The history of printing shows us a surprising fact: when the first printers set out to print the same image over and over again, their goal was to make it look as if the book had been written by hand!

Before Johannes Gutenberg (1400- 1468), all European books and documents were handwritten by scribes and monks. You have probably seen some of that fine calligraphy, often decorated with surprising little pictures around the edges, that constituted books earlier than 1439. The goal of printers like Gutenberg was not to make the books more easily readable or more portable (at least at first), but to make more of them more quickly. It would often take years for one monk in the scriptorium to copy a book; it would take Gutenberg a few weeks to do so.

Now, of course, we have machines that can print an entire book in a matter of minutes. These books are so much easier to read than the Gothic script in which monks wrote (even if it had not been in Latin!) that it is easy to assume legibility was the reason printing was invented.

If you stop by the Nederland Library in the next few weeks, you’ll see a display of 250 years of printed books. Many of the books feature illustrations that are outstanding, mostly because of the artists who provided them: Michael Hague, Henri Matisse, Cecil Beaton, Edward Burne-Jones, Rockwell Kent.

The oldest book in the collection is from 1760, produced by a duo who printed a lot of commentary in London at the time, Messrs. Steele and Addison. If you look carefully at the book, you’ll see that at the time, they did not use what we are used to for the letter “s” but instead used something that looked like an “f.” If you look more closely, you’ll see that when you compare the elongated s and the letter f, they are actually different. Other than that, very little has changed in the way letters have been used over the last 250 years. Even more surprising is that books were printed in almost exactly the way Gutenberg printed them in 1439, all the way through the late 1800s. With only a few minor improvements, printing was nearly unchanged for 400 years.

So what exactly did Gutenberg do that was so amazing? He re-purposed a wine press that had formerly squished grapes, and used the mechanism to push paper down onto the metal words that held the ink, thereby transferring the words onto the paper. He also figured out how to create the type of ink that would transfer onto the paper and stay there. But most influential of all, as a former goldsmith, he figured out a way to make the metal letters that would hold the ink (called type). With a blend of lead, tin and antimony (a mixture still used today), he invented a mold that would take the melted metal and form it into a metal letter. Once he had molded enough letters, he was able to put them all together into a form, cover it with ink, and press paper down onto it. Thus European printing was born, and swept across the world like wildfire.

It should be noted that the concept of printing with individual letters was already invented by the Chinese and the Koreans over a thousand years prior to Gutenberg, but after a few hundred years of printing like this, both cultures opted to either return to hand calligraphy or would carve an entire page onto a wooden block and print with that, partially because these languages were comprised of literally thousands of symbols. It took Gutenberg’s combination of inventions and the helpful fact that he was only dealing with 23 letters (at the time, though we have 26 now) to make printing books a way of life for hundreds and then thousands of “job printers” throughout Europe and eventually the United States. One of our first most famous printers in the US was Benjamin Franklin.

We hope you enjoy our 250 Years of Printing display at the Nederland Community Library. The feature piece is a reproduction of the Kelmscott Chaucer, considered by many to be one of the most beautiful books ever produced.

See you at the library!