became clear that references by edition and folio (or page) were the simplest and most accurate form. This occurred first in the text, then in marginal notations and ultimately in footnotes" (Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550 [1967] 6).

According to its colophon, Werner Rolevinck (Rolewinck), compiler of the Fasciculus temporum, the earliest chronological world history to be printed, provided the Cologne printer Arnold ther Hoernen with a manuscript-layout for his use. In translation the colophon of the printed edition reads, "following the first exemplar which this venerable author himself wrote by hand completely."

The ISTC catalogue describes this edition as no. ir00254000.

This is some of the earliest evidence of the collaboration between author and printer in the design and production of printed books. A few contemporary manuscripts that have survived, such as those for the Nuremberg Chronicle, are similar to the complex typography and woodcuts of the printed edition, but none have been demonstrated to be the author's exemplar for the printer.

Wilson, The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle [1976] 38-41.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of this edition from the website of the Universität zu Köln at this link: http://inkunabeln.ub.uni-koeln.de/vdib-cgi/kleioc/0010/exec/pagemed/%22enne53_druck3%3d0001.jpg%22, accessed 01-01-2010).

Peter Schöffer of Mainz issues the first edition of the Codex Justinianus with the commentary of Franciscus Accursius. ISTC no. ij00574000. This is the first part of the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law) originally issued from 529-534 by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I.

"Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis was lost in the West, where it was scarcely needed in the primitive conditions that followed the collapse of Odoacer's sub-Roman kingdom. Historians disagree on the precise way it was recovered in Northern Italy about 1070: perhaps it was waiting unneeded and unnoticed in a library until the legal studies that were undertaken on behalf of papal authority that was central to the Gregorian Reform of Pope Gregory VII led to its accidental rediscovery. Aside from the Littera Florentina, a 6th-century codex of the Pandects that was jealously preserved at Pisa, since 1406 at Florence, there may have been other manuscript sources for the text that began to be taught at Bologna, by Pepo and then by Irnerius, whose technique was to read a passage aloud, which permitted his students to copy it, then to deliver an excursus explaining and illuminating Justinian's text, in the form of glosses. Irmerius' pupils, the "Four Doctors" were among the first of the "Glossators" who established the curriculum of Roman law."

"The merchant classes of Italian communes required law with a concept of equity and which covered situations inherent in urban life better than the primitive Germanic oral traditions. The provenance of the Code appealed to scholars who saw in the Holy Roman Empire a revival of venerable precedents from the classical heritage. The new class of lawyers staffed the bureaucracies that were beginning to be required by the princes of Europe. The University of Bologna, where Justinian's Code was first taught, remained the dominant center for the study of law through the High Middle Ages."

Abraham ben Garton prints the first dated book in Hebrew at Reggio di Calabria, Italy. It is a commentary on the Torah by Rabbi Shlomo Rashi.

"Although Garton's book is the first dated printed edition, the work is neither the first edition of Rashi's commentary, nor the first book to be printed in Hebrew. Between 1469 and 1472 three brothers, Obadiah, Menasseh, and Benjamin of Rome, were active as the first Hebrew typographers. Six works are positively known to have come off their press, among which was the first, albeit undated edition of Rashi's commentary. Nonetheless, [in] the 1475 edition Abraham Garton created and employed, for the first time, a typeface based on a Sephardic semicursive hand. It was this same style of typeface that a few years later, when commentary and text were incorporated onto one page, would be used to distinguish Rabbinic commentary from the text proper. Ultimately, this typeface would be known as Rashi script" (Wikipedia article on Abraham Garton, accessed 07-25-2009).

The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue no. is00625180 cites only two incomplete copies: Parma "Pal" (imperfect), and New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America (2 leaves).

Claudius Ptolemaeus's (Ptolemy's) Cosmographia or Geographia, translated from Greek into Latin by humanist Giacomo d'Angelo da Scarperia (Jacopo d’Angelo (Jacopus Angelus) da Scarperia )and edited by Angelius Vadius and Barnabas Picardus, is first published as a printed book in Vicenza, Italy by Hermannus Liechtenstein, without any maps.

ISTC no. ip01081000.

Erhard Ratdolt Bernhard Maler (Pictor), and Peter Löslein issue the Kalendario of Johannes Müller (Regiomontanus). ISTC no. ir00103000.

This was the first book in which the title and place, date, and printer's name appeared on a separate title page—an innovation that did not come into common use until the early 16th century. This book and a Latin version that Ratdolt, Maler and Löslein also issued in 1476 (ISTC ir00093000) were also the first books to be dated with Arabic rather than Roman numerals. Prior to this date, and throughout the remainder of the 15th century, the title, place, and date of printing, as well as the printer's name were usually printed on the colophon leaf at the end of books, in the manner of medieval manuscripts.

♦ You can download a digital facsimile of this work from the Universität Wien at this link: http://www.univie.ac.at/hwastro/rare/1476_Regiomontanus.htm, accessed 01-01-2010.

In Milan, Diogini da Paravicino (Dionysius Parvisinus) issues the first book printed entirely in Greek type— the Greek grammar of Constantine Lascaris, Erotemata. ISTC no. il00065000.

The font is thought to have been designed and produced by the Cretan, Demetrius Damilas, who printed the Opera of Homer in Greek in 1488-89.

Barker, Aldus Manutius and the Development of Greek Script & Type in the Fifteenth Century (1992) 30-31.

Having learned the printer's art in Venice, Guillaume LeRoy sets up a press in Lyons, France, at the expense of his financial backer, Bartholomieu Buyer. They locate the press in Buyer's house.

There LeRoy printed Jean de Vigne's (de Vignay's) La légende dorée, Jean de Vigne's (de Vignay's) French translation of Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea sanctorum, sive Lombardica historia edited by Jean Battalier. This was the first book printed in French. 

ISTC no. ij00151700 cites only three copies in England and three in France, of which two are incomplete.

Guillaume LeRoy  became the first printer in Europe to specialize in printing books in the vernacular.

Drees, The Late Medieval Age of Crisis and Renewal 1300-1500 (2001) 286.

Printer William Caxton’s name is entered on the account role for having paid a year’s rent in advance for the premises in which he will set up his press at Westminster Abbey in London.

Wiliam Caxton prints A Letter of Indulgence by John Sant, Abbot of Abingdon, at Westminster, for promoting the war against the Turks. ISTC is00163100 cites one copy printed on vellum, imperfect, in London at the National Archives, noting "The copy known was issued to Henry and Katherine Langley on 13 Dec. 1476."

"The form is set in William Caxton's types—his second and third. Caxton's first types he had previously used in Bruges. Caxton was employed in Bruges as late as 1475,and probably moved to England in the middle of the following year: his tenancy of a house in Westminster began at Michaelmas 1476. The first of his books dated at Westminster was finished by 18 November 1477. No other printer worked in England until 1478.

"This form, therefore, ranks as the first recorded piece of printing done in England. Its existence in the Public Records was noticed in 1928" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London [1963] no. 2.)

William Caxton completes at Westminister Abbey the first dated book printed in England— The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres.

The work was translated from the French of Guillaume de Tignonville by Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, brother-in-law of King Edward IV.

ISTC no. id00272000.

The first printed book on wine, Von Bewahrung und Bereitung der Weine, by Catalan physician Arnald of Villanova, was translated from the Latin by Wilhelm von Hirnkofen, and printed in Esslingen, Germany by Konrad Fyner. (ISTC no. ia01080000. It discusses the value of wine in diet and as a medication.

In 1943 medical historian Henry Sigerist issued a facsimile of the first edition, with an English translation and introduction, entitled The Earliest Printed Book on Wine.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of this work at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München, website at this link: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0003/bsb00035103/images/index.html?id=00035103&fip=67.164.64.97&no=9&seite=7, accessed 01-06-2010.

The earliest portrait of an author in a printed book, and the earliest woodcut illustration printed in Milan, is that of humanist  Paulus Attavanti (Paulus Florentinus) in the edition of his Breviarium totius juris canonici, sive Decretorum breviarium printed by Leonardus Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenzeler. The woodcut shows the author in profile, writing in his library.

Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550 (1967) 49, 60.  ISTC no. ip00178000.

Printing has spread throughout the continent of Europe and England. Up to this date a typical print run of a book is between 100 and 300 copies.

Printer and typographer Nicolas Jenson dies in Venice. His detailed will makes provisions for the continuation of his printing business, and is therefore significant for the history of printing.

Among Jensen's bequests were his punches and matrices for casting type fonts. His will is the first concrete reference in a document of the existence of matrices for casting type fonts, as there were no manuals on printing published until the seventeenth century. The relevant section reads, in English translation:

"Item: the said testator does declare and certify, that if his company, Zan of Cologne and Nicolas Jenson, will choose to take over all the furniture, the clothing, the bed coverings and the household stuff as well as the tools, the presses, and all else pertaining to the art of book printing, and the material on hand, and likewise all else belonging to the said testator that is mentioned in the bond of partnership of the prior company and which at his decease shall be, and be found, in his dwelling, all of these things shall be appraised and at this worth the said company, Zan of Cologne and Nicolas Jenson, shall take and hold all these properties, with this provided, that they shall be held to pay of this price for these goods and chattels, to the heir of the testator, five hundred ducats out of hand and the remainder shall be set in the account owed to the testator which he does carry with the firm, Nicolas Jenson and Company.

"The said testator has declared and does declare that in all and each of the above premises naught shall be read or understood to include the punches with which the matrices are stamped, from which matrices the letters are in turn wrought and fabricated, for he did and does except completely these punches and did and does will that Messer Peter Ugelleymer, his dearest friend, shall have them, and he does devise and bequeath them to the said Messer Peter. And Messer Peter cannot be held to give or pay aught for these same punches unless it shall so please him of his generosity.

"Yet if this Company does not choose to accept these goods and chattels at the worth aforesaid, then Messer Peter shall be held and bound to receive and take these goods and chattels at one hundred ducats less than the price aforesaid, and Messer Peter shall pay the moneys thus, to wit: four hundred ducats of gold out of hand to the heir of said testator, the remainder to go and be computed in the deduction, or in part thereof, which the testator shall make to the company aforesaid, Nicolas Jenson and Company, with this provision, that if Messer Peter likewise will not choose to take these goods and chattels, as aforesaid, then neither shall he have the testator's punches."

Quotations from the Will of Nicolas Jenson, translated into English by Pierce Butler of the Newberry Library in November, 1928. Ludlow printed the will and sent it out customers as a promotional piece, including the statement "[Set] in a trial font of sixteen point Nicolas Jenson, a new type designed by Ernst Detterer, interpreting as faithfully as possible the original roman type of Jenson, and printed in a limited edition on Rives paper by the Ludlow Typograph Company of Chicago in the month of November, 1928." (http://www.pbtweb.com/eusebius/appendix/njwill.html, accessed 02-08-2208).

♦ Jenson's presses were purchased by Andrea dei Toressani, d'Asola (Andreas Torresanus, de Asula),  father-in-law of Aldus Manutius.

Erhard Ratdolt of Venice issues the first printed edition (editio princeps) of Euclid's Elements—Praeclarissimus liber elementorum Euclidis in artem geometriae.

Ratdolt's text was based upon a translation from Arabic to Latin, presumably made by Abelard of Bath in the 12th century, edited and annotated by Giovanni Compano (Campanus of Novara) in the 13th century. The first printed edition of Euclid was the first substantial book to contain geometrical figures, of which it included over 400.

Ratdolt printed several copies with a dedicatory epistle in gold letters, including a dedication copy to the Doge of Venice. Of these, seven copies are preserved. To accomplish this technical feat:

"Ratdolt developed an innovative technique derived from the methods used by bookbinders to stamp gold on leather. This involved strewing a powdered bonding agent (either resin or dried albumen) on the page and probably heating the metal types so that the gold-leaf would stick to the paper. For his 1488 edition of the 'Chronica Hungarorum', Ratdolt employed a simpler method using golden printing ink. His technique of printing in golden letters was first copied in 1499 by the Venetian printer Zacharias Kallierges" (Wagner, Als die Lettern laufen lernten. Inkunabeln aus der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München [2009] no. 20).

In order to print the unusually large number of complex geometrical diagrams, usually containing type, in the margins Ratdolt used printer's "rules," i.e. thin strips of metal, type high, which he bent and cut and adjusted and set into a substance that would both hold them (and pieces of type) in place, and could itself be incised with the design as a guide to modelling and assembly.

Renzo Baldasso, "La stampa dell'editio princeps degli Elementi di Euclide (Venezia, Erhard Ratdolt, 1482)", The Books of Venice/Il libro veneziano, ed. Lisa Pon and Craig Kallendorf (2009) 61-100.

There are two distinct states of the first edition. The second state has leaves a1-a9 set differently from the first state: the heading on a1v is in two lines rather than three and is set in the same type as the text rather than heading type; the three-sided woodcut border and woodcut initial P are added to a2r; the headline in red on a2r begins "Preclarissimus liber elementorum"; and headlines do not begin until a10r. "The two outer pages of sheet c1 also differ, having been evidently reprinted owing to errors in the text and the diagram. . . of the 12th proposition of the 4th book" (B.M.C. vol. 5, 285-286.). See Horblit, One Hundred Books Famous in Science (1964) no. 27. for a detailed illustrated comparison of the two states. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 729.

♦ Characterized as the most famous textbook ever published, Euclid's Elements was one of the most widely printed and studied texts for the next 500 years. It is also considered to the most widely printed text after the Bible, with more than 1000 editions issued.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of one of the copies with the dedication printed in gold from the website of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, at this link: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0003/bsb00037426/images/index.html?id=00037426&fip=67.164.64.97&no=4&seite=6, accessed 04-24-2010.

Based on the unusually large number of surviving copies, Ratdolt printed an edition considerably larger than the 300 copies considered average for a 15th century print run. You can view the long list of institutions which hold a copy at ISTC no. ie00113000.

The earliest medical work printed in English is Treatise on the pestilence published without printer's name or date, but attributed to the press of William Machlinia, in London. "Although often attributed in incunable editions to Benedictus Kamisius, Kamintus, Canutus or Kanuti (i.e. Bengt Knutsson, bishop of Västerâs), the author is probably Johannes Jacobi (i.e. Jean Jasme or Jacme) (Wickersheimer)" (ISTC no.  ij00013200).

J. F. Payne, "The Earliest Medical Work Printed in English", British Medical Journal v.1 [1480]; May 11, 1889, 1085-86.

Erhard Ratdolt's edition of Eusebius of Caesarea's Chronicon issued from Venice records an entry for the year 1457 added by the editor, Johannes Lucilius Santritter,  crediting Johann Gutenberg, "to whom literature will always be indebted," with the invention of "an ingenious way of printing books." This is one of the earliest acknowledgments in print of Gutenberg's invention.

ISTC no. ie00117000.

By decree of Sultan Bayezid II Turks are prohibited from operating a printing press.

An unidentified printer, known as the "Schoolmaster Printer," issues the Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Heraldry from the town of St. Albans, England.

This work on hawking, hunting, and heraldry was the earliest book printed in England to include color printing. It is also the first English book on heraldry and sports and among the earliest, if not the earliest printed book written by a woman, whose name is variously given as Juliana Berners. Little is known about the authoress; some of the most basic information about her is given in the second edition of this work issued by Wynkyn de Worde from his press at Westminister in 1496. She is said to have been prioress of Sopwell nunnery near St Albans, and daughter of Sir James Berners, who was beheaded in 1388.

ISTC no. ib01030000.

Joshua Solomon ben Israel Nathan Soncino, in Soncino, Italy, issues the first printed edition of the German-rite Haggadah together with a small Roman-rite mahzor prayer book which he calls, in Judeo-Italian, Sidorello. Each work had a separate colophon and decorated woodcut initials but no illustrations. Only two copies survived, one in the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the other in the British Library. ISTC no. ih00002700.

Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History. A Panorama in Facsimile and Five Centuries of the Printed Haggadah from the Collections of of Harvard University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Philadelphia (1975) 19-20, plate 2.

Bernhard von Breydenbach, a wealthy canon of Mainz Cathedral, issues an extensively illustrated travel book, describing his pilgramage to Jerusalem entitled Peregrinatio in terram sanctam or Sanctae peregrinationes.

Von Breydenbach made the pilgrimage in 1483-4, taking with him, as the book explains, "Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht", a 'skillful artist', to make drawings of the sights. As the book relates, Reuwich also printed the first Latin edition of the book in his own house in Mainz, and it is also very probable that because Reuwich was the printer he took the opportunity to identify himself as the artist, since the creators of book illustrations were rarely identified at this time.

"Leaving in April 1483 and arriving back in January 1484, they travelled first to Venice, where they stayed for three weeks. They then took ship for Corfu, Modon and Rhodes - all still Venetian possessions. After Jerusalem and Bethlehem and other sights of the Holy Land, they went to Mount Sinai and Cairo. After taking a boat down the Nile to Rosetta, they took ship back to Venice."

"The Sanctae Peregrinationes, or the Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, was the first illustrated travel-book, and marked a leap forward for book illustration generally. It featured five large fold-out woodcuts, the first ever seen in the West, including a spectacular five-foot-long (1600 x 300 mm) woodcut panoramic view of Venice, where the pilgrims had stayed for three weeks. The book also contained a three-block map of Palestine and Egypt, centred on a large view of Jerusalem, and panoramas of five other cities: Iraklion, Modon, Rhodes, Corfu and Parenzo. There were also studies of Near Eastern costume, and an Arabic alphabet—also the first in print. Pictures of animals seen on the journey, including a crocodile, camel, and unicorn, were also included.

"The colophon of the book is a lively coat-of-arms of the current Archbishop of Mainz, which includes the first cross-hatching in woodcut.

"The book was a bestseller, reprinted thirteen times over the next three decades, including printings in France and Spain, for which the illustration blocks were shipped out to the local printers. The first edition in German was published within a year of the Latin one, and it was also translated into French, Dutch and Spanish before 1500. Additional text-only editions and various abridged editions were also published.

"The illustrations were later adapted by Michael Wolgemut for the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, and much copied by various other publishers" (Wikipedia article on Erhard Reuwich, accessed 12-01-2008).

ISTC no. ib01189000.

From his press in Venice, German printer Erhard Ratdolt issues what is probably the earliest known type specimen. 

The only surviving copy of this broadside is preserved in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München. You can download a digital facsimile from their website at this link: http://inkunabeln.digitale-sammlungen.de/Exemplar_R-14,1.html, accessed 01-02-2010.

". . . having successfully run his printing workshop in Venice for more than ten years, Erhard Ratdolt began taking steps towards returning to Augsburg. In April 1485, while still in Venice, he published a breviary for the city of Augsburg (BSB-Ink B-844) which showed the high quality of the products of his printing workshop. A year later, Radolt accepted the invitation of the bishop of Augsburg Johannes of Werdenberg (1469-1486) and his successor Friedrich of Zollern (1486-1505) and returned to his home town to set up a press there. The change of location brought with it a change in the profile of his publications. Whereas in Venice Ratdolt had published numerous scientific and historical books, he now specialised more and more in printing liturgical works for hwich church commissions assured him a solid market.

