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Printing Press

Entertainment / Literature / Printing Press: Chinese and Japanese inventors developed simple printing techniques centuries earlier in monasteries, but in the 1440s and 1450s, Europe developed printing independently. Even though forerunners of the printed book might have existed in Holland, the most important developments were in Mainz, Germany, where 'Indulgence' was printed in 1454, and the Gutenberg Bible in 1456. John of Gutenberg is credited with the invention by fifteenth-century writers, and the invention spread rapidly to Italy, France, Holland, and other countries. William Caxton set up a printing press in Europe (Bruges) in 1475, and there printed the first book in English, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Returning to England in 1476, Caxton set up his second printing press in Westminster. He next printed a number of Latin texts before printing in English the Dicts or Sayings of the Philosophers (1477), Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1483), Malory's Le Morte Darthur (1485), and others for about a hundred titles in total. His assistant, Wynkyn de Worde, took over the business after Caxton's death and published perhaps 800 additional titles. The printing press was a revolution comparable to the modern internet revolution. It made books for the first time cheap enough for mass production and mass purchasing, ensuring a rise in literacy, blurring dialectal vocabularies, spreading geographic and cultural knowledge, and fueling the flames of religious reformation.
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