Gutenberg's Press: The Technology, the Business and the Spread

Europe did not lack books before Gutenberg. Monasteries, then universities and urban workshops, copied texts by hand, and the trade was growing. Buringh and van Zanden, who estimated European book output over thirteen centuries (Journal of Economic History, 2009), describe medieval and early modern book production as a dynamic sector with average growth of around one percent a year.

What hand copying could not do was scale. Each copy cost roughly the same labour as the last, so doubling output meant doubling the scribes. Copies also drifted: every scribe introduced new errors, and a text copied from a copy inherited all of them.

Key idea: Printing did not create demand for books from nothing. It met a demand that already existed and was already rising, with a production method whose cost per copy fell as the print run grew.

Movable type itself was not new. In East Asia it came centuries earlier, and the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, the Korean Jikji, dates from 1377. Gutenberg's achievement, in Mainz around 1450, was a system that made casting and printing with metal type fast and repeatable in a Latin alphabet of a few dozen letters.

• The hand mould. An adjustable mould that cast type pieces of identical height but varying width, so an i and an m could both be made quickly and fit together.
• Type metal. An alloy of lead, tin and antimony: it melts at a low temperature, casts sharp letters, and survives repeated pressure. Lead alone would deform.
• Oil-based ink. Water-based inks used by block printers do not stick to metal; an oil-based ink does.
• The press. A wooden screw press, adapted from presses already used for wine and paper, applying even pressure across a whole page.

Definition: Movable type means each character is a separate reusable piece, arranged into a page, printed, then broken up and reused for the next page.

Gutenberg's showpiece was the 42-line Bible, completed in Mainz by about 1455. How many copies were printed is not recorded; the most common estimate is about 180, most on paper and the rest on vellum. Around 49 survive at least in substantial part, 21 of them complete.

The project also shows the business model's weak point. Type, presses, paper and months of compositors' wages all had to be paid for before a single copy could be sold. Gutenberg borrowed from the Mainz financier Johann Fust. A legal record from November 1455 shows Fust suing over the use of the funds, and the court decided in Fust's favour, leaving him in control of the Bible workshop.

In practice: Printing was capital-intensive from the first day. The inventor lost control of his own workshop to his investor at the moment the flagship product was finished, and the need to finance a whole edition before selling any of it stayed with printers from then on.

The economics of print differ from copying in one structural way. Most of the cost is paid once per edition, setting type and making ready, and each extra copy costs little more than paper and press time. With a fixed cost $F$ per edition and a marginal cost $c$ per copy, the average cost of a run of $n$ copies is:

This is why printers needed long runs and wide markets, why they clustered in trading cities, and why a failed edition could ruin them. The last row of the table matters for the next lesson: print made errors identical, which also made them findable and correctable.

Printing spread outward from Mainz, carried mostly by German-trained printers.

The economic historian Jeremiah Dittmar (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2011) mapped the diffusion. Drawing on the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue and other bibliographies, he counts 205 European cities with a printing press by 1500. The technology spread in what the historian Frédéric Barbier called "concentric circles" around Mainz, as printers trained there set up shop elsewhere.

Two features slowed copying of the technology itself. The craft of casting type stayed close to a trade secret for nearly a century: Dittmar notes that the earliest known published blueprint is Biringuccio's Pirotechnia of 1540. And the product did not travel easily, since transport added heavily to the price of books; Dittmar cites late-1500s contracts in which a journey of about 360 km raised a book's sale price by 20%.

Key idea: Because both the know-how and the books travelled badly, the benefits of printing stayed local for decades. That is what later lets economists compare cities with and without a press.

Books printed before 1501 are called incunabula, from the Latin for swaddling clothes, the infancy of print. The British Library's Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, which aims to record every item printed from movable type in Europe before 1501, lists about 30,000 editions.

A few patterns stand out:

Latin dominance matters. The early press mostly made existing learned texts cheaper; it served the market that manuscripts had served. The shift to vernacular pamphlets aimed at ordinary readers came later, and is part of the next lesson.

The clearest economic effect of the first fifty years was price. Van Zanden's estimates from Dutch data, reported by Dittmar (2011), put the fall in real book prices at about two-thirds between 1450 and 1500, then a slower decline to about one-sixth of the pre-print level by 1800.

English data tell a similar story: Clark (2004), also cited by Dittmar, finds real book prices in England fell 75% between 1450 and 1530, then stayed near one-third of the pre-Gutenberg level into the late 1700s.

Once the process existed, printers competed on the product. The most influential was Aldus Manutius, who founded the Aldine Press in Venice in 1495 and printed Greek and Latin classics.

In 1501 he issued an edition of Virgil in a small octavo format, set in a new italic type cut by the punchcutter Francesco Griffo and based on the humanist cursive handwriting of the time. The narrower italic letters fitted more text on a small page, and the small page made the book cheaper and portable.

Key idea: A general-purpose technology pays off through the products built on it. The press made copies cheap; formats like the octavo decided who would buy them.