"From Venice, Ratdolt brought various innovations to Augsburg which he had developed himself or adopted form others. With this broadside, Ratdolt advertised the diversity of fronts available in his printing house. The print, preserved only in the copy shown, is dated to 1 April 1486 and may have been produced while Ratdolt was still in Venice. It contains samples of 14 different fonts, of which ten use gothic letters, three humanist Roman and one Greek script, in a range of sizes. Among the gothic fonts, the Italian rotunda was used mainly for printing liturgical works. Besides advertising his well-equipped press, Ratdolt took the opportunity to praise himself amply as a man of great-ability (vir solertissimus) famous in Venice for his great talent and amazing skill (preclaro ingenio et mirifica arte. . .celbratissimus), who was now ready to publish books of examplary quality in the imperial city of Augsburg" (Wagner, Als die Lettern laufen lernten. Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert (2009) no. 40).

ISTC no. ir00029840

In response to the rapid spread of print technology, Pope Innocent VIII issues the first Papal Bull concerned with printing: Bulla S.D.N. Innocentii "Inter multiplices nostrae sollicitudinis curas" contra impressores librorum reprobatorum.

The bull was printed in Rome by Eucharius Silber, and issued after November 17, 1487. ISTC no. ii00110000 cites only two surviving copies, one in Germany and one in the United States.

From this date the Holy Inquisition instituted prepublication censorship.

The first printed edition (editio princeps) of the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer appears in Florence in two volumes.

This was the first printed edition of any major Greek work in its original language. The book was edited by the Greek scholar Demetrius Chalcondyles and printed by Bartolommeo di Libri at the expense of the brothers Nerli.

"The type used was that of Demetrius Damilas, whose 'labor and skill' . . . is acknowledged in the colophon" (Barker, Aldus Manutius and the Development of Greek Script & Type in the Fifteenth Century [1992] 37).

ISTC no. ih00300000.

At Soncino, Italy, Abraham ben Hayyim prints for Joshua Solomon Soncino Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim, the first complete printed Hebrew Bible.

It is thought that 200-300 copies were issued and at a high price. In 1492 German humanist and Greek and Hebrew scholar Johannes Reuchlin purchased a copy in Rome for 6 gold coins, supposedly a year's salary for a government clerk at the time.

ISTC no. ib00525500.

Printer Gershom ben Moses Soncino, in Soncino, Italy, issues his first book, the Sefer Mitzvot Gadol by Moses ben Jacob de Coucy.

On the end flyleaf of a copy in The Library of Congress there is an autograph bill of sale in Hebrew signed by Gershom Soncino translated as:

" 'Gershom, the son of Moshe Soncino (of blessed memory), Printer,' and issued to one Moshe ben Shmuel Diena, stipulating that the buyer might not resell the volume for a period of two years. The bill of sale is dated 'the 25th day of Tevet, (5)249 [ = December 29, 1488, here in the city of Soncino' ten days after the printed date of publication. Arthur Z. Schwarz, who first brought this to the attention of the scholarly world, suggested that this volume may well be one of the first, if not the first off the press. The colophon date is the day of the 'completion of the work,' i.e. the printing. Some days may have passed before it was ready for distribution. Soncino's signature is his only Hebrew autograph to have survived" (Jewish Virtual Library.org, accessed 12-10-2008).

ISTC no. im00866240. 

Rabbi Eliezer Toledano establishes the first press at Lisbon, Portugal, to print books in Hebrew. His first book is Moses ben Nahman's Hiddushe ha-Torah (Commentary on the Pentateuch) . This was the second book printed in Lisbon.

ISTC no. im00866160.

Printer Anton Koberger of Nuremberg publishes the Liber chronicarum written by the physician Hartmann Schedel.

A large-folio compendium of history, geography and natural wonders, the Liber chronicarum contained 298 printed leaves, including 1,809 illustrations from 645 woodcuts by or after painter and woodengraver Michael Wohlgemut (Wohlgemuth), his stepson Wilhelm Plydenwurff, and possibly some by Koberger's godson, the young Albrecht Dürer, who was apprenticed to Wohlgemut until 1490. Certain woodcuts were reproduced more than once, sometimes for the depiction of different people or cities. The images include a full-sheet map of Europe, a Ptolemaean world map, large and small city views, biblical and historical scenes, and portraits.

♦ You can view a black & white digital facsimile of the Latin edition from the Biblioteca de Andalucía at this link:  http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/cultura/bibliotecavirtualandalucia/catalogo_imagenes/grupo.cmd?path=10150, accessed 01-02-2010.

Koberger also issued a German translation by Georg Alt, entiled Das Buch der Croniken und Geschichten on December 23 of the same year.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile at the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Weimar at this link: http://ora-web.swkk.de/digimo_online/digimo.entry?source=digimo.Digitalisat_anzeigen&a_id=4218, accessed 01-02-2010.

Though the information in the Nuremberg Chronicle was rapidly superceded, it remained famous for its extraordinary graphic design, its printing, its woodcuts and descriptions of cities. One of the woodcuts depicts the paper mill established in Nuremberg by Ulman Stromer in 1390.

Probably because it was such a large and impressive volume, the work was a great commercial success, with an unusually large printings for a fifteenth century book:

"The Latin edition was printed in at least 1400 copies, of which more than 1200 still exist today" (Wagner, Als die Lettern laufen lernten. Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert [2009] no. 11 (describing the annotated copy of the author, Hartmann Schedel, which is preserved at the Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, Munich).

Most probably fewer copies of the German edition were printed, as it remains rarer on the market. Between roughly 1980 and 2009 there were 188 auction sales recorded for the Latin edition and 35 sales of the German edition, some sales presumably representing the same copies being resold.

Remarkably, the original manuscript exemplars showing the exact arrangement of the text and illustrations for both the Latin and German editions, as well has other original documents pertaining to the publication of these works, were preserved. The exemplar for the Latin edition is in the Stadbibliothek Nürnberg. The exemplar for the German edition is in the Nuremberg City Library. Adrian Wilson, a book designer and historian of book design from San Francisco, issued an outstanding book in which he showed the relationship between these manuscript exemplars and the printed editions: The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1976).

ISTC no. is00307000 (Latin). ISTC no. is00309000 (German).

After their explusion from Spain David and Samuel ibn Nahmias travelled to Constantinople as a result of Sultan Bayezid II's offer of refuge. There they established the first Hebrew printing press in the Ottoman Empire. The first book the Nahmias brothers printed was Jacob ben Asher's fourteenth century Arbaah Turim (Four Orders of the Code of Law) completed on 4 Tevet 5254 (13 December 1493). This was the first book printed in the Ottoman Empire, not only in Hebrew but in any language.

Previously the Nahmias brothers had attempted to set up a printing shop in Naples. The type they used in Constantinople is similar to Hebrew type used in Spain and Italy. The paper on which their edition of ben Asher was printed in Constantinople is of northern Italian origin.

As Jews, the Nahmias brothers were allowed to practice the printing trade forbidden to Muslims. Jacob ben Asher's work was the only book that the Nahmias brothers issued in Hebrew from Constantinople during the 15th century.

Lehrstuhl für Türkische Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur, Universität Bamberg, The Beginnings of Printing in the Near and Middle East: Jews, Christians and Muslims (2001) 9. ISTC no. ij00000300.

In his treatise De laude scriptorum (In Praise of Scribes) probably written in reaction to the information revolution caused by printing, Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius (Tritheim) advocated preserving the medieval tradition of manuscript copying even though he was well aware of the advantages of printing for information distribution, since thirty printed editions of his own writings appeared during the 15th century. Tritheim also questioned the durability of media used in long term information storage when he compared the known long-term durability of information written on traditional parchment , examples of which had already lasted over 700 years, with that written or printed on the newer and less proven medium of paper. He also pointed out that

"the entire written heritage could never be completely published in print or collected in a single library. Therefore, the preservation of less well-known works was to be the task of monks who could choose the texts to be copied without economic considerations and, working manually, reproduced them in higher quality than that of printed productions which often neglected the orthography and other decorative elements (ceteros librorum ornatus) — a not unjustified criticism of the hasty methods of mass production" (Wagner, Als die Lettern laufen lernten. Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert [2009] no. 32).

Perhaps not surprisingly, Tritheim's retrograde treatise which took issue with the new technology was not a best-seller. It underwent only one printed edition during the 15th century. ISTC no. it00442000.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of this work at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek website at this link: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0003/bsb00037424/images/index.html?id=00037424&fip=67.164.64.97&no=3&seite=3, accessed 01-02-2010.

Sebastian Brant publishes Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) in Basel, Switzerland at the press of Johann Bergmann, de Olpe. Some of the woodcuts illustrating this work are by the young Albrecht Dürer.

Brandt's satire became a great bestseller. It included a characterization and woodcut illustration of the "book fool" who enjoyed owning many books but read few of them. That book-collecting had become a topic for satire by this time is a reflection of the proliferation of books since the invention of printing by moveable type.

The popularity of Brandt's satire was in itself a reflection of the proliferation of books. Twenty-six different editions appeared in the 15th century. Brandt authorized six editions in German during his lifetime and there were at least six other unauthorized editions published. The work was translated into Latin by Jacob Locher in 1497 (Stultifera Navis), into French by Paul Riviere in 1497 and by Jehan Droyn in 1498. An English verse translation by Alexander Barclay appeared in London in 1509, and again in 1570; one in prose by Henry Watson in London, 1509; and again 1517. It was also rendered into Dutch and Low German.

ISTC no. ib01080000.

English printer Wynkyn de Worde, successor to William Caxton, prints at Westminister an edition of the encyclopedic work by Bartholomaeus Anglicus,  De proprietatibus rerum, in the English translation of John Trevisa, illustrated with woodcuts, mostly derived from the numerous earlier editions. This work was the first book printed in England on paper made at the first English paper mill, operated by John Tate from around 1495 till his death in 1507.

Remarkably, the original unillustrated manuscript, substantially marked up by the compositors, for a portion of this work, is preserved in the Plimpton Collection at Columbia University Library. Plimpton

"purchased it from Quaritch who had bought it when Lord Middleton's library was sold at auction in 1925. The large and beautiful codex was made for Sir Thomas Chaworth of Wiverton, Notts., about 1440; it apparently soon became the property of the Willoughby family, neighbors and kin of the Chaworths, in whose possession it remained until the sale of Lord Middleton's books in 1925. (Thomas Willoughby was created Baron Middleton 1 January 1711/12). Throughout the nearly 500 years in which the MS. was in private hands it was all but unknown to scholars" (Three Lions cited below, 18).

Wynkyn de Worde's printed text deviates substantially from the manuscript. A second manuscript source, no longer extant, was also a source for the edition. 

♦ Three Lions and the Cross of Lorraine: Bartholomaeus Anglicus, John of Trevisa, John Tate, Wynkyn de Worde and De Proprietatibus Reum. A Leaf Book with Essays by Howell Heaney, Dr. Lotte Hellinga, Dr. Richard Hills. Newton, PA: Bird & Bull Press (1992) details my role in supplying the very incomplete copy of the Wynkyn de Worde printing, containing 138 leaves, which became the basis for the edition, and determined the number of copies printed.

"Worde is generally credited for moving English printing away from its late-Medieval beginnings and toward a modern model of functioning. Caxton had depended on noble patrons to sustain his enterprise; while de Worde enjoyed the support of patrons too (principally Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII), he shifted his emphasis to the creation of relatively inexpensive books for a commercial audience and the beginnings of a mass market. Where Caxton had used paper imported from the Low Countries, de Worde exploited the product of John Tate, the first English papermaker. De Worde published more than 400 books in over 800 editions (though some are extant only in single copies and many others are extremely rare). His greatest success, in terms of volume, was the Latin grammar of Robert Whittington, which he issued in 155 editions. Religious works dominated his output, in keeping with the tenor of the time; but de Worde also printed volumes ranging from romantic novels to poetry (he published the work of John Skelton and Stephen Hawes), and from children's books to volumes on household practice and animal husbandry. He innovated in the use of illustrations: while only about 20 of Caxton's editions contained woodcuts, 500 of de Worde's editions were illustrated.

"He moved his firm from Caxton's location in Westminster to London; he was the first printer to set up a site on Fleet Street (1500), which for centuries became synonymous with printing. He was also the first man to build a book stall in St. Paul's Churchyard, which soon became a center of the book trade in London.

"De Worde was the first to use italic type (1528) and Hebrew and Arabic characters (1524) in English books; and his 1495 version of Polychronicon by Ranulf Higdon was the first English work to use movable type to print music" (Wikipedia article on Wynkyn de Worde, accessed 01-10-2008).

Dard Hunter, The Literature of Papermaking 1390-1800 (1925) 13. ISTC no. ib00143000.

Scholar printer, Aldus Manutius of Venice, issues the Idyllia of Theocritus in Greek along with other works in Greek and Latin, including the writings of Hesiod. (ISTC no. it00144000).

"We must not ask of Aldine editions what they cannot give, a balanced critical recension which even in our own day has hardly been achieved for many Greek authors. The aims of textual purity and correctness were often trumpeted in early editions, long before Aldus, indeed, but with special emphasis in his prefaces. But these aims, no doubt genuinely held, all too frequently succumbed to the messy pressures of the printing house, as the number of errata pages attached to his editions attest. Something is better than nothing, Aldus says in the preface to Theocritus in 1496, and a text once printed can at least find many correctors where a manuscript can only receive occasional emendation. This of course is true in the long run, but sidesteps the whole problem of corrupt texts being fixed in hundreds of copies by the printing press" (Davies, Aldus Manutius, Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice [1999] 23).

The Venetian Senate grants Ottaviano Petrucci a twenty-year patent for the double-impression technique of printing polyphonic music for voices, organ, and lute using moveable type.

This was the "first known record of a privilege granted for music printing. It is also one of the early records of patents for invention and improvement in the mechanism of printing, showing that there was no legal distinction between books and printed music or other works of art produced through the press" (Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org, reproducing an image of the document, and providing a translation and an extremely detailed, and thoroughly documented commentary).

The first illustration of a printing press and printing office in a printed book appears in La grât danse macabre, published in Lyons by Mathias Huss. The image shows death visiting a printing office and a bookseller's shop.

Huss's book was one of numerous editions of The Dance of Death, or Danse macabre. 

"The first known illustration of a printing press was certainly not drawn to enlighten future generations as to its characteristics. It appears in an edition of the Danse Macabre, published in Lyons by Mathias Huss in 1499. Death is depicted carrying off a printer and a bookseller, and, such as it is, we may take it that the cut illustrates a French fifteenth-century printing office. Unfortunately, although the general construction of press can be made out, the very aspect which would have been of most interest—the way in which the platen was hung—is obscured by the struggling figure of the pressman. However, the illustration does show clearly the supports, or stays, between the top of the top of the press and the ceiling, which were found to be necessary to keep the press stable; a course wooden screw, and a straight pole or bar. Particularly interesting is the plank held up by a stay and on which there is a box, to which we may presume a tympan is hinged by what look like leather straps. No winding mechanism is visible and it may be conjectured that the box was pushed under the platen by hand at this date. The other pressman (or 'beater') is holding an ink-ball, which hardly changed in appearance until it was replaced by a roller some three hundred and fity years later. Two ink-balls were used to ink the forme. They were made of untanned leather or sheepskin, stuffed with wool or hair, and nailed around a wooden handle or stock. Ink was spread out on to a slab and rubbed out thinly with a wooden device known as a brayer.

"The little rest, or gallows, give additional credence of the idea that there was a tympan to be thrown back on it when the forme was being inked. The unusual position of the pressman, who usually stood next to his companion, is probably the result of the artist's license as he wanted to show the figure of Death full face" (Kinsman, The Darker Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond  the Fields of Reason [1974] 25).

Fewer than 150 editions of Hebrew incunabula (15th century books) were produced— less than half a percent of the total production of printed books during the 15th century.

By the end of the 20th century only about 2000 copies of all these editions combined were preserved in institutional libraries. The editions were printed in Italy, Spain and Portugal, and one edition was published in the Ottoman Empire. Many of these editions are very rare, with one-third of them known in only one, two or three copies.

Humanist printer Aldus Manutius describes on a single printed sheet preserved in the Vatican Library (Stamp. Barb. AAAIV 13, inside front cover) Rules of the Modern Academy.

“He calls for those concerned with preparing and correcting editions of the Greek classics in his shop in Venice (many of whom were émigrés from Greece or Crete) to speak only classical Greek. Those who fail to do so must pay fines, and when these have sufficiently accumulated, they are to be used to pay for a ’symposium’—a lavish common meal (the rule states that it must be better than the food given printers, which was legendarily meager.) The Renaissance idea of the publishing house as a center of learning emerges vividly” (Anthony Grafton, "The Vatican and its Library," Grafton (ed.) Rome Reborn [1993] 15, plate 11).

Printer Richard Pyson, a native of France and eventually a naturalized Englishman, issues from "without" Temple Bar, London, a book entitled This is the boke of Cokery. The earliest cookbook printed in the English language, the work is known from a single surviving copy in the library of the Marquess of Bath at Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire, England.

"In his Boke of Cokery, Pynson not only gave his readers a variety of recipes to choose from, heading this section 'The Calender of Cokery,' but set out details of as many historical royal feasts as he could muster. Whether he carried out the necessary research himself, or, as seems more likely, used the services of some unknown expert in such affairs, remains a mystery, but he undoubtedly made good use of an early manuscript of recipes now at Holkham Hall, Norfolk. Due to his efforts we known that 'The Feast of King Harry the Fourth to the Spenawdes and Frenchmen when they had jousted in Smythe Felde,' was composed of three courses of exotic game and meats, a typical list reading:

'Creme of Almondes; larks, stewed potage; venyson, partryche rost; quayle, egryt; rabettes, plovers, pomerynges; and a leache of brauwne wyth batters' "

(Quayle, Old Cook Books. An Illustrated History [1978] 24-25).

♦ The website of the British Library describes a manuscript written around 1440 entitled A Boke of Kokery, (accessed 06-07-2009).

By this date printing presses are established in 282 cities.

"These are situated in some 20 countries in terms of present-day boundaries. In descending order of the number of editions printed in each, these are: Italy, Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, England, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, Croatia, Montenegro, Balearic Islands, Hungary, and Sicily."

"The 18 languages that incunabula are printed in, in descending order, are: Latin, German, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Catalan, Czech, Greek, Church Slavonic, Portuguese, Swedish, Breton, Danish, Frisian, and Sardinian."

"Only about one edition in ten (i.e. just over 3000) has any illustrations, woodcuts or metalcuts. The 'commonest' incunabulum is Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle ("Liber Chronicarum") of 1493, with c. 1250 surviving copies (which is also the most heavily illustrated). Very many incunabula are unique, but on average about 18 copies survive of each. This makes the Gutenberg Bible, at 48 or 49 known copies, a rather common (though extremely valuable) edition" (Wikipedia article on incunabulum, accessed 12-01-2008).

The average print run of a 15th century printed book was between 400-500 copies, with as many as 1000 copies of some books printed. By this date it was estimated that printers issued up to 35,000 different printed works of all kinds, including pamphlets and broadsides as well as books, with a total printed output somewhere around 15 to 20 million copies. Presumably no copies of certain publications—especially ephemera—survived.

♦ In January 2008 the Incunabula Short Title Database maintained by the British Library recorded 29,777 editions printed from moveable type, but not from woodblocks or engraved plates, before 1501. These included  "some 16th-century items previously assigned incorrectly to the 15th century." The number of true incunabula recorded in the database was  27,460— thought to be very close to complete coverage of the number of extant incunabula, which was estimated at 28,000.

