the movable-type press

For most of recorded history a book was a thing you copied by hand. A single volume could take a scribe the better part of a year, which meant texts were rare, expensive, and easy to lose. The change, when it came, was not a single invention but a stack of them landing at once: a durable metal alloy for the type, an oil-based ink that clung to metal instead of beading off it, and a screw press borrowed, more or less, from the people who made wine.

The piece that gets the credit is movable type — individual letters cast in reverse, set into a frame, inked, and pressed onto a sheet, then broken apart and re-set for the next page. It sounds obvious in hindsight. The hard part was metallurgy: a letter had to be cast quickly, identically, thousands of times, and survive the pressure of the press without deforming. The answer was a soft alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that melted low and set sharp.

The early printed books are called incunabula — works from the first fifty years or so, before printing settled into its own conventions. They imitate manuscripts almost apologetically, down to the hand-painted initials. Within a generation the imitation stopped. Page numbers, title pages, and tables of contents appeared, because once a text could be reproduced exactly, it became worth pointing at a specific page.

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