Printing: Technology Leap

Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany is widely credited with introducing commercial letterpress printing into the European world in the mid 15th century. The sweeping story of commercialization thereafter is told in the greatest of detail, maybe more than any casual reader wants, by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in “The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450 - 1800” (2010). The Febvre/Martin book appeared originally in 1958 in French. It is a story linked necessarily to another technology development. “It would have been impossible to invent printing had it not been for the impetus given by paper, which had arrived in Europe from China via the Arabs two centuries earlier and came into general use by the late 14th century.” The making of this paper, one of the “indispensab…