". . . many more incunabula have survived from the second half of the 15th century than manuscripts from the entire Middle Ages. Of circa 28,000 fifteenth-century editions known today (the number of publications printed is bound to have been much larger), German collections preserve a total of 135,000 copies. As a result of two decades of work on the 'Inkunabelcensus Deutschland', these are now recorded in the London database of the 'Incunabula Short Title Catalogue' (ISTC). By contrast, the number of medieval manuscripts in German libraries is estimated circa 60,000. Holdings of the Bayerische Staasbibliothek at Munich display a similar relationship: about 20,000 copies of 9,700 fifteenth-century editions are kept alongside circa 10,500 medieval Latin and 1,800 German manuscripts - roughly a sixth of the total German holdings" (Wagner, Als die Lettern laufren lerneten. Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert [2009] 15).

Having obtained in 1498 a twenty-year exclusive license for printing music in the Venetian Republic, Octaviano Petrucci publishes Harmonice Musices Odhecaton.

This was the first book of sheet music printed using moveable type. It was an anthology of 96 secular songs,  mostly polyphonic French chansons, for three or four voice parts. For this work Petrucci printed two parts on the right-hand side of a page, and two parts on the left, so that four singers or instrumentalists could read from the same sheet.

"The type was probably designed, cut, and cast by Francesco Griffo and Jacomo Ungaro, both of whom were in Venice at the time. The collection included music by some of the most famous composers of the time, including Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez, Antoine Brumel, Antoine Busnois, Alexander Agricola, Jacob Obrecht, and many others, and was edited by Petrus Castellanus, a Dominican friar who was maestro di cappella of San Giovanni e Paolo. Inclusion of composers in this famous collection did much to enhance their notability, since the prints, and the technology, were to spread around Europe in the coming decades.

"The Odhecaton used the double-impression technique, in which first the musical staff was printed, and then the notes in a second impression. Most of the 96 pieces, although they were written as songs, were not provided with the text, implying that instrumental performance was intended for many of them. Texts for most can be found in other manuscript sources or later publications."

When Petrucci printed music with verbal text or lyrics he employed three impressions: first for the staffs, second for the notes, and third for the lyrics.

♦ No complete copy of the first edition of the Odhecaton (Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A) survives, and its exact publication date is not known, but it includes a dedication dated May 15, 1501. The second and third editions were printed on January 14, 1503 and May 25, 1504, respectively. Each corrected several errors of the previous editions. Petrucci published two further anthologies, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton B and C, in 1502 and 1504, respectively.

"Petrucci's publication not only revolutionized music distribution: it contributed to making the Franco-Flemish style the international musical language of Europe for the next century, since even though Petrucci was working in Italy, he chiefly chose the music of Franco-Flemish composers for inclusion in the Odhecaton, as well as in his next several publications. A few years later he published several books of native Italian frottole, a popular song style which was the predecessor to the madrigal, but the inclusion of Franco-Flemish composers in his many publications was decisive on the diffusion of the musical language" (Wikipedia article on Harmonice Musices Odhecaton).

Printer Aldus Manutius of Venice issues an edition of Virgil in Italic type designed by Francesco Griffo.

This was the first book completely printed in Italic type, an adaptation of humanist script. In addition to its elegant design, Italic type had the advantage of a higher character count, allowing more information to be printed legibly in less space than Roman or Gothic type. Aldus’s edition of Virgil was the first of a series of volumes that he issued in the pocket, or octavo format. This smaller format had previously been used for editions of devotional texts, but Aldus was the first to use the smaller format to make non-devotional literature available in the more portable format, and at lower cost. Davies points out that a signifcant reason for Aldus's introduction of the octavo format was the collapse of the credit market in Venice in 1500 caused by "Venetian defeats and Turkish advances," which caused many business failures, and would have motivated Aldus to publish books that could be sold at lower cost.

"The innovation lay not in the small format, often used by printers for devotional texts, but in applying it to a class of literature hitherto issued in large and imposing folios or quartos. It is also certain that the small-format manuscripts in Bernardo Bembo's library included a good number written by the leading Paduan scribe, Bartolomeo Sanvito, whose hand seems to be the best and closest model for the Aldine italic.

"This famous type was a sympathetic rendering by Francesco Griffo of the best humanist cursive script of the day, a wholly new departure in Latin typography but parallel to Aldus's adaptation of Greek cursive hands for his earlier work. If italic has today become practically confined to words that convention dictates be 'italicized', we must also recognize that it appeared to contemporaries as a revelation of elegance -- to Erasmus, 'the neatest types in the world'. The narrow set of the type is also very economical of paper, an important consideration in those days. The very first appearance is in a few words set in the woodcut that adorns the folio St Catherine . . . , followed by limited use in the preface to the second (quarto) edition of Aldus's Latin grammar of February 1501. Italic reached its manifest destiny as the text type of the book which began Aldus's great series of octavo classics, the Virgil of April 1501" (Martin Davies, Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice [1999] 42).

Aldus' pocket editions of Virgil were a commercial success:

".. . . By the time of the dedication to Bembo in 1514, Aldus had already exhausted two editions of the works of Virgil (which we can estimate to have been about 3,000 for each run). By contrast, nearly all the incunable editions of his Greek folios were still available in the third advertisement of 1513, some at reduced prices. Not that the octavos were cheap—Isabella d'Este, the learned Marchioness of Mantua (and another former pupil of Battista Guarino), sent back some vellum copies she had ordered when she was told by her courtiers that they were worth no more than half the price Aldus's partners were asking. These may have been special illuminated copies costing five ducats or more—some exquisite vellum editions that she did buy from Aldus survive in the British Library—but even the plain paper copies, according to Aldus's annotation of the 1503 advertisement, went for a substantial quarter of a ducat" (Davies, op. cit., 46).

By the time he left the Abbey at Sponheim Johannes Trithemius expanded its library to 2000 volumes of printed books and manuscripts from the 40 works present in the library when he became Abbot in 1482. This was an exceptionally large library for the time.

Besides a reflection of Tritheimius's skill and tenacity as a book collector, the growth of the library reflects the increased availability of information after the development and spread of printing in Europe.

James IV of Scotland grants Walter Chepman, an Edinburgh merchant, and his business partner Androw Myllar, a printer and bookseller, the first royal licence for printing in Scotland.

"The first printed book from this press with a definite date was a vernacular poem by John Lydgate 'The Complaint of the Black Knight' which was printed on 4 April 1508 on the press they had set up, near what is now Edinburgh's Cowgate. The only known copy is held in the National Library of Scotland's collections" (http://www.500yearsofprinting.org/printing.php, accessed 02-28-2009).

Printer and publisher Wynkyn de Worde issues The Boke of Kervynge.  This is the first book in English on carving and preparing different types of meat, game and fish.

Of the first edition only a single copy survived, at the University Library Cambridge. Similarly only a single copy survived of the second edition dated 1513. It is preserved in the British Library.

Quayle, Old Cook Books. An Illustrated History (1978) 27-28.

The first "major" book printed in Scotland is Breuiarij Aberdone[n]sis ad percelebris eccl[es]ie Scotor[um] potissimu[m] vsum et consuetudine[m] [The Aberdeen Breviary for the principal use and custom of the most famous church of the Scots]. Commissioned by William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen, and printed in Edinburgh at the press of the first printers in Scotland, Walter Chepman and Androw Myllar, it is generally known as the Aberdeen Breviary. 

No complete copies of this work exist. The finest copy is preserved in Edinburgh University Library. The National Library of Scotland holds two imperfect copies and a fragment from a third. Aberdeen University Library and the British Library old imperfect copies. One copy remains in private hands.

Gregorio de Gregorii, a Venetian, publishes from Fano, Italy a Book of Hours entitled Kitab Salat al-Sawa'i, probably for export to the Melkite Christian communities of Syria.

This was the first book in Arabic printed by moveable type.

"The notes printed at the end of the work give us information about the printer, the location where it was printed and the year it was printed. The fact that the well-known Venetian printer, de Gergorij, had this book published not in Venice but in Fano may probably be explained by the fact that he wished to avoid the privileges that were in force in Venice relating to the printing of books in Oriental type. Only some of the at least ten surviving copies (for example the one housed in the Nuremberg Municipal Library) show a title page. It gives the Arabic title in red letters. Nine of the total of 240 pages of have noteworthy decorations in the form of edgings, which show a vareity of basic type faces, including three floral embellishments and flourth kind with a combination of birds and flower patterns" (Lehrstuhl für Türishche Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur, Universität Bamberg, The Beginnings of Printing in the Near and Middle East: Jews, Christians and Muslims [2001] no. 1).

Miroslav Krek, "The Enigma of the First Arabic Book Printed from Moveable Type," J. Near East. Stud., no. 3 (1979) 203-212. On 12-10-2008 I accessed a PDF of this article at http://www.ghazali.org/articles/jnes-38-3-mk.pdf.

At Fez, Morocco, Jewish refugees who had worked for the printer Rabbi Eliezer Toledano in Lisbon, set up the first press on the African continent.

As part of the Edict of Worms Charles V issues the first major secular anti-Reformation legislation: Der römischen Kaislerlich Majestät Edikt wider Martin Luthers Bücher und Lehre, seine Anhänger, Enthalter und Nachfolger und etliche andere schmähliche Schriften. Auch Gesetz der Druckerei:

"Item. We ask you and command that 'with the sounding of the trumpet' you call the people from the four corners of the villages and cities where this edict will be published and gather them where it is customary to publish our edicts and mandates. You will then read this edict word for word and with a loud voice. We order, upon the penalties contained herein, that the contents of this edict be kept and observed in their entirety; and we forbid anyone, regardless of his authority or privilege, to dare to buy, sell, keep, read, write, or have somebody write, print or have printed, or affirm or defend the books, writings, or opinions of the said Martin Luther, or anything contained in these books and writings, whether in German, Latin, Flemish, or any other language. This applies also to all those writings condemned by our Holy Father the pope and to any other book written by Luther or any of his disciples, in whatever manner, even if there is Catholic doctrine mixed in to deceive the common people.  

"For this reason we want all of Luther's books to be universally prohibited and forbidden, and we also want them to be burned. We execute the sentence of the Holy Apostolic See, and we follow the very praiseworthy ordinance and custom of the good Christians of old who had the books of heretics like the Arians, Priscillians, Nestorians, Eutychians, and others burned and annihilated, even everything that was contained in these books, whether good or bad. This is well done, since if we are not allowed to eat meat containing just one drop of poison because of the danger of bodily infection, then we surely should leave out every doctrine (even if it is good) which has in it the poison of heresy and error, which infects and corrupts and destroys under the cover of charity everything that is good, to the great peril of the soul.  

"Therefore, we ask you who are in charge of judicial administration to have all of Luther's books and writings burned and destroyed in public, whether these writings are in German, Flemish, Latin, or in any other written language and whether they are written by himself, his disciples, or the imitators of his false and heretical doctrines, which are the source of all perversity and iniquity. Moreover, we ask you to help and assist the messengers of our Holy Pope. In their absence you will have all those books publicly burned and execute all the things mentioned above.  

"To that effect, we ask and require all our subjects of your jurisdiction to consider the penalties herein mentioned, and we also ask them to assist and obey you as they would obey us.  

"We also have to be careful that the books or the doctrines of the said Martin Luther not be written and published under other authors' names. Daily, several books full of evil doctrine and bad examples are being written and published. There are also many pictures and illustrations circulated so that the enemy of human nature, through various tricks, might capture the souls of Christians. Because of these books and unreasonable pictures, Christians fall into transgression and start doubting their own faith and customs, thus causing scandals and hatreds. From day to day, and more and more, rebellions, divisions, and dissensions are taking place in this kingdom and in all the provinces and cities of Christendom. This is much to be feared.

"For this reason, and to kill this mortal pestilence, we ask and require that no one dare to compose, write, print, paint, sell, buy, or have printed, written, sold, or painted, from now on in whatever manner such pernicious articles so much against the holy orthodox faith and against that which the Catholic Apostolic Church has kept and observed to this day. We likewise condemn anything that speaks against the Holy Father, against the prelates of the church, and against the secular princes, the general schools and their faculties, and all other honest people, whether in positions of authority or not. And in the same manner we condemn everything that is contrary to the good moral character of the people, to the Holy Roman Church, and to the Christian public good.  

"And finally, after this edict has been published, we want all the books, writings, and pictures mentioned above to be publicly burned, including those under the name of any author that might be printed, written, or compiled in any language, wherever they may be found in our countries.  

We ask you to be diligent in apprehending and confiscating all the belongings of those who seem rebellious to the ordinances herein mentioned and to punish them according to the penalties set out by law-Divine, canon, and civil.  

"And so as to prevent poisonous false doctrines and bad examples from being spread all over Christendom, and so that the art of printing books might be used only toward good ends, we, after mature and long deliberation, order and command you by this edict that henceforth, under penalty of confiscation of goods and property, no book dealer, printer, or anybody else mention the Holy Scriptures or their interpretation without having first received the consent of the clerk of the city and the advice and consent of the faculty of theology of the university, which will approve those books and writings with their seal. As for books that do not even mention faith or the Holy Scriptures, we also want this decree applied to them, except that our consent or that of our lieutenants will be sufficient. All this will apply for the first printing of the books hereabove mentioned.  

"Item. Furthermore, we declare in this ordinance that if anyone, whatever his social status may be, dares directly or indirectly to oppose this decree--whether concerning Luther's matter, his defamatory books or their printings, or whatever has been ordered by us--these transgressors in so doing will be guilty of the crime of lèse majesté and will incur our grave indignation as well as each of the punishments mentioned above.  

"We desire that evidence be added to the copy of this decree, signed by one of our secretaries or by an apostolic notary as would be done for this original.  

"As a witness to this, and for all these things to be firm and forever established, we have put our seal on this document and have signed by our hand.  

"Given in our city of Worms on the eighth day of May in the year of our Lord one thousand five hundred twenty-one.

"Signed Charles of Germany" (http://www.crivoice.org/creededictworms.html, accessed 12-27-2009).

In this comprehensive edict Charles V took a position identical to the pope, without any attempt to compromise with Luther or his followers. It has been suggested that the proclamation was part of a bargain by which Charles V attempted to enlist the cooperation of the pope against Francis I of France.

Depending on the influence which Charles V could exert on a specific region, and the attitude of sovereigns toward Luther and other reformers, this imperial decree was enforced with varying degrees of vigor, or not at all.

Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550 (1967) 91.

Bookseller and scribe employed by the Apostolic Chancery, Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi, publishes a pamphlet of 32 pages entitled La Operina.  This was the first book devoted to Humanistic Cursive (Littera Humanistica Cursiva, Cancellaresca, Cancellaresca all'antica). Each page was printed from a woodcut by Ugo da Carpi rather than from type.

Osley, Luminario: An Introduction to the Italian Writing-Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1972) 27-34, suggesting that the work may have been first published in 1524.

• In 1524 Arrighi turned to printing and designed his own italic typefaces for his works.

• At the link to La Operina above you can page through a copy of the text of the original edition.

Venetian printer Alessandro Paganini produces the first printed edition of the Qur'an (Koran) in Arabic.

The edition was probably intended for export to the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately the abundant errors and poor appearance of the type appear to have ruined all prospects for its success. Presumably, the copies published were confiscated and destroyed by the Ottomans.

For a long time this entire edition was thought to be lost, and the rumor was that the Pope had the complete print run burned. However, in 1987 an Italian scholar discovered the sole surviving copy in the monastic library of Provincia Veneta di San Antonio di Padova dei Frati Minori, Venice.

Henry VIII decrees that all new books printed in England must be approved by the Privy Council before publication.

This requirement remained in effect in some form until 1694.

Seville Printer Juan Cromberger and the government of Seville, Spain, sign a contract to establish a printing press in Mexico.

Juan Pablos, a printer from the "casa de Juan Cromberger," set up what is most likely the first printing press in the Western Hemisphere. The first book he published was Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Christiana en lengua Mexicana y Castellana.

Contemporary authorities refer to a book possibly published in Mexico entitled Escala Espiritual par Illegar al cielo, which conceivably could have been printed in 1537, but no copy survived.

Vannuccio Biringuccio publishes De re pirotechnia at Venice.

De re pirotechnia was the first comprehensive treatise on the pyrotechnic or "fire-using" arts, including mining, metallurgy, applied chemistry, gunpowder, military arts and fireworks. Significantly for the history of printing, it contained the first description of type-casting.

Printer and publisher Robert Estienne issues from Paris Libri in officina Rob. Stephani partim nati, parti restituti & excusi.

This was the first publisher's catalogue issued in book form, of which any copies survived.

"Estienne's publications are listed in alphabetical order, some under their authors, others under their titles; prices are added, but no dates given. The Paris printers, such as Estienne, Colines, Wechel, Chaudière, and Janot, pioneered this form of publisher's lists, and, between 1542 and 1550 issued more than a dozen of them, each surviving in only or or two copies" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 13).

French physician, writer, and translator, Charles Estienne, of the Estienne printing dynasty, publishes De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres. . . . in Paris.

Charles, the younger son of Henri I Estienne, was a member of the second generation of the Estienne dynasty of scholar-printers. His De dissectione, one of the most interesting woodcut books of the French Renaissance, was printed at the Estienne Press by his stepfather Simon de Colines, who ran the press from Henri I's death until Charles's brother Robert came of age.

Estienne studied medicine in Paris, completing his training in 1540; in 1535, during his course of anatomical studies under Jacques Dubois  (Jacobus Sylvius), he had Andreas Vesalius as a classmate. At the time the only illustrated manuals of dissection available were the writings of Berengario da Carpi, and the need for an improved, well-illustrated manual must have been obvious to all students of anatomy, particularly the medical student son of one of the world's leading publishers. Estienne did not hesitate to fill this need. The manuscript and illustrations for De dissectione were completed by 1539, and the book was set in type halfway through Book 3 and the last section, when publication was stopped by a lawsuit brought by Étienne de la Rivière, an obscure surgeon and anatomist who had attended lectures at the Paris faculty during 1533-1536, overlapping the time of Estienne's medical study in Paris.

According to historian of surgery and economist, François Quesnay, Estienne may have attempted to plagiarize a manuscript of Étienne de la Rivière which the latter had turned over to him for translation from French into Latin. In the eventual settlement of the lawsuit, Estienne was required to credit Rivière for the various anatomical preparations and for the pictures of the dissections. Had De dissectione been published in 1539, there is no question that it would have stolen much of the thunder from Vesalius's Fabrica: it would have been the first work to show detailed illustrations of dissection in serial progression, the first to discuss and illustrate the total human body, the first to publish instructions on how to mount a skeleton, and the first to set the anatomical figures in a fully developed panoramic landscape, a tradition begun by Berengario da Carpi in his Commentary on Mondino. Nonetheless, Estienne's work still contained numerous original contributions to anatomy, including the first published illustrations of the whole external venous and nervous systems, and descriptions of the morphology and purpose of the "feeding holes" of bones, the tripartate composition of the sternum, the valvulae in the hepatic veins and the scrotal septum. In addition, the work's eight dissections of the brain provide more anatomical detail that had previously appeared.

The anatomical woodcuts in De dissectione have attracted much critical attention due to their wide variation in imagistic quality, the oddly disturbing postures of the figures in Books 2 and 3, the obvious insertion in many blocks (again, in Books 2 and 3) of separately cut pieces for the dissected portions of the anatomy, and the uncertainty surrounding the sources of the images. The presence of inserts in main blocks would suggest that these blocks were originally intended for another purpose, and in fact a link has been established between the gynecological figures in Book 3, with their frankly erotic poses, and the series of prints entitled The Loves of the Gods, engraved by Gian Giacomo Caraglio after drawings by Perino del Vaga and Rosso Fiorentino. It has also been conjectured that the male figures in Book 2 are from blocks cut for an unpublished book of anatomical designs after Rosso Fiorentino's studies of bodies disinterred from the burial grounds at Borgo; however, this speculation remains insufficiently supported by evidence.

