Spread of the printing press

The spread of the printing press was the diffusion of Johannes Gutenberg's method of printing with movable metal type, developed in Mainz around 1439, first across Europe and then around the world. Within half a century presses had worked in more than two hundred European towns, and by the end of the nineteenth century the technology had reached almost every inhabited region. It displaced hand copying and block printing, and gave its name to a new medium, "the press".

Gutenberg's first major work was a Latin Bible with 42 lines to the page, probably printed in Mainz between 1452 and 1454. After he lost a lawsuit to his investor, Johann Fust, the workshop passed to Fust and to Gutenberg's former employee Peter Schöffer, while Gutenberg found another lender and set up a new shop. Once the technique was no longer a secret, emigrating German printers carried it to other towns, and before long foreign apprentices trained in their shops took it home.

Presses appeared in quick succession in the towns of the Holy Roman Empire: Bamberg around 1457, Strasbourg in 1460, Cologne around 1465 and Augsburg in 1468. Two Germans, Arnold Pannartz and Konrad Sweynheym, began printing at Subiaco near Rome in 1465. Venice followed in 1469 and became the busiest printing city in Italy, with roughly 30 per cent of the country's printers. Paris had a press in 1470, Buda in the early 1470s and Kraków in 1473, while Spanish towns such as Segovia, Barcelona and Valencia gained printers between 1471 and 1475.

William Caxton, who had already printed books in English at Bruges, opened a shop at Westminster in 1476, bringing printing to the Kingdom of England. Johann Snell introduced it to Denmark in 1482 and Sweden in 1483, and at Cetinje in Montenegro the Crnojević press produced the first books of south-eastern Europe from 1493. By 1500, the conventional end of the earliest era of printing, about 236 European towns had presses. One estimate puts output by then at some twenty million books, for a population of perhaps seventy million; in the following century production rose to between 150 and 200 million copies.

The voyages of 1492 and 1498 opened sea routes that carried the press further, often in the hands of missionaries. The first press in the Americas was set up in Mexico City in 1539 (some sources say 1544), and in the sixteenth century almost a third of its local output was in Indigenous languages such as Nahuatl. Jesuits began printing at Goa in 1556, Lima followed in 1581, and Manila and Nagasaki in 1590. In English North America the first press opened at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638.

Adoption was much slower in the Ottoman Empire. According to some sources, printing in Arabic script was prohibited there from 1483 until 1729, partly because of opposition from religious scholars and professional scribes. Other communities were free to print: Jewish refugees from Iberia produced Hebrew books in Constantinople from 1493, and Armenian and Greek presses followed. The first Muslim-run press using Arabic script, opened by Ibrahim Muteferrika in Constantinople in 1729, was permitted to print only secular works and produced seventeen titles before closing in 1742.

Elsewhere, practical problems slowed the spread. An English East India Company printer sent to Surat in 1675 failed because no type existed for Indian scripts, and presses printing in Tamil and English appeared at Madras and Calcutta only from the 1760s and 1770s. Cape Town had a printer by about 1795, Sydney by 1802, Tahiti by 1818 and Hawaii by 1821; these Pacific arrivals marked the end of a diffusion that had lasted almost four hundred years. Western-style presses reached China through Macau in 1833 and Korea in the early 1880s. By then the hand press itself was giving way to steam-powered machines, first built in 1812, and rotary presses from 1833.

Our 1492 and 1500 maps show Europe during the first great wave of printing, including the Republic of Venice, its leading centre.