Possible explanations of this connection between pornography and anatomy are that the engraver of the female nude woodcuts did not have access to a model, and for the sake of expediency copied the general outlines of the female nudes from "The Loves of the Gods," eliminating the male figures from the erotic illustrations. Another wood engraver, perhaps Rivière, would then have prepared the anatomical insert blocks showing the internal organs. Economic reasons may also have been a factor, as commissioning entirely new woodcuts would certainly have cost more in time and money than adapting existing artwork, and after the enforced delay imposed by Étienne de la Rivière's lawsuit, both time and money may well have been in short supply. A third explanation might have been that the publishers intended to commercialize the anatomy by stressing the erotic overtones, thus appealing to a wider market than strictly physicians. Possibly because of the erotic connection, the work sold unusually well for a anatomical treatise, appearing in French the following year, with publication of an edition of the plates alone, without text, several years later. During a period in which printed erotica was very difficult to come by there would have been considerable demand for erotic images made acceptable by their adaption for medical purposes.

Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (1920) 152-155. Kellett, "Perino del Vaga et les illustrations pour l'anatomie d'Estienne," Aesculape 37 (1955), 74-89. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 728.

Brother Juan Diez, a companion of Hernando Cortès (Hernán) in the conquest of New Spain, publishes the Sumario Compendioso in Mexico City at the press of Juan Pablos.

The Sumario Compendioso was the earliest treatise on mathematics published in the western hemisphere, and also the first textbook on any subject besides religious instruction to be printed outside of Europe.

In his introduction to The Sumario Compendioso of Brother Juan Diez, the Earliest Mathematical Work of the New World (1921), a facsimile and translation, David Eugene Smith writes of the existence of possibly four copies including one (incomplete) in the Biblioteca Nacional at Madrid, which he used for his edition, and a copy in the British Library.

"Not again in the sixteenth century did the Mexican printers publish any work on mathematics, except for a brief Instrucción Nautica which appeared in 1587. The press was generally true to its early purpose to issue only books relating to the conversion of the native inhabitants to the way of the cross" (Smith, introduction cited above, 6).

French painter, sculptor, etcher, engraver, and geometrician, Jean Cousin the Elder, publishes Livre de perspective in Paris at the press of Jean Le Royer. The folio volume includes a woodcut title device, a frontispiece of platonic solids and 58 geometrical diagrams (16 full-page, 5 double-page) by Jean Le Royer and Aubin Olivier. The frontispiece of the platonic solids is one of the finest examples of mannerist book illustration.

“According to the printer’s introduction, leaf A3v, Le Royer received from Cousin the text and ‘les figures pour l’intelligence d’iceluy necessaries, portraittes de sa main sus planches de bois,’ and he himself cut most of Cousin’s blocks and completed others which his brother-in-law, Aubin Olivier, had started. Several of the diagrams are extended into landscapes with figures. . . . Le Royer held the title of king’s printer for mathematics. Cousin is known to have been a successful painter and designer of stained glass windows. . . . His considerable reputation as a designer of woodcuts for the Paris printers has been developed chiefly by comparison of details from this volume” (Mortimer, Harvard College Library Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts Part I. French Sixteenth Century Books (1964) no. 157, quote from pp. 195-97). 

Physician, naturalist, and bibliographer, Conrad Gessner (Gesner) issues his Prologomena in Galenum, in tres partes divisa in volume one of Cl [audius] Galeni Pergameni [Opera] Omnia, quae extant, in Latinum sermonem convers published in Basel by Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius. 

Gessner's work on the many and complicated writings of the second century CE physician, Galen of Pergamon, was the first bio-bibliography, and Gessner's most developed bibliography, covering Greek editions, Latin editions, lost works, writers on Galen, and a classified bibliography of Galen's writings. The bio-bibliography occupies 37 unnumbered leaves, following the title to volume 1, and Gesner's two unnumbered leaves of dedication, dated February 1562. (α†^4-6,β†⁶, γ†⁶, A†-C†⁶, D†⁴).

Besterman, Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography 2nd ed (1940) 19-20, no. XXIX.

By Letters Patent of the thirteen year old Charles IX of France (Mantes September 10) it is forbidden for any French printer to print without permission, under penalty of being hanged or strangled.

Ivan Fedorov (Fyodorov) issues at Moscow the first dated book printed in Russia. It is the Apostol (Acts and Epistles of the Apostles).

In 1565 Fedorov  issued the Chasovnik, a Book of Hours. This was the earliest Greek Orthodox liturgical work printed in Russia.

Printer Pedro Ocharte, born Pierre Ocharte in Rouen, France, working in Mexico City, issues Opera medicinalia by the Spanish physician, Francisco Bravo. Ocharte had married the daughter of Juan Pablos, the first printer in the New World, and inherited his equipment. Opera medicinalia includes a woodcut title border and a few botanical woodcuts, including images to distinguish the false sarsaparilla of Mexico from the true Spanish sarsaparilla of Dioscorides. It was the first medical book printed in the Western Hemisphere, and its botanical images were the first illustrations of plants printed in the Western Hemisphere.

Of the original edition only two copies are known, of which the only complete copy is at the Universidad de Puebla, Mexico. In 1862 American bookseller and bibliographer Henry Stevens purchased an incomplete copy at the sale of the library of Guglielmo Libri in London. This he resold to the American collector James Lennox. This copy is preserved in the New York Public Library.

In 1970 London antiquarian booksellers Dawsons of Pall issued a facsimile of the complete Universidad de Puebla copy with a companion volume of commentary by Francisco Guerra. The two volumes were printed on hand-made paper by J. Barcham Green, Ltd. and bound in parchment by Zaehnsdorf in London. The edition was limited to 250 hand-numbered copies.

Eliezer ben Isaac Ashkenazi, a printer from Prague, settled in Safad (Safed) in northern Palestine (now Israel). The first book that he issued there was Lekah Tov, a Hebrew commentary on the Book of Esther, by Yom Tov Zahalon.

This was the first book printed in the Middle East. In his introduction Zahalon expressed his delight in the founding of a press in this Holy City of the Holy Land and urged authors to have their works printed there; however the press issued only six books.

French lawyer, Conseil du Roi (privy councillor), and mathematician François Viète (Franciscus Vieta) publishes Canon mathematicus seu ad triangula. Cum adpendicibus.

Viète's numerous mathematical works were written during two brief periods of leisure from his career as a lawyer to the French courts of Henry III and Henry IV. His Canon mathematicus, the earliest of his published mathematical works, was the first of his studies on trigonometry.

"Here he gathered together the formulas for the solution of right and oblique plane triangles, including his own contribution, the law of tangents. . . . For spherical right triangles he gave the complete set of formulas needed to calculate any one part in terms of two other known parts, and the rule for remembering this collections of formulas, which we now call Napier's rule. He also contributed the law of cosines involving the angles of an oblique spherical triangle" (Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times [1972] 239-240).

In addition, Viète called for a reform in the expression of fractions, in which decimal fractions would replace the sexagesimal fractions then used in astronomy, physics and mathematics.

Viète's work consists of two parts: "Canon mathematicus," containing a table of trigonometric lines with some additional tables; and "Universalium inspectionum ad canonem mathematicum" (with separate title), giving the computational methods used in the construction of the canon and explaining the computation of plane and spherical triangles. Viète had originally planned to include two more parts devoted to astronomy, but these were never published.

Canon mathematicus was remarkably advanced typographically for its time. It is also very rare: privately printed in a small edition, its scarcity was compounded by Viète's displeasure over its many misprints, which caused him to withdraw from circulation all the copies he could recover.

Dibner, Heralds of Science, no. 105.  Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 2151.

Ivan Ivan Fyodorov, Fedorov or Fedorovych (Russian: Iва́н Федоров) prints the first complete Slavic Bible. 

It is known as the Ostog Bible (Ukrainian: Острозька Біблія; Russian: Острожская Библия), because it was printed on the estate of the Ukrainian/Lithuanian prince, Konstanty Wasyl Ostrogski (Belarusian: Канстантын Васiль Астрожскi Lithuanian: Konstantinas Vasilijus Ostrogiškis Ukrainian: Костянтин-Василь Острозький) at Ostog, Ukraine.

"The Ostrog Bible is unique among Church Slavonic Bibles in that the Old Testament was translated not from the (Hebrew) Masoretic text, but from the (Greek) Septuagint. This translation, comprising seventy-six books of the Old and New Testaments, was based on the Gennadius Bible and a manuscript of the Codex Alexandrinus. Some parts were based on Francysk Skaryna's translations.

The Ostrog Bibles were printed on two dates: 12 July 1580, and 12 August 1581. The second version differs from the 1580 original in composition, ornamentation, and correction of misprints. In the printing of the Bible delays occurred, as it was necessary to remove mistakes, to search for correct textual resolutions of questions, and to produce a correct translation. The editing of the Bible detained printing. In the meantime, Fyodorov and his company printed other biblical books. The first were those which did not require correcting: the Psalter and the New Testament.

"The Ostrog Bible is a monumental publication of 1,256 pages, lavishly decorated with headpieces and initials, which were prepared especially for it. From the typographical point of view, the Ostrog Bible is irreproachable. This is the first Bible printed in Cyrillic type. It served as the original and model for further Russian publications of the Bible. The importance of the first printed Cyrillic Bible can hardly be overestimated. Prince Ostrogski sent copies to Pope Gregory XIII and tsar Ivan the Terrible, while the latter presented a copy to an English ambassador. When leaving Ostroh, Fyodorov took 400 books with him. Only 300 copies of the Ostrog Bible are extant today" (Wikipedia article on Ostrog Bible, accessed 01-03-2010).

Father Ruggiere, a missionary in China, has his Catechism printed in the Chinese language at Tchao-kin.

Printed by wood blocks, Ruggiere's Catechism was the first book printed by Europeans in China. 1200 copies were printed of which only two seem to have survived.

Pope Gregory XIII founds a Maronite College in Rome to train European missionaries in various oriental languages, and to train oriental Christians in the languages of Europe.

The Maronites translated books from Latin into Arabic and Syriac. To undertake the printing of Arabic and other oriental languages, Gregory appointed Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, director of what came to be called the Medici Press. Medici placed Giovan Battista Raimundi in charge of the press, within ten years they issued elegantly produced editions of Avicenna, Euclid and other works in Arabic.

"In the 18th century, amazingly enough, many of the books printed by Raimondi were still in the Palazzo Vecchio stacked in wardrobes. An inventory taken at the time shows that 1,039 copies of the Arabic-Latin Gospels, 566 of the Arabic Gospels, 810 of the Avicenna, 1,967 of the Euclid, 1,129 of the Idrisi, still remained unsold, along with several other titles. But early in the 19th century - the Age of Enlightenment - the government sold the remaining books for a derisory sum to a bookseller who destroyed the bulk of them to increase the rarity of the remainder. The remaining type and matrices wound up in the Pitti Palace, where Napoleon was able to loot them at his ease when he conquered Italy. In 1808 Napoleon ordered the punches and matrices to be taken to Paris, where they were used to print Arabic proclamations for distribution in the Near East. Eight years later, after Napoleon's exile, they were brought back to Florence" (http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/198102,/arabic.and.the.art.of.printing-a.special.section.htm, accessed 01-29-2009)

Using Korean printing equipment brought back by Toyotomi Hideyoshi's army in 1593, and type cast by the order of Tokugawa Ieyasu before he became shogun, the Japanese print an edition of the Confucian Analects at the order of Emperor Go-Yōzei. This document is the oldest surviving work of Japanese printing by moveable type.

Despite the appeal of moveable type, the Japanese decided that the running script or semi-cursive style of Japanese writing was better reproduced using woodblocks, and by 1640 woodblock printing was adopted for nearly all purposes in Japan. 

Franciscan Fray Juan Bautista publishes A Jesu Christo S.N. ofrece este Sermonario en lengua mexicana in Mexico, En casa de Diego Lopez Davalos.

This was the second collection of sermons published Nahuatl (Aztec) prefaced with a two-page list of previously published works by Bautista. The listing of books was the first bibliography published in the Western Hemisphere.

"On signature **iii (recto and verso) is a list of 'las obras que hasta agora ha impresso el auctor' ('the works that until now the author has had published'). The list is not in chronological order nor is it alphabetical by title; nonetheless it is a bibliography and supplies us with information now known only because of its inclusion here. Of the 17 items listed, several have failed to survive in any known copy, including the second part of this sermonario: at the time of publication of part one 'de la sequnda parte esta ya impresso gran pedaço' ('of the second part a large piece is already printed')" (Szewczyk & Buffington, 39 Books and Broadsides Printed In America Before the Bay Psalm Book [1989] no. 19).

Printer Hieronymus Hornschuch publishes at Leipzig the first editor's and printer's manual, Orthotypographia, which "while dealing mainly with the signs and symbols of correction, includes short sections on schemes of imposition and type-specimens" (P.Gaskell, G.Barber and G.Warrilow, 'An Annotated List of Printers' Manuals to 1850', Journal of the Printing Historical Society, no. 4  [1968] 11-31, G1). 

Prior to this date no printer had published instructions any technical aspect of the printing trade—a trade which had to be learned through a secretive process of apprenticeship.

Reference: Orthotypographia, by Hieronymus Hornschuch A Facsimile with a Parallel Translation of the Earliest Printers Manual, First Published at Leipzig in 1608, edited by Philip Gaskell and  Patricia Bradford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 1972.

The first book printed in the Arab world was a bilingual Psalter in small folio of 260 pages which appeared in the Maronite Monastery of St. Anthony at Qozhaya in Northern Lebanon.

"Besides the title-page, the little book contains an introduction by Sarkis al Rizzi, the Maronite Archibshop of Damascus, 151 psalms (the 150 canonical ones and one apocryphal), the ten Biblical odes (tasabih), the imprimatur by the Archbishop of Ihdin to whose diocese Quzhayya belonged, and a concluding colophon. The psalms are arranged in two columns, on the right is the text in Syriac and on the left in Arabic, but written in Syriac letters, the so-called Karshuni script. As the Arabic version is longer than the Syriac one the wish to keep both texts parallel caused the use of two different fonts; larger ones for Syriac and smaller ones for Arabic. Both sets of types are elegant and harmonious and are cast after a calligraphic model of high quality.

". . . . The lowest panel [of the title page] - again in Arabic (Karshuni) - gives information in the form of a colophon, on the place of printing, the printers, and the year of printing: 'In the venerated hermitage which is situated in the valley of Quzhayya on the blessed Mount Lebanon by the master Pasquale Eli and the humble Yusuf, the son of 'Amima from Karmsadda, called deacon, in the year 1610' " (Lehrstuhl für Türkische Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur Universität Bamberg, The Beginnings of Printing in the Near and Middle East: Jews, Christians and Muslims [2001] no. 3.)

This was the first book printed in the Middle East. No other books followed from the press at Qozhaya (Quzhayya), and almost a century elapsed before the first book was printed in Arabic in the Middle East (1706).

Physician and writer Pietro Caneparius publishes De atramentis in Venice. This is "the earliest known work which gives details of the formulation of typographic inks" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibition at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London [1963] No. 122).

Stephen Daye establishes the first printing press in North America at Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Daye's first publications were a broadside entitled The Oath of a Freeman, and Peirce's Almanack for 1639. Of these two printings, no authentic copies are known.

Bernhard von Mallinckrodt, of Münster cathedral, issues a pamphlet at Cologne to mark the bicentennary of the invention of printing by moveable type in Europe, defending the priority of Johann Gutenberg.

Mallinckrodt's pamphlet was entitled De ortu et progressu artis typographicae ("Of the rise and progress of the typographic art.") The pamphlet included the phrase prima typographicae incunabula, "the first cradle of printing," or more loosely, "the infancy of printing." This was the origin of the term incunabula, still used to describe books and broadsheets printed before 1500, the arbitrary cut-off date which Mallinckrodt selected. Today the term incunabula (singular: incunabulum) is typically applied to imprints before 1501.

A locksmith, Stephen Daye prints the Whole Booke of Psalmes, edited by Ricard Mather. Known as the Bay Psalm Book, this was the first book printed in North America.

Of the original edition of 1700 copies, eleven copies are extant.

"The first printing press to come to British America arrived in the winter of 1638/39. During 1639 an almanac and the 'Oath of a Freeman' were printed, although no genuine examples of either have been found. The ministers of the small colony were eager to produce their own version of the Psalms, one that did not sacrifice accuracy of translation to regulating of meter. Richard Mather, John Eliot, and several others made translations from the original Hebrew. Thus this first product of the American press represented a distinct break from Old England, both in production and translation." (Reese, The Printers' First Fruits. An Exhibition of American Imprints 1640-1742, from the Collections of the American Antiquarian Society [1989] no. 1).

Abolition of the Star Chamber court removes the machinery of censorship in England.

This resulted in an outpouring of publications on topics which previously had been suppressed. 2000 titles were published in England in 1642, and 3500 in 1643-- "more titles in a single year than at any time before the eighteenth century" (A. Hessayon, "Incendiary texts: book burning in England, c.1640 – c.1660", Cromohs, 12 [2007] 1-25. http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/12_2007/hessayon_incendtexts.html, accessed 01-04-2010).

The German amateur artist Ludwig von Siegen invents the mezzotint process of printmaking.

Mezzotint was was the first tonal method of printmaking, producing prints that have a more painterly appearance. The word derives from Italian meaning "half-painted." Von Siegen's first known mezzotint is a portrait of  Amelie Elisabeth von Hessen.

Mezzotint allows "half-tones to be produced without using line or dot based techniques like hatching, cross-hatching or stipple. Mezzotint achieves tonality by roughening the plate with thousands of little dots made by a metal tool with small teeth. In printing the tiny pits in the plate hold the ink when the face of the plate is wiped clean. A high level of quality and richness in the print can be achieved."

Wax, The Mezzotint. History and Technique (1990) 15-16.

Artist and printmaker, Abraham Bosse, writes, illustrates and publishes the first treatise on engraving and etching techniques: Tracté des manières de graver en taille douce sur l'airin.

In 1662 English painter and engraver William Faithorne published The Art of Graveing and Etching, which was primarily a translation of Bosse's work.

English puritan clergyman and missionary in Roxbury, Massachusetts John Eliot, and printers Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson in Cambridge, Massachusetts issue The Holy Bible: Containing the Old Testament and the New, Translated into the Indian Language. 

This was the first complete edition of the bible published in the Western Hemisphere, and “the earliest example in history of the translation and printing of the entire Bible in a new language as a means of evangelization” (Darlow and Moule).

On July 27, 1649, the British Parliament enacted an "Ordinance for the Advancement of Civilization and Christianity Among the Indians." This act created The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, the first Protestant missionary society. Also in 1649 Eliot made the decision to attempt the translation of the Scriptures into the Algonquin language. Like other native American languages, Alogonquin had no written form, and it was considered one of the world's most difficult languages. The process of translation of the bible into the Natick dialect of the region's Algonquin tribes took Eliot ten years,  with the assistance of John Sassamon, a member of the local tribe, whose ability to speak and write English proved invaluable.

“When the manuscript was ready for publication, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England not only provided the funds to print it, but they also sent an English printer by the name of Marmaduke Johnson, a printing press, and a supply of paper. Johnson arrived in the New World and set to work with Samuel Green who had already started to print the New Testament. By 1661 they had completed the printing of fifteen hundred copies of the New Testament. One thousand of the New Testaments were reserved for binding with the Old Testament, when completed, to form an entire Bible. The remaining copies of the New Testament were distributed among the Algonquin tribe or sent to England as presentation copies.

"When the task of printing the New Testament was complete, Green and Johnson began printing one thousand copies of the Old Testament, which included a translation of the Metrical Psalms. The work proceeded quickly and by 1663 the printing was finished. The Old Testaments were bound with the reserved copies of the New Testament to produce one thousand copies of the entire Bible” (Samworth, John Eliot and America's First Bible, accessed 12-30-2008).

Samuel Green, using a press in Cambridge, Massachusetts owned by the president of Harvard, Henry Dunster, prints the first medical or biological publication in North America--an edition of a London plague tract. The title is: Thomas Vincent's Gods Terrible Voice in the City of London wherein you have the Narration of the Two Late Dreadful Judgements of Plague and Fire, Inflicted by the Lord upon that City; the former in the year 1665. The latter in the year 1666. By T.V. To which is Added, the Generall Bill of Mortality, shewing the Number of Persons which Died in Every Parish of all Diseases, and of the Plague, in the Year Abovesaid. This is known from a single copy preserved at Harvard University. It is also probably the first North American publication on any scientific subject.

The pamphlet was reissued in 1668 by another Cambridge, Masschusetts printer, Marmaduke Johnson. This 31 page pamphlet is known from a single copy preserved in the American Antiquarian Society.

Joseph Moxon publishes his Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing as part of his survey of the chief trades of his day. This was the first printing manual published in English, and the first comprehensive manual in any language published on printing—a trade that was passed down through apprenticeship since the mid-15th century.

Moxon's Mechanick Exercises was intended to furnish his readers with basic instruction in all the chief trades of his day.  Fourteen numbers, devoted to smithying, joining, carpentry and related arts, were issued between 1677 and 1680, before lack of interest, and the Gunpowder Plot— which "took off the minds of my few customers from buying" (Moxon's "Advertisement," Vol. ii)— forced Moxon temporarily to cease production.

¶ Vol. 1 was the first book in England to be published in parts, or fascicules. Moxon resumed the series in 1683 with Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, issued in twenty-four parts during 1683 and 1684. The general title page was issued with the first number in 1683, and bears that date in its imprint. 

Moxon had worked for years as a master printer. He had also cut steel punches for letters, made moulds and matrices, and cast and sold type. He provided detailed technical accounts of the tools of the compositor and pressman, the art of typefounding, and the work of the compositor, corrector, pressman and other members of the printing trades as they had come down to his day. Most of these skills had not changed materially for nearly two hundred years, and would remain unaltered until the mechanization of printing in the nineteenth century.  Moxon's manual "put into writing a knowledge that was wholly traditional" (Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, edited by Davis and Carter [1962] vii), with such success that it was copied by virtually every writer of printing manuals and served as a standard text for over two hundred years.  

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1561.

Daniel Michael Schmatz publishes in Sultzbach Neu-vorgestelltes auf der löblichen Kunst Buchdruckerey gebräuchliches Format-Buch. This was not a comprehensive printing manual like Moxon's but, "a guide to imposition, different alphabets, Greek and Latin abbreviations, alchemical and pharmaceutical symbols. This is what the journeyman printer needed for ready reference." (Roger Gaskell). It was the fourth printing manual published in German.

Cornelis a Beughem publishes at Amsterdam, Incunabula typographiae s. catalogus librorum scriptorumque proximis ab inventione typographiae annis ad annum Christi MD inclusive in quavis lingua editorum.

This was the first attempt to comprehend and organize the collected literature of early printing, and the first use of of the term incunabula in the title of a book on the history of early printing. Beughem cited approximately 3000 titles.  A bookseller and city counselor at Emmerich, in the Duchy of Cleves under the rule of the Electors of Brandenburg, and author of several bibliographies, Beughem has been called the foremost bibliographer of the 17th century

The first printing house in the Arab world that printed in Arabic was opened by the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan  Athanasius al-Dabbas in Aleppo, Syria, "after he had helped to print two Arabic books in Romania at the beginning of the 18th century. This gave him the needed insight and expertise to run an own press the equipment of which he had received as a gift from the ruler of Walachia" (http://pagesperso-orange.fr/colloque.imprimes.mo/pdf/CWR0.pdf).

Within the first year al-Dabbas issued two books, a Book of Psalms and a Gospel book. 

Schnurrer, Bibliotheca Arabica (1811) p. 374. The Gospel book printed in Arabic is described and illustrated in Lehrstuhl für Türkische Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur, Universität Bamberg, The Beginnings of Printing in the Near and Middle East: Jews, Christians and Muslims (2001) no. 3.

An anonymous third edition of Traite de la peinture en mignature printed in The Hague describes trichromancy in terms of three Couleurs primitives--yellow, red and blue.

At this time Jacob Christophe le Blon was working as a miniaturist in Amsterdam.

Johann Conrad Zeltner publishes Correctorum in typogaphiis eruditorum centuria speciminis loco collecta in Nuremberg at the press of A. J. Felsecker.

"Zeltner's bio-bibliography of 100 proofreaders and press correctors from the 15th to the beginning of the 18th century includes such luminaries as Henri I Estienne (and a history of his printing house), Michael Servetus, Josse Bade, Coverdale, G.A. Bussi (who worked for Sweynheim and Pannartz), Erasmus, Plantin, Isaac Casaubon, Oporinus, Paolo Manuzio, Rabii Jacob ben-Chajim or Hayyim (for Daniel Bomberg), and Thomas Crenius the bibliographer. Each entry contains a list of the press corrector’s published writings, some of the famous books on which he worked and citations to source material. Felsecker’s typesetters here committed over 400 errors (five page errata in 68 pt. type)" (Bruce McKittrick Rare Books, Short Stack Seven [2009] no. 4).

Bigmore & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing (1880) III: 113. The work was reissued in Nuremberg in 1720 under the following title: Theatrum virorum eruditorum qui speciatim typophraphiis laudabilem operam preaestiterunt.

Working in London, the painter Jacob Christoph le Blon secures a patent from George I for a process which he calls "printing paintings."

To prepare each of his three printing plates, Le Blon used the technique of mezzotint engraving: a copper sheet is uniformly roughened with the finely serrated edge of a burring tool, and local regions are then polished, to varying degrees, in order to control the amount of ink that they are to hold.

To develop his process Le Blon needed to find three colored inks of suitable transparency, and to analyze the color that was to be reproduced into its components. Sometimes he used a fourth plate, carrying black ink. This technique allowed the use of thinner layers of colored ink, reducing cost, and accelerating drying.

Printer and bookseller Martin-Dominique Fertel issues La Science pratique de l'imprimérie contenant des instructions très faciles pour se perfectionner dans cet art. On y trouvera une description de toutes les pieces dont une Presse est construire, avec le moyen de remedier à tous les défauts qui peuvent y s. from Saint-Omer, France.

This was the first manual on printing published in French, and the first book on book design in any language, though the author probably did not think of it as a design manual per se. The four parts of Fertel's work cover type and composition, imposition and press correction, accentuated letters and punctuation, and press work.  Fertel (1648-1752) had a shop in St. Omer from 1713 until his death in 1752. After becoming a printer in 1704 he travelled for about 10 years through France, Italy and Flanders. Not finding a printing manual anywhere, he decided to print his own.

Having formed a company in London called The Picture Office in 1721 to produce color prints by his trichromatic method of color printing, Jacob Christophe le Blon privately published a pamphlet called Coloritto, describing the process that he had invented. This was the first published description of color printing.

With the support of the Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Muteferrika addresses a petition to the Sultan of Constantinople in the form of an essay entitled Wasilat al-Tiba'a, "The Utility of Printing."

Convinced by this essay of the value of printing, Sultan Ahmet III issued an edict permitting the establishment of printing presses in the Ottoman Empire. The authorities also ruled that only secular works could be printed. This edict protected the more than 4,000 professional manuscript copyists of Constantinople, whose work consisted almost entirely of copying the Qu'ran, the collections of canonical traditions, and legal texts.

Two years after he received permission to print, Ibrahim Muteferrika founded the first printing press in Turkey, in his home at Constantinople. His first publication was an Arabic-Turkish vocabulary by Muhammed Ben Mustapha.

Pierre-Simon Fournier le Jeune publishes Tables des Proportions des Differens Caracteres de l'imprimerie.

This work described Fourier's point-system, or typographic unit for the sizes of type—all multiples of a unit which he termed a "point typographique" based on a scale of 144 points. Fournier's point system underwent numerous revisions through the nineteenth century.

Printing by hand on wooden printing presses remained a very laborious process that did not improve dramatically since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press circa 1450. In the mid-18th century a competent printer could expect to print about 100 sheets per hour.

French writer and philosopher Denis Diderot publishes in the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société‚ de gens de lettres an article entitled Encyclopédie. In that he explained that a primary reason for undertaking this enormous writing and publishing project was to manage information overload by providing a rational and comprehensible order to what was already an almost impossibly large and disorganized body of information. 

I preface my remarks About the Database with a brief quotation from Diderot's article. Equally relevant is this somewhat longer quotation, which places Diderot's partially self-deprecating thoughts in better context:

"As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes. When that time comes, a project, until then neglected because the need for it was not felt, will have to be undertaken.

"If you will reflect on the state of literary production in those ages before the introduction of printing, you will form a mental picture of a small number of gifted men who are occupied with composing manuscripts and a very numerous body of workmen who are busy transcribing them. If you look ahead to a future age, and consider the state of literature after the printing press, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, you will find again a twofold division of labor. Some will not do very much reading, but will instead devote themselves to investigations which will be new, or which they will believe to be new (for if we are even now ignorant of a part of what is contained in so many volumes published in all sorts of languages, they will know still less of what is contained in those same books, augmented as they will be by a hundred—a thousand—times as many more). The others, day laborers incapable of producing anything of their own, will be busy night and day leafing through these books, taking out of them fragments they consider worthy of being collected and preserved. Has not this prediction already begun to be fulfilled? And are not several of our literary men already engaged in reducing all big books to little ones, among which there are still to be found many that are superfluous. Let us assume that their extracts have been competently made, and that these have been arranged in alphabetical order and published in an orderly series of volumes by men of intelligence—you have an encyclopedia!

"Thus we have now undertaken, in the interests of learning and for the sake of the human race, a task to which our grandsons would have had to devote themselves; but we have done so under more favorable circumstances, before a superabundance of books should have accumulated to make its execution extremely laborious" (translation in Baker (ed) The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1987) 85-86).

Printer and type founder Pierre-Simon Fournier le Jeune issues his Manuel typographique in 2 volumes.

The first volume concerned type-founding and contained plates showing instruments used by the type-founder. The second volume displayed a vast range of type specimens.

Wilhelm Haas of Basel builds a new type of printing press in which all parts subject to stress during the printing process are made of iron, including both the bed and the platen.

Building key parts of the handpress out of iron greatly improved the efficiency of the press.

François-Ambroise Didot revises the point system for typographic units introduced by Pierre-Simon Fournier in 1737.

Didot related the body size of the type to the legal standard of measurement then in force in France, the "pied du roi" or "royal foot." This resulted in an augmentation of Fournier's point by a twelfth. Didot's point system became the standard unit of type measurement in France. It was adopted in Germany in the mid-19th century.

John Dunlap prints approximately 200 copies of The Declaration of Independence as a broadside.

"There is evidence that it was done quickly, and in excitement — watermarks are reversed, some copies look as if they were folded before the ink could dry and bits of punctuation move around from one copy to another. 'We were all in haste,' John Adams later wrote."

Surprisingly these printed broadsides, of which 25 copies survived in 2008, are the earliest records of the final draft of the document, as the manuscript dated July 4, 1776 in the National Archives was back-dated. A fair copy of the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote out in the week after July 4, 1776, is preserved in the New York Public Library. This is one of two surviving fair copies in Jefferson's hand.

German scientist, satirist and Anglophile Georg Christoph Lichtenberg discovers Lichtenberg figures, and describes them in his memoir "Super nova methodo motum ac naturam fluidi electrici" investigandi," Göttinger Novi Commentarii, Göttingen, 1777.

"In 1777, Lichtenberg built a large electrophorus to generate high voltage static electricity through induction. After discharging a high voltage point to the surface of an insulator, he recorded the resulting radial patterns in fixed dust. By then pressing blank sheets of paper onto these patterns, Lichtenberg was able to transfer and record these images, thereby discovering the basic principle of modern Xerography. This discovery was also the forerunner of modern day plasma physics. Although Lichtenberg only studied 2-dimensional (2D) figures, modern high voltage researchers study 2D and 3D figures (electrical trees) on, and within, insulating materials. Lichtenberg figures are now known to be examples of fractals" (Wikipedia article on Lichtenberg figures, accessed 06-11-2010).

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Grenoble recently acquired a fourth, and previously unknown panel painting of the printing shop of the Liège printer Clément Plomteux by the Franco-Flemish genre painter Léonard Defrance.

This painting, and the three other paintings by Defrance that depict Plomteux's shop, are illustrated in color in the online article linked to above by Daniel Droixhe, du Groupe d'étude du XVIIIe siècle de l'Université de Liège. Defrance's paintings are among the best painted records of the printing/publishing process in the late eighteenth century.

Archivist, paleographer and antiquary Thomas Astle, Keeper of Records in the Tower of London, publishes The Origin and Progress of Writing, as well Hieroglyphic and Elementary, Illustrated by Engravings Taken from Marbles, Manuscripts and Charters, Ancient and Modern: Also, some account of the Origin and Progress of Printing. This work was probably the earliest treatise on paleography in English, and the earliest English work on diplomatics, the "science of diplomas, or of ancient writings, literary and public documents, letters, decrees, charters, codicils, etc., which has for its object to decipher old writings, to ascertain their authenticity, their date, signatures, etc." Astle also provided detailed summaries of the history of writing materials— parchment, vellum, and paper, including Chinese paper— and a well-informed summary of the history of printing and typography in Europe.

By hieroglyphs, Astle meant "picture-writing," and used as examples pictograms by the ancient Maya and the Egyptians.

Astle was well aware that the Romans brought literacy to Britain, and that after the departure of the Romans from Britain in 427 Britain reverted to illiteracy, writing on p. 96:

"After the most diligent inquiry it doth not appear, that the Britons had the use of letters before their intercourse with the Romans. Although alphabets have been produced, which are said to have been used by the Ancient Britons, yet no one MS. ever appeared that was written in them. (I have several of these pretended alphabets in my collection; though they are only Roman letters deformed.) Cunoboline, king of Britain, who lived in the reigns of the emperors Tiberius and Caligula, erected different mints in this island, and coined money in gold, silver and copper, inscribed with Roman characters.(Many of these coins are preserved in the elaborate dissertation of the Rev. Mr. Pegges, on the coins of Cunoboline; and many particulars concerning this prince appear in the hist. of Manchester, by Mr. Whitaker, vol. I p. 284, 372, and in his corrections, chap. ix.). From the coming of Julius Caesar, till the time the Romans left the island in the year 427, the Roman letters were as familiar to the eyes of the inhabitants, as their language to their ears, as the numberless inscriptions, coins, and other monuments of the Romans still remaining amongst us, sufficiently evince. (See several monuments inscribed with Roman British characters in Borlace's Hist. of Cornwall, p. 391, 396. See more in Warburton's Vallum Romanum, London, 1753, 4to). However, we are of opinion, that writing was very little practised by the Britons, till after the coming of St. Augustin, about the year 596.

"The Saxons, who were invited hither by the Britons, and who arrived about the year 449, were unacquainted with letters. The characters which they afterwards used, were adopted by them in the island, and though the writing in England from the fifth to the middle of the eleventh century is called Saxon (The architecture in England, which preceded the Gothic, is usually called Saxon, but it is in fact Roman.) it will presently appear, that the letters used in this island were derived from the Roman, and were really Roman in their origin, and Italian in their structure at first, but were barbarized in their aspect by the British Romans and Roman Britons. A great variety of capital letters were used by the Saxons in their MSS. of which many specimens are given in our plates."

Note that in the quotation from Astle above I have added in his footnotes to the paragraphs in parentheses, to provide a more complete example of Astle's scholarship.

The numerous plates in Astle's volume are beautifully produced through engraving, some printed in a single color, and some colored by hand. The scan provided on the Internet by Google books is not reflective of the fine quality of the printed images or of the overall fine quality of book production shown in Astle's deluxe publication.

In a letter to Ebenezer Hazard, Thomas Jefferson writes concerning the preservation of information:

". . . let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident."

Jefferson's idea was shared by exponents of the new invention of printing by moveable type in the second half of the fifteenth century who believed, and rightly so, that printing an edition of a text that might survive in only one or a handful of manuscript copies was a way of safeguarding the existence of the text.

German actor and playwright Alois Senefelder invents lithography (from Greek λίθος - lithos, 'stone' + γράφω - graphο, 'to write') as a cheaper way of publishing his plays.

Lithography was the first planographic printing process, and the first radically new method of printing since Gutenberg’s invention of printing by moveable type.

William Stanhope builds the first printing press entirely out of iron.

The greatly increased rigidity enabled by the iron, rather than wood construction, further improved the efficiency of the press.

Private printing presses are suppressed in Russia by the order of the Tsar, Paul I.

During his Egyptian Campaign Napoleon Bonaparte establishes printing presses (Imprimerie Nationale) at Alexandria, Cairo, and Gizeh. These were probably first presses on the continent of Africa since 1519. When the French were driven out of Egypt in 1801 the presses ceased operation.

The output of a manual printing press is 250 sheets per hour at this time.

"The long 's' is derived from the old Roman cursive medial s, which was very similar to an elongated check mark. When the distinction between upper case (capital) and lower case (small) letter-forms became established, towards the end of the eighth century, it developed a more vertical form. At this period it was occasionally used at the end of a word, a practice which quickly died out but was occasionally revived in Italian printing between about 1465 and 1480. The short 's' was also normally used in the combination 'sf', for example in 'ſatisfaction'. In German written in Blackletter, the rules are more complicated: short 's' also appears at the end each word within a compound word.

"The long 's' is subject to confusion with the lower case or minuscule 'f', sometimes even having an 'f'-like nub at its middle, but on the left side only, in various kinds of Roman typeface and in blackletter. There was no nub in its italic typeform, which gave the stroke a descender curling to the left—not possible with the other typeforms mentioned without kerning.

"The nub acquired its form in the blackletter style of writing. What looks like one stroke was actually a wedge pointing downward, whose widest part was at that height (x-height), and capped by a second stroke forming an ascender curling to the right. Those styles of writing and their derivatives in type design had a cross-bar at height of the nub for letters 'f' and 't', as well as 'k'. In Roman type, these disappeared except for the one on the medial 's'.

"The long 's' was used in ligatures in various languages. Three examples were for 'si', 'ss', and 'st', besides the German 'double s' 'ß'.

"Long 's' fell out of use in Roman and italic typography well before the middle of the 19th century; in French the change occurred from about 1780 onwards, in English in the decades before and after 1800, and in the United States around 1820. This may have been spurred by the fact that long 's' looks somewhat like 'f' (in both its Roman and italic forms), whereas short 's' did not have the disadvantage of looking like another letter, making it easier to read correctly, especially for people with vision problems.

"Long 's' survives in German blackletter typefaces. The present-day German 'double s' 'ß' (das Eszett "the ess-zed" or scharfes-ess, the sharp S) is an atrophied ligature form representing either 'ſz' or 'ſs' (see ß for more). Greek also features a normal sigma 'σ' and a special terminal form 'ς', which may have supported the idea of specialized 's' forms. In Renaissance Europe a significant fraction of the literate class was familiar with Greek.The long 's' survives in elongated form, and with an italic-style curled descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus; Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz based the character on the Latin word summa (sum), which he wrote ſumma. This use first appeared publicly in his paper De Geometria, published in Acta Eruditorum of June, 1686, but he had been using it in private manuscripts since at least 1675" (Wikipedia article on Long s, accessed 09-11-2009).

♦ According to R. B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927), the effective introduction of the reform in England was credited to the printer and publisher John Bell who in his British Theatre of 1791 used s throughout.  "In London printing the reform was adopted very rapidly, and save in work of an intentionally antiquarian character, we do not find much use of [long] s in the better kind of printing after 1800" (McKerrow p. 309).  Though it would be amusing to do so, there seems to be no reason to accept the legend that  Bell initiated the change in his edition of Shakespeare because of his dismay at the appearance of the long s in Ariel's song in The Tempest: "Where the bee sucks, there suck I."

The Qur'an (Koran) first appears in a printed edition issued by Muslims in Kazan, capital of the Republic of Tartarstan, Russia.

Prior to this date, and for most of the nineteenth century, the Qur'an was primarily transmitted by manuscript copying.

Pomeranian-English papermaker Matthias Koops publishes Historical Account of the Substances which Have Been Used to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas from the Earliest Date to the Invention of Paper. Second edition. Printed on Paper Re-Made from Old Printed and Written Paper. 

In 1800 Koops, whose scholarly and inventive attributes seem to have excelled his business acumen, published the first edition of this serious account of the history of materials used for recording information. To promote his venture to produce paper from materials other than linen rags— The Straw Paper Manufactory— Koops had the first edition printed entirely on yellow paper made from straw. Part of the second edition, essentially identical to the first, he also had printed on straw, but he also had a portion of the second edition printed on recycled paper. with the exception of the frontiispiece image of the papyrus plant, which was printed on straw in both versions of the second edition. The copies printed on recycled paper were the first books ever printed on recycled paper, and may have remained the only books printed on recycled paper for a century or more; I have been unable to find any study of this topic.

The appendix of all copies of Koops's second edition (pp. 259-73) was printed on paper made from wood pulp. My copy of the 1801 edition shows that Koops's recycled paper was of excellent quality; his wood pulp paper somewhat less so, since that final gathering of my copy has browned but remains sound.

From the name of Koops's enterprise it is evident that he considered the production of paper from materials other than linen rags to be more commercial than the paper recycling process he invented:

". . . By 1800 Koops had experience of manufacturing from waste paper at Neckinger mill in Bermondsey, and in 1800–01 three patents were granted to him: one for extracting inks from printed and written paper before pulping, and the other two for making paper fit for printing from straw, hay, thistles, waste, and refuse of hemp and flax. In 1800 his Historical Account of the Substances which have been Used to Describe Events was printed on straw paper.

"Having proved the possibility of making good paper from such materials, Koops set up a company, the Straw Paper Manufactory, raised over £70,000 by issue of shares, and in 1801 erected a paper-making mill at Millbank in Westminster. Contractors for the machinery included John Rennie, the engineer, and the firm of Boulton and Watt. This paper mill was easily the largest in the country. The enterprise, however, was over-ambitious and under-capitalized. Koops himself was the principal shareholder in the venture and on the strength of this offered to satisfy his creditors. His failure to discharge his bankruptcy by 1802 compelled Koops's creditors to issue a writ, inter alia, for seizure of the Straw Paper Manufactory's assets, and in the end its proprietors could not keep the enterprise solvent. The Millbank paper mill and its equipment were eventually offered for sale by auction in October 1804, thereby ending the possibility of England challenging the European paper industry by using more easily available materials for making paper" (Oxford DNB).

Alois Senefelder adapts printing by lithography to incorporate zinc plates instead of lithographic stones.

The Istanbul Engineering College Press in Istanbul issues the the Cedid Atlas Tercumesi (New Atlas). This was the first world atlas printed by Muslims. Only 50 copies were issued.

Composer and music publisher Johann Anton André publishes Thematisches Verzeichniss sämmtlicher Kompositionen von W. A. Mozart.

This was:

"the first thematic index of a composer's works (and probably the first book [on music] produced by lithographic process). André, a composer and, as music publisher, successor to his equally famous father, Johann, had in 1800 acquired Mozart's manuscripts, including his [Mozart's own] 'Verzeichniss aller meiner Werke,' on which this index is based" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 116).

After two failed attempts, Friedrich Koenig of Suhl builds a steam operated twin cylinder printing press. This is the first printing press not powered by hand.

The Times of London newspaper publishes its first issue printed on a steam-driven Koenig power press.

The output of the new machine was initially 1,100 sheets an hour—more than four times higher than the manually operated press previously used by the newspaper.

Friedrich Koenig adds a perfector to The Times of London steam power press, allowing the press to print almost as many copies on both sides of the sheet on one pass through the press as had been previously printed on one side only. By 1818 Koenig's steam power press achieved an output of 2400 impressions per hour.

Alois Senefelder publishes Vollstaendiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey (A Complete Course of Lithography), providing a practical manual as well as a history of lithography. In this book Senefelder describes his plans to print in color, but whether Senefelder is actually the first to develop a functioning method of chromolithography is unclear. 

Alois Senefelder publishes Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey.

This manual of lithography also introduced chromolithography with a two-color lithographic reproduction of the first page of the 1457 Mainz Psalter including its large two-color initial letter.

Senefelder's book was translated into French and published in 1818 as l'Art de la lithographie en construction pratique contenant la déscription claire et succincte des différents procédés à suivre pour déssiner, graver et imprimer sur pierre; precédée d'un histoire de la lithographie et de ses progrès. 

The following year the book appeared in English, published in London by Rudolf Ackermann as  A Complete Course of Lithography: ... Accompanied by Illustrative Specimens of Drawings. To Which is Prefixed a History of Lithography. It has been argued that the technique of lithography spread around the world largely through the information presented in the English translation.

About this time the American inventor Jacob Perkins develops the method of steel engraving. He introduces the process in England as a method of duplicating bank-notes.

London publisher and bookseller William Pickering introduces the first cloth edition bindings with printed paper spine labels in his Diamond Classic Series, set in very small Diamond type, equal to 4.5 point. The first volume in the series is Cicero's  De Offiiciis, de Senectute et de Amicitia, issued in 48mo, bound in reddish brown calico cloth. In addition to the title the paper labels indicated the price (5s, in the case of the Cicero).

A government press is set up at Bulaq, Egypt to print manuals for the military, an official manual for the administration, and textbooks for the new schools.

This was the first indigenous Arabic press set up in Egypt by Muslims. It was also the first government press on the African continent, apart from the short-presses briefly established by Napoleon during his Egyptian campaign.

By 1851 the government press issued 526 works.

The English Church Missionary Society establishes a press in Malta to publish books in Arabic and Turkish. These include Christian texts and also secular educational texts intended for Muslim, Christian and Jewish pupils in the new missionary schools and colleges of the Middle East. They also issue a periodical in the style of a newspaper.

Through 1842 this press issued over 150,000 books for distribution throughout the Middle East and Turkey.

Roper, Arabic Books Printed in Malta 1826-42, Sadgrove (ed) History of Printing and Publishing the the Languages and Countries of the Middle East (2005) 111-130.

Cowper & Applegarth in England complete the design of a four cylinder steam-powered printing press with capacity of 4,000-5,000 impressions per hour.

At the age of 20, Louis Braille, blind from the age of 5, and a student at l'Institut Royale des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris publishes Procede pour écrire les Paroles, la Musique et le Plain-chant au moyen de points, a l’usage des aveugles et dispose pour eux.

This large quarto volume of 4 preliminary leaves and 32 pages included the first presentation of the Braille system of printing and reading for the blind, which represents letters and numbers by combinations of six dots.

Though Braille introduced his six dot system briefly in his 1829 work, most of the Procede pour écrire was published through the traditional system of printing for the blind using raised letters that was invented by the founder of l'Institut Royale des Jeunes Aveugles, Valentin Haüy. In 1837 Braille added symbols for mathematics and music to his sic dot system.

“The Braille system was not given an immediate welcome; it was only in 1854 that it was officially accepted by the Institute itself. But at an international congress in Paris in 1878 it was adopted throughout Europe. It is now in use virtually throughout the literate world” (Carter & Muir, Printing & the Mind of Man [1967] no. 292.

Mark Godburn of earlydustjackets.blogspot.com stated  in March 2009:

"A dust jacket issued on an English book in 1829 has been reported at the University of Oxford during a search for clues to the disappearance of an 1832 dust jacket which had been lost at the university in 1951. The newly discovered jacket - the earliest one ever recorded - was issued on an 1830 edition of a popular annual called Friendship's Offering, which, like most annuals of the period, was printed and available for sale the previous fall. Its discovery puts publishers' dust jackets for the first time in the decade of the 1820s, when cloth case binding got its start."

Images of the printed jacket, which was wrapped around the entire book to preserve its special binding, may be viewed at this link.

Yisrael Bak and his son Nissan open a printing press in the town of Safad (Safed) in northern Palestine (now Israel).

This was the first press to operate in Palestine since about 1577.

Ayalon, "The Beginnings of Publishing in pre-1948 Palestine," in Sadgrove (ed) History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East (2005) 69.

A pocket-sized Arabic grammar, the first book on a secular (non-religious) subject, is issued from the American Press, in Beirut, Lebanon in an edition of 1000 copies.

The work by Nasif al-Yaziji, Kitab fasl al-khitab fi usul lughat al-a'rab (The Conclusive Discouse of the Rules of the Arab's Language)

". . . was printed by the Protestant missionaries of the 'American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions' (ABCFM) who had opened a printing shop in Beirut two years earlier in 1834. The author of the concise treatise on Arabic grammar was Nasif al-Yaziji (1800-1871) a local Greek Catholic scholar from a little village south of Beirut who later became one of the most celebrated Christian Arab authors of the nineteenth century. With his numerous philological works, but moreover with his poetry and rhyming prose he influenced a whole generation of Arab intellectuals and thus became a pioneer and outstanding protagonist of the so call Nahda, the renaissance of Arabic language and literature" (Lehrstuhl für Türkische Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur, Universität Bamberg, The Beginnings of Printing in the Near and Middle East: Jews, Christians and Muslims [2001] no. 5).

During ceremonies dedicating a new statue of Johannes Gutenberg, in the city of Leipzig's quadicentennial celebration of the invention of printing, Felix Mendelssohn's Festgesang -- a cantata for male chorus, brass, and tympani -- is first performed in the town square by a chorus of 200 men, 16 trumpets, and 20 trombones.

Edward Binn's The Anatomy of Sleep is published in London.

This was the first book to be typeset by the Young & Delcambre Composing Machine, the first composing machine known to have been used in a printing office. The Young & Delcambre machine set a single continuous line of type; line breaking and justification were later done by hand. 

"The use of the Young and Delcambre machine was opposed by the London Union of Compositors, particularly because female labour was employed to operate it" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions [1963]  no. 463).

Richard Hoe of New York patents the horizontal rotary printing press, dramatically increasing the speed of printing.

The first mechanical printing press, using western style moveable type and western style printing ink, arrives in Japan for the use of the Japanese.

Though the Jesuits had operated a European style printing press in Nagasaki for a limited time in the sixteenth century, the Japanese favored woodblock printing as a way to reproduce their semi-cursive writing. Printing from woodblocks in East Asia remained an unmechanized, laborious process, in which printing was done on only one side of the paper because of the need to rub the back of the paper with a hand tool. This would have tended to spoil the other side of the paper, and the water-based inks used tended to soak through the paper.  Unlike Western printing which had used oil-based inks since Gutenberg's original invention of printing ink, only water-based inks were used in Asia.

The first western style printing presses were introduced in Korea over 30 years later, in 1881-83.

Swedish author, editor, and inventor Georg Scheutz publishes Nytt och enkelt sätt att lösa nummereqvationer af hogre och lägre grader efter Agardhska teorien: För praktiska behov [A new and simple method of solving numerical equations of higher and lower degree with the help of Agardh’s theory: For practical purposes]. and Bihang till skriften: Nytt och enkelt sätt att lösa nummereqvationer af hogre och lägre grader efter Agardhska teorien. Innehällande seriemetodens tillämpning vid bestämmandet af imaginära, lika, och nära hvarandra belägna rötter i en eqvation. Af C[arl] A[dolph] Agardh [1785-1859] . . . Utgifvet af Georg Scheutz [Appendix to the treatise: A new and simple method of solving numerical equations, using Agardh’s theory, containing the serial method used in determining imaginary, exact, and approximate roots of an equation. By C. A. Agardh, . . . edited by G. S.].

The Swedish father-and-son team of Georg and Edvard Scheutz was the first to construct a working difference engine capable of producing printed mathematical tables. The Scheutz machine, of which three examples were built, was based upon Charles Babbage’s design for his famous Difference Engine No. 1, which Babbage worked on intermittently between 1822 and 1834 before abandoning the project uncompleted (only a small working portion, about one-ninth the size of the projected Difference Engine, was ever constructed; the uncompleted machine ended up costing the British Government over £17,000).

Georg Scheutz—described by Lindgren as an “auditor, printer, journalist and editor, political commentator, spokesman for technology, translator and inventor”—first learned of Babbage’s Difference Engine circa 1830. Although his imagination was immediately fired by the possibilities of such a machine, he was unable to begin designing his own version until 1834, when Dionysius Lardner published his detailed review of Babbage’s Difference Engine in the July issue of the Edinburgh Review. Drawing on the information in Lardner’s article, Scheutz and his teenage son Edvard began working on their own design for a difference engine, which was both simpler and cheaper to produce than Babbage’s machine.

The Scheutz difference engine no. 1, a prototype model built by Edvard, was completed in 1843 and certified by members of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. Despite this mark of favor, the Scheutzes were initially unable to stir up any interest or official support for their machine, either at home or abroad. They did no further work on the Scheutz machine until 1850, when, in response to renewed interest in machines for printing tables, they began working on the Scheutz difference engine no. 2.

However, the Scheutz machine no. 1 did not lie entirely fallow during the seven years between 1843 and 1850, for in 1849, Georg Scheutz used it to produce and print a table of a polynomial of the third degree, which he published in Nytt och enkelt sätt att lösa nummereqvationer af hogre och lägre grader efter Agardhska teorien. This little one-column table, found on p. 74 of Scheutz’s pamphlet, is the earliest known automatically produced numerical table.

"In [Scheutz’s Nytt och enkelt sätt att lösa nummereqvationer af hogre och lägre grader efter Agardhska teorien] he gave an exposition of the method of solving equations by the method of differences, which the professor of botany, mathematician and latterly bishop Carl Adolph Agardh had presented in 1809. In an addendum he remarks that while the method is excellent, it is time consuming when used on equations of high degree. He then adds that this disadvantage could be removed if one 'could assign the laborious and time consuming figure work to some assistant, that never tired, never made an error and dealt with the numerical calculations for the higher degrees as swiftly and certainly as those for the first degree.” Georg Scheutz notes that such an assistant does in fact exist and he gives an example of a stereotyped table calculated and printed by the first engine. . . . The table shows that Scheutz still was fascinated by the machine’s capability to solve equations. But more importantly, this table is the only existing illustration [emphasis ours] of what the Scheutz prototype engine could do. It is also the oldest automatically made numerical table in the world, which has been preserved " (Lindgren, Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Müller, Charles Babbage and Georg and Edvard Scheutz [1987] 138-39).

Lindgren was the first to note the existence of this numerical table generated by the Scheutz difference engine no. 1. Prior to this, the first examples of tables produced by a Scheutz engine were thought to have been contained in the Scheutz’s Specimens of Tables, Calculated, Stereomoulded and Printed by Machinery (1857), which the Scheutzes produced in both English and French editions as a means of showcasing the Scheutz difference engine no. 2. The standard histories of computing, including Aspray’s Computing before Computers (1990), contain no reference to the table printed by the Scheutz difference engine no. 1. The original publication in Swedish is of the greatest rarity.

Merzbach, Georg Scheutz and the First Printing Calculator (1977). 

The use of flong for stereotype printing plates provides an advantage for the publication of mathematical tables since stereotype plates represent “an immutable form of information capture that offered immunity from the inherent vulnerability of moveable type to derangement during printing or storage” (Doron Swade, “The ‘Unerring Certainty of Mechanical Agency’: Machines and Table Making in the Nineteenth Century,” Campbell-Kelly [ed.] The History of Mathematical Tables [2003] 148).

Paul Pretsch patents a process called "photo-galvanography" for the printed reproduction of photographs.

The first print that Pretsch issued was called "Scene in Gaeta after the Explosion." It was "the first relief half-tone and the first commercial use of half-tone" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions Held at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London [1963] no. 629).

David Edward Hughes invents the first perfected mechanism for printing telegraph messages, using a keyboard in which each key causes the corresponding letter to be printed at a distant receiver.

Hughes's printing mechanism worked something like a "golfball" typewriter, but it was produced before the typewriter was invented.

Paul Pretsch, inventor (1854) of the half-tone process, which he calls photo-galvanography, issues a book entitled Photographic Art Treasures.

This was the first book of printed reproductions of photographs as distinct from a book illustrated with pasted-in original photographs.

The British government, long after refusing funding to complete Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 1, or to construct his Analytical Engine, paid for the construction of the Scheutzes' third difference engine.

Medical statistician William Farr first used the Engine in 1859 to print a table for his paper, published in Philosophical Transactions, “On the Construction of Life-Tables, Illustrated by a New Life-Table of the Healthy Districts of England.”

Osman Zeki Bey, an Ottoman calligrapher, opens his printing office called Matbaa-i Osmaniye in Constantinople.

Osman Zeki Bey was the first printer authorized by the Ottoman Palace to print the Qur'an (Koran).

Kuran-Burcoglu, "Osman Zeki Bey and his Printing Office the Matbaa-i-Osmaniye, Sadgrove" (ed) History of Printing and Publishing the Languages and Countries of the Middle East (2005) 35-58.

The Times of London newspaper installs a Walter press, developed by the owner of the newspaper, John Walter, that prints on continuous paper, further increasing the speed of production.

J.G.A. Eickhoff builds a four-cylinder perfecting press, capable of printing two sides of paper simultaneously.

Thomas Edison invents the Electric Pen, the forerunner of the mimeograph.

Thomas Edison received US patent 180,857 for "Autographic Printing" on August 8, 1876. The patent covered the electric pen, used for making the stencil, and the flatbed duplicating press. In 1880 Edison obtained a further patent, US 224,665: "Method of Preparing Autographic Stencils for Printing", which covered the making of stencils using a file plate, a grooved metal plate on which the stencil was placed which perforated the stencil when written on with a blunt metal stylus.

Thomas Edison, who had invented in the electric pen in 1876, agrees to sell his patents for this device to Albert Blake Dick, who had invented the mimeograph stencil.

Edison also agreed to help Dick market the mimeograph under the name, Edison Mimeograph. Marketed by the AB Dick company, the mimeograph became the first widely used electric office duplicating machine.

Mergenthaler Linotype is used by the New York Tribune newspaper.

In 1887 the New York Tribune published the first book typeset by lintotype, The Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports.

Tolbert Lanston demonstrates his prototype of the Monotype machine, which casts letters in the form of individual pieces of lead type.

Lanston's machine read punched paper tape like a player piano.

Ira Rubel develops the first commercial lithographic offset system, or offset press, for printing on paper.

"The inspiration was an accident. While operating his lithographic press he [Rubel] noticed that if he failed to insert paper the stone plate would transfer its image onto the rubber impression cylinder. When he then placed paper into the machine it would have the image on two sides, one from the stone plate and one from the rubber impression cylinder. To Rubel’s amazement, the image from the rubber impression cylinder was much clearer; the soft rubber was able to give a sharper look than the hard stone litho plate. Soon he created a machine that repeated this original “error”. This process was also noted by two brothers, Charles and Albert Harris, at about the same time. They produced an offset press for the Harris Automatic Press Company not long after Rubel created his press" (Wikipedia article on Offset printing, accessed 04-22-2009).

Times New Roman, a serif typeface supervised by Stanley Morison of the English branch of Monotype, and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times, makes its debut in the British newspaper, The Times.

"Morison used an older font named Plantin as the basis for his design, but made revisions for legibility and economy of space. As the old type used by the newspaper had been called Times Old Roman, Morison's revision became Times New Roman and made its debut in the 3 October 1932 issue of The Times newspaper. After one year, the design was released for commercial sale. The Times stayed with Times New Roman for 40 years, but new production techniques and the format change from broadsheet to tabloid in 2004 have caused the newspaper to switch font five times since 1972. However, all the new fonts have been variants of the original New Roman font.

"Because of its ubiquity, the typeface has been influential in the subsequent development of a number of serif typefaces both before and after the start of the digital-font era. . . .

"Although no longer used by The Times, Times New Roman is still widely used for book typography. It is one of the most successful and ubiquitous typefaces in history." (Wikipedia article on Times Roman, accessed 04-26-2009).

Chester F. Carlson invents xerography, originally called electrophotography.

Xerography did not become a commercial success until the wide adoption of the xerographic copier first introduced in 1949.

IBM announces the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring proportional spacing.

By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a printed page, an effect that was enhanced by a typewriter ribbon innovation that produced clearer, sharper words on the page.

Charlton Hinman develops the Hinman Collator, a mechanical device for the visual comparison of different copies of the same printed text. 

By 1978, when the last machine was manufactured, around fifty-nine had been acquired by libraries, academic departments, research institutes, government agencies, and a handful of pharmaceutical companies. Though built for the study of printed texts and used primarily for the creation of critical editions of literary authors, the Hinman Collator has also been employed in other projects where the close comparison of apparently identical images is required, everything from the study of illustrations to the examination of watermarks to the detection of forged banknotes. 

"Hinman's invention greatly increased not only the speed at which texts could be compared but also the effectiveness of such comparisons, and it made collation on a large scale possible for the first time. The most famous use of the machine was by its inventor and resulted in his Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963) and the Norton facsimile of the First Folio (1968). Hinman estimated that without the aid of his machine, the research for these projects would have taken over forty years. Without the collator, as he himself recognized, his study would have been a "practical impossibility", as would have the work of the many scholars who compiled dozens of bibliographies, produced hundreds of volumes of critical editions, and undertook countless bibliographical and textual investigations on his machine over the next five decades.

"The purpose of the machine for which he was seeking a patent was straightforward and grew directly from the needs of his research. During the Renaissance, the period of his specialty, books were proofread and corrected continually during the printing process, and early uncorrected sheets were commonly bound up with corrected ones from later in the print run. Thus the printed matter in the last book sold could, and usually did, differ substantially from that of the first, as it also could and quite often did from nearly every other copy in the printing. These variations are precisely the details the collator was developed to help detect. The operation of the device Hinman would eventually build was also straightforward. The operator sets up one book turned to a particular page on a platform on one side of the machine and another copy from the same printing turned to the same page on a platform on the other. He or she then views these items, which are superimposed via a set of mirrors, through a pair of binocular optics. After making adjustments to bring the two objects into registration, the operator activates a system of lights that alternately illuminates each page. If the pages are identical, they more or less appear as one; if they are not identical, the points of difference are called to the operator's eye by appearing to dance or wiggle about" (Smith, " 'The Eternal Verities Verified': Charlton Hinman and The Roots of Mechanical Collation," Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 53 [2000] includes images of the machines )

The Fotosetter, the first phototypesetter, is invented.

The first phototypesetters were mechanical devices that replaced the metal type matrices with matrices carrying the image of the letters. They replaced the caster of hot metal typesetting machines with a photographic unit.

René Higonnet and Louis Moyroud invent the Lithomat in France.

The Lithomat was the first successful phototypesetting machine. Later models called Lumitype could print more than 28,000 characters per hour.

The Haloid Company introduces the Model A  xerographic copier, the first commercial electrophotographic copier. 

"Manually operated, it was also known as the Ox Box. An improved version, Camera #1, was introduced in 1950" (Wikipedia article on Xerox 914, accessed 04-21-2009).

The company renamed itself Haloid Xerox in 1958 and shortened its name to Xerox Corporation in 1961.

Howard "Bud" Kettler designs the monospaced, or fixed-width or non-proportional, slab serif typeface to resemble the output from a strike-on typewriter.

"The design of the original Courier typeface was commissioned in the 1950s by IBM for use in typewriters, but they did not secure legal exclusivity to the typeface and it soon became a standard font used throughout the typewriter industry. As a monospaced font, it has recently found renewed use in the electronic world in situations where columns of characters must be consistently aligned. . . .

"Kettler was once quoted about how the name was chosen. The font was nearly released with the name "Messenger." After giving it some thought, Kettler said, 'A letter can be just an ordinary messenger, or it can be the courier, which radiates dignity, prestige, and stability' " (Wikipedia article on Courier [typeface], accessed 04-26-2009).

Haloid Xerox introduces the Xerox 914, the first successful commercial plain paper xerographic copier, roughly the size of a desk.

". . .  commercial models were not available until March 1960. The first machine, delivered to a Pennsylvania metal-fastener maker, weighed nearly 650 pounds. It needed a carpenter to uncrate it, an employee with 'key operator' training, and its own 20-amp circuit. In an episode of Mad Men, set in 1962, the arrival of the hulking 914 helps get Peggy Olson her own office, after she tells her boss, 'It’s hard to do business and be credible when I’m sharing with a Xerox machine' " (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-mother-of-all-invention/8123/, accessed 06-11-2010).

Lanston Monotype Machine Company introduces the Monomatic composing machine, a system perpetuating the concept of a separate keyboard and caster interfaced by a 31-channel punched paper tape.

“The keyboard consisted of a two-alphabet layout (instead of the customary five or seven) augmented by four shift keys. In the caster, the matrix-case contained 324 characters arranged in 18 ¥ 18 rows. There were no restrictions on unit values within the rows.”

Compugraphic engineers recognize that a computer can be programmed to handle repetitious typesetter coding automatically.

The firm developed a prototype model of the Directory Tape Processor (DTP) which eliminated all operator decisions and produced a fully coded tape used for typesetting.

Marshall McLuhan publishes The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in which he divides history in four epochs: oral tribe culture, manuscript culture, the Gutenberg galaxy and the electronic age.

McLuhan argued that a new communications medium was responsble for the break between each of the four time periods. Writing before computing was pervasive in society, he was concerned with the influence of radio, television and film on print culture, and on the impact of media, independent of content, upon thinking, and social organization:

"The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ('visual homogenizing of experience'), which in turn impacts social interactions ('fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a. . . specialist outlook'). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism, and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of 'segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."

The Los Angeles Times newspaper drives Linotype hot metal typesetters with perforated tape created from RCA computers, greatly speeding up typesetting.

The key to this advance was development of a dictionary and a method to automate hyphenation and justification of text in columns. These tasks had taken 40 percent of a manual Linotype operator's time.

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard is promulgated, specifying the pattern of seven bits to represent letters, numbers, punctuation, and control signals in computers.

"Historically, ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on ASCII formally began October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published during 1963, a major revision during 1967, and the most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (now mostly obsolete) that affect how text and space is processed; 94 are printable characters, and the space is considered an invisible graphic. The most commonly used character encoding on the World Wide Web was US-ASCII until 2008, when it was surpassed by UTF-8" (Wikipedia article on ASCII, accessed 01-29-2010).

Compugraphic introduces the Linasec I and II, the first general typesetting computers.

These automated tapeprocessors produced justified tapes to drive the Linotype machines used in the newspaper industry.

"The net production of the Linasec-in excess of 3,600 lines per hour compared to the manually-set 600 lines per hour, break open the market by enabling newspapers to carry more detailed, late breaking news stories."

The Printing and the Mind of Man exhibition takes place in London. The lengthy and complex title of its catalogue reads: Catalogue of a display of printing mechanisms and printed materials arranged to illustrate the history of Western civilization and the means of the multiplication of literary texts since the XV century, organised in connection with the eleventh International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition, under the title Printing and the Mind of Man, assembled at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London, 16-27 July 1963.

This was  followed in 1967 by a cloth-bound edition edition with more detailed annotations, and without discussion of "printing mechanisms," entitled Printing and the Mind of Man. A Descriptive Catalogue Illustrating the Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization, compiled and edited by John Carter and Percy H. Muir, assisted by Nicolas Barker, H.A. Feisenberger, Howard Nixon and S.H. Steinberg.

This exhibition was, and remains, immensely influential on both institutional and private collectors of landmark books that influenced the development of Western Civilization. Taking place at the dawn of online searching and the ARPANET, and roughly twenty years before the development of the personal computer, this exhibition and its catalogues may also record the peak of the print-centric view of information before the development of electronic information technology leading to the Internet. The only references to computing in the exhibition and its catalogues were to Napier on logarithms, and to Leibnitz's stepped-drum calculator. There were references to the invention of radio and films, but not to television. 

The Central Intelligence Bureau of the Chinese People's Liberation Army issues in Beijing or Tianjin Mao Zedong, Mao Zhu XI Yu Lu (Quotations of Chairman Mao.) This "probably still holds the world record for most copies printed of a single work in under four years (720 million books by the end of 1967)."

Computer scientist Jerome H. Salzer writes TYPESET and RUNOFF, memorandum editor and type-out commmands.

RUNOFF was the first computer text formatting program to see significant use. It's formatting commands derived from the commands used by typesetters to manually format documents.

"It actually consisted of a pair of programs, TYPSET (which was basically a document editor), and RUNOFF (the output processor). RUNOFF had support for pagination and headers, as well as text justification (TJ-2 appears to have been the earliest text justification system, but it did not have the other capabilities).

"RUNOFF is a direct predecessor of the runoff document formatting program of Multics, which in turn was the ancestor of the roff and nroff document formatting programs of Unix, and their descendants. It was also the ancestor of FORMAT for the IBM System/360, and of course indirectly for every computerized word processing system.

"Likewise, RUNOFF for CTSS was the predecessor of the various RUNOFFs for DEC's operating systems, via the RUNOFF developed by the University of California, Berkeley's Project Genie for the SDS 940 system.

"The name is alleged to have come from the phrase at the time, I'll run off a copy" (Wikipedia article on TYPESET and RUNOFF, accessed 01-31-2010).

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) introduces the LA30, a 30 character/second dot matrix printer.

"It printed 80 columns of uppercase-only 5x7 dot matrix characters across a unique-sized paper. The printhead was driven by a stepper motor and the paper was advanced by a somewhat-unreliable and definitely noisy solenoid ratchet drive. The LA30 was available with both a parallel interface and a serial interface; however, the serial LA30 required the use of fill characters during the carriage-return operation.

"The LA30 was followed in 1974 by the LA36, which achieved far greater commercial success, becoming for a time the standard dot matrix computer terminal. The LA36 used the same print head as the LA30 but could print on forms of any width up to 132 columns of mixed-case output on standard green bar fanfold paper. The carriage was moved by a much-more-capable servo drive using a dc motor and an optical encoder/tachometer. The paper was moved by a stepper motor. The LA36 was only available with a serial interface but unlike the earlier LA30, no fill characters were required. This was possible because, while the printer never communicated at faster than 30 characters per second, the mechanism was actually capable of printing at 60 characters per second. During the carriage return period, characters were buffered for subsequent printing at full speed during a catch-up period. The two-tone buzz produced by 60 character-per-second catch-up printing followed by 30 character-per-second ordinary printing was a distinctive feature of the LA36" (Wikipedia article on Dot matrix printer, accessed 12-16-2009).

Centronics Data Computer Corporation also introduced a dot matrix printer in 1970: the Centronics 101. This printer used a print head incorporating an innovative seven-wire solenoid impact system, and Centronics claimed that it was the first dot matrix impact printer.

Centronics concentrated on the low-end line printer market. In the process they designed the parallel electrical interface, or parallel port, that became standard on most most printers until it began to be replaced by the Universal Serial Bus (USB) in the late 1990s.

Gary Starkweather at Xerox PARC invents the laser printer by modifying a Xerox copier.

Harris introduces editing terminals for newspapers, which are quickly followed by terminals from Raytheon, Atex, Digital Equipment Corporation and others. The terminals output strips of type on film from phototypesetters.

Atex works with the Minneapolis Star newspaper to develop the first electronic pagination system that allows the creation and output of full editorial pages, eliminating the need for manual paste-up of strips of film.

The Atex system featured "Atex Messaging" which is widely believed to be the forerunner of both email and instant messenger applications. Atex publishing systems were "based on highly modified Dec PDP-11 minicomputers, designed to produce news sections of newspapers. The systems included clustered CPUs, a distributed file system and dumb terminals that displayed memory-mapped video and featured keyboards with up to 140 keys: Distinctively, the cursor keys were on the left-hand side. A custom operating system tied everything together."

At Evans & Sutherland John Warnock and John Gaffney develop the "The Evans and Sutherland Design System" for producing 3-dimensional graphical databases both for the Evans & Sutherland CAD/CAM Picture System and for custom-built simulation machines. 

These graphics systems used a graphics model, developed by Ivan Sutherland and others, based on coordinate system transformations and line drawing.

"John Warnock joined Xerox PARC in 1978 to work for Charles "Chuck" Geschke. There he teamed up with Martin Newell in producing an interpreted graphics system called JAM. "JAM" stands for "John And Martin". JAM had the same postfix execution semantics as Gaffney's Design System, and was based on the Evans and Sutherland imaging model, but augmented the E&S imaging model by providing a much more extensive set of graphics primitives. Like the later versions of the Design System, JAM was "token based" rather than "command line based", which means that the JAM interpreter reads a stream of input tokens and processes each token completely before moving to the next. Newell and Warnock implemented JAM on various Xerox workstations; by 1981 JAM was available at Stanford on the Xerox Alto computers, where I first saw it.  

"In the meantime, various people at Xerox were building a series of experimental raster printers. The first of these was called XGP, the Xerox Graphics Printer, and had a resolution of 192 dots to the inch. Xerox made XGP's available to certain universities, and by 1972 they were in use at Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and the University of Toronto. Each of those organizations produced its own hardware and software interfaces. The XGP is historically interesting only because it is the first raster printer to gain substantial use by computer scientists, and was the arena in which a lot of mistakes were made and a lot of lessons learned.  

"To replace the XGP, Xerox PARC developed a new printer called EARS, and then another newer printer called Dover. After the agony of converting software from XGP to EARS, various Xerox people realized that applications programs generating files for the XGP or for EARS should not be tied to the device properties of the printer itself. Bob Sproull and William Newman, of Xerox PARC, developed a relatively device-independent page image description scheme, called "Press format", which was used to instruct raster printers what to print.  

"As part of an extensive grant program to selected universities, Xerox donated Dover printers and made documentation of the Press format available under a nondisclosure agreement. As far as I know, that nondisclosure agreement has never been lifted, though information about Press format has been widely enough distributed that by 1982 researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) at Lausanne had given conference papers about their own independent implementation of Press format.  

"Press format was a smashing success; it revolutionized laser printing technology in the academic and research communities, and stimulated a large number of people to think about issues of device-independent print graphics. Nevertheless, Press format had its limitations, and various people felt the need to revise the basic design.  

"Sproull left Xerox in 1978 to become a professor of computer science at CMU. Newman returned home to England to become an independent consultant. Martin Newell left Xerox to join Cadlinc Corp. Warnock and Geschke remained at Xerox.  

"While at CMU, Sproull began making plans for a new version of Press that would combine the graphics model of JAM with the page image description properties of Press. Sproull returned to Xerox for a sabbatical leave in 1982, and enlisted the help of Butler Lampson in the creation of the new page image description language that Warnock dubbed "Interpress". The name caught on.  

"While it is difficult to separate the contributions made by Sproull and Lampson, it is not incorrect to say that Lampson and Warnock produced the execution model of Interpress while Sproull and Warnock produced the imaging model. It is also approximately correct to characterize this first version of Interpress as being derived from the graphics model and execution model of JAM with additional protection and security mechanisms derived from experience with programming languages like Euclid and Cedar, and a careful silence on the issue of fonts. The trio worked under Geschke's direction, and Geschke was responsible for refereeing disagreements and for making certain that the resulting design was acceptable to the rest of Xerox" (Brian Reid, http://groups.google.com/group/fa.laser-lovers/msg/5d0df32a0e91f1fa?rnum=2&pli=1, accessed 01-07-2009).

IBM introduces the IBM 3800, the first commercially available laser printer for use with its mainframes.

This "room-sized" machine was the first printer to combine laser technology and electrophotography. The technology speeded the printing of bank statements, premium notices, and other high-volume documents.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein publishes The Printing Press as an Angent of Change. Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe.

Quoting from the Wikipedia, from its perspective of digital information and the Internet, an evaluation of the impact of this printed book on book history:

"In this work she [Eisenstein] focuses on the printing press's functions of dissemination, standardization, and preservation and the way these functions aided the progress of the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution. Eisenstein's work brought historical method, rigor, and clarity to earlier ideas of Marshall McLuhan and others, about the general social effects of such media transitions. This work provoked debate in the academic community from the moment it was published and is still inspiring conversation and new research today. Her work also influenced later thinking about the subsequent development of digital media. Her work on the transition from manuscript to print influenced thought about new transitions of print text to digital formats, including multimedia and new ideas about the definition of text."

John Warnock and Chuck Gerschke found Adobe Systems.

At Abobe Warnock developed the PostScript page description language, a simplified version of the InterPress language that he developed at Xerox PARC.

Bob Doyle introduces, the first Desktop Publishing program, MacPublisher, for the Macintosh.  

"MacPublisher introduced WYSIWYG layout for multi-column text and graphics, but it would not have been possible without graphics primitives like QuickDraw that Bill Atkinson had originally developed for the Apple Lisa computer. QuickDraw was incorporated in the PASCAL toolbox for the new Macintosh and was the basis for MacPaint." (Wikipedia article on MacPublisher).

John Warnock and Chuck Geschke of Adobe Systems market the PostScript page description language, enabling scalable digital fonts and desktop publishing.

Apple introduces the LaserWriter laser printer. It cost $6,995. The Mac's ability to run PageMaker for "desktop publishing" in association with Apple's LaserWriter printer caused sales of the Mac to take off.

Paul Brainerd, founder of Aldus Corporation, introduces PageMaker, the first widely-used WYZIWIG page layout program for personal computers. Initially it ran exclusively on the Apple MacIntosh, but a PC version followed in 1986, running under Windows 1.0. To assist in marketing the software Brainerd coined the term “desktop publishing.” Aldus Corporation was purchased by Adobe Systems in 1994.

Having searched for an acceptable ink formulation to replace oil-based printer's inks since 1979, The American Newspaper Publishers Association approves the use of soy ink, based on soybean oil.

This environmentally friendly substitute for petroleum-based ink became widely used throughout the printing industry.

Joseph D. Becker of Xerox Corporation, Lee Collins (also at Xerox) and Mark Davis of Apple develop a universal character set.

Becker coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project in his report, Unicode 88:

"1.1. Abstract

"This document is a draft proposal for the design of an international/multilingual text character coding system, tentatively called Unicode.

"Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as 'wide-body ASCII' that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world's living languages. In a properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose.

"In the Unicode system, a simple unambiguous fixed-length character encoding is integrated into a coherent overall architecture of text processing. The design aims to be flexible enough to support many disparate (vendor-specific) implementations of text processing software.

"A general scheme for character code allocations is proposed (and materials for making specific individual character code assignments are well at hand), but specific code assignments are not proposed here. Rather, it is hoped that this document will evoke interest from many organizations, which could cooperate in perfecting the design and in determining the final character code assignments" (http://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf, accessed 01-29-2010).

Adobe introduces the Portable Document Format (PDF) to aid in the transfer of documents across platforms. PDF is a file format used to represent a document in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system used to create it.

Apple introduces TrueType in competition with Adobe's PostScript.

The first TrueType fonts available were Times Roman, Helvetica and Courier.

The first volume of the Unicode standard is published by the Unicode Consortium. 

"Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, the latest version [5.2, 2009] of Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 107,000 characters covering 90 scripts [including Egyptian hieroglyphs] a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic or Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts) " (Wikipedia article on Unicode, accessed 01-29-2010).

Benny Landa of Indigo introductes the Indigo E-Print 1000 digital offset press, incorporating ElectroInk technology, also called ink-based electrophotography.

126,000,000 metric tons of paper are consumed in the world.

Richard-Gabriel Rummonds's Printing on the Iron Handpress is published. This elegantly produced definitive book on the operation of historic handpress printing technology, illustrated by photographs and line drawings, is printed by high-speed photo-offset rather than manual letterpress printing. It includes an annotated bibliography of prior printing manuals published in English. The introduction by Harry Duncan concludes:

". . . anyone who does stay the course and follow to the end the directives given here can count on acquiring a consummate, tried, and true method for handling an instrument that has never been surpassed, that still calls for a printer's full participation, physical as well as mental, in order to achieve the best work of which he is capable."

64,711 new books are published on paper in the United States this year.

It requires about 756,000,000 trees to produce the world’s annual paper supply. “The UNESCO Statistical Handbook for 1999 estimates that paper production provides 1,510 sheets of paper per inhabitant of the world on average, although in fact the inhabitants of North America consume 11,916 sheets of paper each (24 reams), and inhabitants of the European Union consume 7,280 sheets of paper annually (15 reams), according to the ENST report. At least half of this paper is used in printers and copiers to produce office documents.”

Thus computers have not reduced paper usuage; if anything, because nearly everyone who owns a personal computer also owns a printer, the amount of printing being done has increased.

How much information?, a project at the University of California at Berkeley by Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian, attempts to measure the amount of information produced in the world each year.

"Heavy information overload: the world’s total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth.”

“Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage.”

“Approximately 240 terabytes (compressed) of unique data are recorded on printed media worldwide each year.” The website provides a chart breaking down the printed media into categories.

Andrew Hoyem founds The Grabhorn Institute in San Francisco “for the purpose of preserving and continuing the use of one of the last integrated typefoundry, letterpress printing, and bookbinding facilities, and operating it as a living museum and educational and cultural center.”

By about this time prepress became, for all printing processes except traditional letterpress, an entirely digital process.

Prepress entails the processes and procedures that occur between the procurement of a manuscript and original artwork, and the manufacture of a printing plate, image carrier, or, in letterpress, forme, ready for mounting on a printing press.

When a photopolymer printing plate replaces the forme in letterpress that prepress may also be considered a digital process.

Douglas R. Stewart receives U.S. Patent 6,319,530 for a "Method of photocopying an image onto an edible web for decorating iced baked goods."

This invention enables printing a food-grade color photograph on the surface of a birthday cake, or other iced baked goods, using a dedicated inkjet printer and edible inks. 

Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, designed between 1847 and 1849, but never previously built, is completed and fully operational at the Science Museum, London. Built from Babbage’s engineering drawings roughly 150 years after it was originally designed, the finished machine weighs 5 tons and consists of 8000 machined parts, equally divided between the calculating and automatic printing and stereotyping apparatus. It is operated by turning hand-cranks.

The world's smallest book printed on paper, an edition of Chekhov's Chameleon, is published. It measures just .9 by .9 millimeters, not much larger than a grain of salt, and has 30 pages and three color illustrations. The print cannot be read by the naked eye.The edition is limited to 50 copies in English and 50 copies in Russian.

Physicist and software developer Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Paul Needham, Librarian of the Scheide Library at Princeton University, working on original editions in the Scheide Library, use high resolution scans of individual characters printed by Gutenberg, and image processing algorithms, to locate and compare variants of the same characters printed by Gutenberg. From this research it appears that the method of producing moveable type attributed to Gutenberg developed in phases rather than as a complete system, and that Gutenberg's technique of type casting was a precursor to the definitive process developed in the 1470s.

"We may now surmise that the method of manufacture of type with steel punches and matrices, which became the standard for more than four centuries of typography, was introduced a few years later by Nicolas Jenson, who from early days on was praised as a co-inventor. Jenson's contribution was apparently based on the early part of his career at the Mint in Paris, where striking medals with elaborate lettering would have given him specialized expertise. Jenson became one of the most influential type designers of all ages -- as well as an excellent printer --when he worked in the 1470s in Venice, but this may have been preceded by an interlude in Mainz, where he probably made a type, first used in 1459, which unlike Gutenberg's types, was able to withstand many years of intensive use" (Lotte Hellinga, "The Gutenberg Revolutions" in Eliot & Rose (eds) A Companion to the History of the Book [2007] 208).

"The irregularities in Gutenberg's type, particularly in simple characters such as the hyphen, made it clear that the variations could not have come from either ink smear or from wear and damage on the pieces of metal on the types themselves. While some identical types are clearly used on other pages, other variations, subjected to detailed image analysis, made for only one conclusion: that they could not have been produced from the same matrix. Transmitted light pictures of the page also revealed substructures in the type that could not arise from punchcutting techniques. They [Agüera y Arcas and Needham] hypothesized that the method involved impressing simple shapes to create alphabets in "cuneiform" style in a mould like sand. Casting the type would destroy the mould, and the alphabet would need to be recreated to make additional type. This would explain the non-identical type, as well as the substructures observed in the printed type. Thus, they feel that "the decisive factor for the birth of typography", the use of reusable moulds for casting type, might have been a more progressive process than was previously thought. They suggest that the additional step of using the punch to create a mould that could be reused many times was not taken until twenty years later, in the 1470s. " (Summary from the Wikipedia article on Johannes Gutenberg, accessed 02-08-2209).

References:

Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Paul Needham, "Computational analytical bibliography," Proceedings Bibliopolis Conference The future history of the book', The Hague: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, (November 2002).

Agüera y Arcas, "Temporary Matrices and Elemental Punches in Gutenberg's DK type", in: Jensen (ed) Incunabula and Their Readers. Printing , Selling, and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century (2003) 1-12.

Michael Hawley, a scientist at MIT, creates the world's largest book-- Bhutan: a Visual Odyssey Across the Kingdom. The work, which is also one of the most beautiful books ever published, was undertaken as a philanthrophic endeavor. It has 112 pages and weighs 133 pounds on an included custom-built aluminum stand. It's page openings are 7 x 5 feet. The work was initially offered in exchange for a $10,000 contribution. In November 2008 Amazon.com was offering copies for sale for $30,000 each.

A more practical and affordable way to appreciate this spectacular volume may be the trade edition published in 2004. In February 2009 this was offered for sale by Amazon.com for $100.00. In my opinion this is one of the finest and most spectacular trade books designed, printed and bound in America, though my aging eyes are not entirely comfortable reading white text against a black background. The clothbound volume, with an unusual dust jacket printed on both sides, measures 15¼ x 12¼ inches (39 x 31 cm).

The National Science Foundation funds research headed by Gabor Forgacs at the University of Missouri-Columbia on what is called "Organ Printing," to "further advance our understanding of self-assembly during the organization of cells and tissues into functional organ modules."

From ABC News 2-10-2006:

"In what could be the first step toward human immortality, scientists say they've found a way to do all of these things and more with the use of a technology found in many American homes: an ink-jet printer.

"Researchers around the world say that by using the technology, they can actually 'print' living human tissue and one day will be able to print entire organs.

" 'The promise of tissue engineering and the promise of 'organ printing' is very clear: We want to print living, three-dimensional human organs,' Dr. Vladimir Mironov said. 'That's our goal, and that's our mission.' "

"Though the field is young, it already has a multitude of names.

" 'Some people call this 'bio-printing.' Some people call this 'organ printing.' Some people call this 'computer-aided tissue engineering.' Some people call this 'bio-manufacturing,' said Mironov, associate professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and one of the leading researchers in the field."

The author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issues From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology.

This printed book was the first anthology to reflect the origins of the various technologies that converged to form the Internet.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation decodes printer tracking dots.

The first experimental beta Espresso Book Machine is installed at the World Bank InfoShop in Washington, D.C. to print and bind World Bank publications on demand.

"In September 2006 ODB installed a second beta machine at The Library of Alexandria, Egypt, to print books in Arabic. The first EBM Version 1.5 was introduced for ninety days at the New York Public Library during the summer of 2007."

In September 2008 the first Espresso Book Machine in a retail commercial setting was installed at Angus & Robertson in Melbourne, Australia.

♦ Link to the PDF brochure for Espresso Book Machine 2.0 at ondemandbooks.com, accessed 08-31-2009.

Borrowing a technique from genetics, Blair Hedges describes the "print clock" method for dating examples of printing, including books and copperplates, issued from hand-operated presses.

Rice University Press, which shut down in 1996, announces that it is re-opening as an entirely digital operation:

"As money-strapped university presses shut down nationwide, Rice University is turning to technology to bring its press back to life as the first fully digital university press in the United States.  

"Using the open-source e-publishing platform Connexions, Rice University Press is returning from a decade-long hiatus to explore models of peer-reviewed scholarship for the 21st century. The technology offers authors a way to use multimedia -- audio files, live hyperlinks or moving images -- to craft dynamic scholarly arguments, and to publish on-demand original works in fields of study that are increasingly constrained by print publishing.  

" 'Rice University Press is using Rice's strength in technology to innovatively overcome increasingly common obstacles to publication of scholarly works,' Rice University President David Leebron said. 'The nation's first fully digital academic press provides not only a solution for scholars -- particularly those in the humanities -- who are limited by the dearth of university presses, but also a venue for publishing multimedia essays, articles, books and scholarly narratives.'

Charles Henry, Rice University vice provost, university librarian and publisher of Rice University Press during the startup phase, said, 'Our decision to revive Rice's press as a digital enterprise is based on both economics and on new ways of thinking about scholarly publishing. On the one hand, university presses are losing money at unprecedented rates, and technology offers us ways to decrease production costs and provide nearly ubiquitous delivery system, the Internet. We avoid costs associated with backlogs, large inventories and unsold physical volumes, and we greatly speed the editorial process.  

" 'We don't have a precise figure for our startup costs yet, but it's safe to say our startup costs and annual operating expenses will be at least 10 times less than what we'd expect to pay if we were using a traditional publishing model,' Henry said.  

"The digital press will operate just as a traditional press, up to a point. Manuscripts will be solicited, reviewed, edited and resubmitted for final approval by an editorial board of prominent scholars. But rather than waiting for months for a printer to make a bound book, Rice University Press's digital files will instead be run through Connexions for automatic formatting, indexing and population with high-resolution images, audio and video and Web links.  

" 'We don't print anything,' Henry explained. 'It will go online as a Rice University Press publication in a matter of days and be available for sale as a digital book.' Users will be able to view the content online for free or purchase a copy of the book for download through the Rice University Press Web site. Alternatively, thanks to Connexions' partnership with on-demand printer QOOP, users will be able to order printed books if they want, in every style from softbound black-and-white on inexpensive paper to leather-bound full-color hardbacks on high-gloss paper.  

"As with a traditional press, our publications will be peer-reviewed, professionally vetted and very high quality,' Henry said. 'But the choice to have a printed copy will be up to the customer.'

"Authors published by Rice University Press will retain the copyrights for their works, in accordance with Connexions' licensing agreement with Creative Commons. Additionally, because Connexions is open-source, authors will be able to update or amend their work, easily creating a revised edition of their book. W. Joseph King, executive director of Connexions and co-director of the Rice University Press project, said, 'Connexions' mission is to support open education in all forms, including the publication of original scholarly works. We believe that Connexions has the ability to change the university press at Rice and in general.'

"In the coming months, Rice University Press will name its board of directors and appoint an editorial board in one or two academic disciplines that are especially constrained by the current print model. Over time, Rice University Press will focus on:

"1. Putting out original scholarly work in fields particularly impacted by the high costs and distribution models of the printed book. One such field is art history, in which printing costs are exceptionally high. Over the years, many university presses have slashed the number of art history titles, severely limiting younger scholars' prospects of publication, Henry said. Rice University Press has identified art history as a field that would benefit immediately and therefore it will be the press's first area of major effort.  

"2. Fostering new models of scholarship: With the rise of digital environments, scholars are increasingly attempting to write book-length studies that use new media -- images, video, audio and Web links -- as part of their arguments. Rice University Press will easily accommodate these new forms of scholarship, Henry said.

"3. Providing more affordable publishing for scholarly societies and centers: Often disciplinary societies and smaller centers, especially in the humanities, publish annual reports, reflections on their field of study or original research resulting from grants. For smaller organizations, the printing costs of these publications are prohibitive. Rice University Press will partner with organizations to provide more affordable publishing.  

"4. Partnering with large university presses: In the wake of rising production costs and overhead, many university presses have closed or reduced the number of titles they publish, especially in the humanities and social sciences. As a result many peer-reviewed, high quality books are waiting on backlog. Rice University Press will work with selected university publishers to inexpensively publish approved works. Henry said two major university presses have already expressed an interest in working with Rice University Press to reduce backlogged titles. Rice University Press plans to partner with these and other presses to produce such works as dual publications.  

" 'Technological innovations suffuse academia, but institutional innovation often seems more challenging. The initiative to resuscitate Rice University Press as a fully digital university press is thus doubly exciting,' said Steve Wheatley, vice president of the American Council of Learned Societies, an umbrella organization of 70 scholarly societies in the humanities and social sciences. 'It is particularly encouraging to note that the revived press will give special attention to scholarship that is born digital. Equally commendable -- and perhaps even more important -- is the commitment of the university to support this initiative at this crucial phase for scholarly publishing " (http://media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=8654, accessed 05-23-2010)/

Google and various print newspapers, including The New York Times, announce that they will test a modified version of Google's AdWords program to place advertisements in print newspapers.

It has been estimated that more than 4.7 billion Bibles (in whole or in part) have been printed. That is more than five times the estimated number of 900 million printed copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, the enormous distribution of which occurred becuase it was "an unoffical requirement for every Chinese ciitzen to own, read and carry it at all times under the latter half of Mao's rule, and especially during the Cultural Revolution."

The Universal Digital Library estimates that there are "no more than 10,000,000 unique book and document editions before the year 1900, and perhaps 300 million since the beginning of recorded history."

The Watchtower has an average semi-monthly printing on paper of 28,578,000 copies in 161 languages. This may be the largest and most linguistically diverse circulation printed on paper of any periodical.

After 100 years of publishing in print, The Christian Science Monitor announces that in April 2009 it will become "the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.

"The changes at the Monitor will include enhancing the content on CSMonitor.com, starting weekly print and daily e-mail editions, and discontinuing the current daily print format."

Bettina Wagner and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, publish Als die Lettern laufen lernten. Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert (When Letters Became Mobile. The Transition of Media in the 15th Century):

"The invention of printing with movable letters by Johann Gutenberg is frequently described as a „media revolution“ and compared to the effects of the „electronic revolution“ of the past decades. While both events had far-reaching consequences on the production and distribution of texts, the exhibition intends to demonstrate that a gradual transition rather than a sudden turnover took place in the second half of the 15th century. Increasingly, printing techniques were employed for the production of books, but the oldest printed books, traditionally referred to as incunabula, still show many individual features which were created by hand. Thus, innovation and tradition overlap in many respects: the modern techniques for multiplication of texts and images in print only gradually superseded handwriting, and for a long time, printed books continued to be corrected by hand and to be decorated with coloured headlines and painted illustrations.

"About 90 items are displayed from the rich holdings of incunabula in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, which ranks first among all libraries world-wide with holdings of more than 20,000 15th-century books. The most famous incunabula are on show in the „Schatzkammer“ (treasury), including the Gutenberg-Bible and the ‚Türkenkalender’ of 1454, the earliest printed book in German, which survives in a single copy held at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. In addition to illustrated manuscripts and blockbooks, incunabula with painted miniatures and outstanding examples of 15th-century woodcuts can be seen, among them the report by the Mainz canon Bernhard von Breydenbach about his journey to Palestine, Hartmann Schedel’s personal copy of his ‚Nuremberg Chronicle’ and Sebastian Brant’s ‚Ship of Fools’, for which Albrecht Dürer may have designed illustrations. Apart from woodcuts, examples of other techniques for printing illustrations are presented, like copper engravings, metal cuts and printing with colour and gold – still at an experimental stage in the 15th century.

"In the second part of the exhibition, a range of very diverse incunabula give insight into the production and distribution of printed books – starting with the manuscript copy text used for typesetting and ending with the book arriving in the hands of a buyer and reader. Proof-sheets and printed tables of rubrics reveal how early printers organized the production of books. In the first decades of printing, modern conventions of book design like title-pages developed. Texts printed in non-Latin alphabets and unusual formats as well as evidence for 15th-century print-runs demonstrate the effectiveness and capability of early printing workshops. The new medium of the broadside reached entirely new groups of readers. In the printing press, posters and handbills could be produced in large numbers and thus served to disseminate all manners of texts – from pious songs over medical advice up to current news. Early printers also used broadsides to advertise their products in order to achieve financial success. This, however, led to a rapid decrease in book prices: The exhibition ends with a note added to an incunable in 1494 by a buyer who marvels at the low cost of the book. Forty years after Gutenberg published his Bible, the technology of printing finally prevailed over older, competing forms of text reproduction. While conservative circles continued to plead for copying texts by hand, the printed book’s triumph proved unstoppable, even though some readers, like Sebastian Brant’s ‚foolish reader’ could not cope with the massive number of books available" (https://www.bsb-muenchen.de/Detailed-information.403+M56017d4e158.0.html, accessed 09-18-2009).