100 Fun Facts About Printing Press

In which German city did Johannes Gutenberg set up the workshop where he printed his famous Bible?

Mainz, his birthplace, founded the Gutenberg Museum in 1900 to mark his 500th birthday, though 1400 is only a convenient guess: nobody knows the year he was born.

Gutenberg built his printing press around 1440, in the middle of which period of European history?

The Renaissance: cheap printed books carried its ideas far beyond a learned few, raising literacy across Europe and letting writers publish in everyday languages rather than Latin.

What was Gutenberg's trade before he turned to printing?

Goldsmith: his knowledge of metals helped him devise a hard-wearing type alloy and a hand mould that could cast identical letters quickly and in quantity.

Gutenberg's type metal was an alloy of lead, tin and which third metal?

Antimony went into an alloy that melted at a low temperature, so letters could be cast quickly and cheaply, yet set hard enough to survive thousands of impressions.

Gutenberg's printing fluid, unlike the traditional water-mixed inks, was made with what base?

Oil: the water-based inks used for writing by hand would not cling to metal type, so he developed a thicker ink that would.

Gutenberg's Bible reproduces the Vulgate, the Latin translation made in the fourth century by which saint?

St Jerome's Vulgate was the Bible of the medieval Western Church, and Gutenberg set most of its pages in two columns of 42 lines, which is why it is also called the 42-line Bible.

About a quarter of Gutenberg's Bibles were printed on vellum, a fine parchment named from the Old French for which animals?

Calves: buyers expected vellum in a luxury book, but paper was cheaper and easier to print on, so about three-quarters of the edition was printed on paper instead.

Which American library holds three Gutenberg Bibles, more than any other institution in the world?

The Morgan Library grew out of banker J. P. Morgan's private collection of rare books, which is how one institution came to own three of the roughly 50 surviving copies.

Which US state's flagship university has kept a complete Gutenberg Bible on permanent display since acquiring it in 1978?

Texas: the university in Austin bought one of the last complete copies ever sold, and because none has come to market since 1978, experts can only guess that one would now fetch tens of millions of dollars.

Which moneylender financed Gutenberg's press with two 800-guilder loans, then sued him and won the Bible workshop?

Johann Fust claimed 2,026 guilders with interest, won his case in 1455, and carried on printing with Gutenberg's own chief workman, who went on to marry his daughter.

Which former Paris copyist, Gutenberg's chief workman, went on to run the printing business with its financier?

Peter Schöffer testified against Gutenberg in the 1455 lawsuit, became the financier's son-in-law, and kept the press running for almost fifty years.

Which future pope wrote in March 1455 that he had seen Gutenberg Bible pages in Frankfurt?

Pius II, then an Italian bishop, praised pages so clean that they could be read without glasses, and reported that buyers had already been found for every copy.

Around 1439 Gutenberg lost money making metal mirrors for pilgrims to which city's relic exhibition?

Aachen put off its display of Charlemagne's relics for a year, so the mirrors, meant to catch the relics' holy light for pilgrims, had no buyers when the money ran out.

In which city did Gutenberg live from 1434 to 1444, teaching partners gem-polishing while experimenting in secret?

Strasbourg has since named a central square after him, though nobody knows what he printed there, if anything: the surviving records speak only of a secret enterprise.

Gutenberg's 1465 title of Hofmann came with a stipend, a court outfit and tax-free allowances of what?

Grain and wine came from Archbishop Adolf of Nassau, the same man whose troops had sacked Gutenberg's home city three years earlier and driven many of its printers abroad.

Who invented the world's first movable-type system, in China around 1040?

Bi Sheng was a commoner, so almost nothing is known of his life: his method survives only because the scholar Shen Kuo described it in his Dream Pool Essays.

The first movable type, made in Song-dynasty China in the 11th century, was formed from what material?

Baked clay won out over wood, which was tried at the same time but dropped because the blocks swelled unevenly once they were soaked in ink.

What is the name of the oldest surviving book printed with metal movable type, produced in Korea in 1377?

Jikji records on its own last page that it was printed with metal type at Heungdeok Temple in 1377, which is how it can be dated to generations before Gutenberg.

Around 1298 the Yuan official Wang Zhen carved more than 30,000 wooden types to print 100 copies of what?

A county gazetteer, the Records of Jingde County, took only about a month to print because Wang sorted his type by rhyme on two revolving tables that brought each character to hand.

What feature of Chinese writing made movable type far costlier to use there than in alphabetic Europe?

Thousands of characters meant a vast, costly stock of type for a single book, whereas a European compositor could set any text from a few dozen letters.

Gutenberg modelled his machine on the screw press, which the Romans had used mainly for what?

Pressing grapes and olives had been the screw press's farm job since Roman times, and Gutenberg may also have drawn on the similar presses German paper mills already used.

Which book format, which had replaced the scroll by about AD 500, was one of the technologies Gutenberg combined?

The codex, a stack of bound pages, beat the scroll because both sides of every leaf could be used and a reader could turn straight to any passage without unrolling.

Before wood pulp took over in the 1800s, Europe's paper mills made their sheets mainly from what?

Old rags, chiefly linen, were pulped to make paper: the sheets of Gutenberg's own Bible are linen fibre, and their watermarks suggest they were imported from Italy.

Which Italian trading city had become the printing capital of Europe within thirty years of Gutenberg's Bible?

Venice took up the German invention quickly, and its presses went on to pioneer small editions of the classics that a reader could carry about.

Francis Bacon named printing among three inventions that had changed the world, along with the compass and what?

Gunpowder: Bacon wrote in 1620 that the three had changed the face of the world yet called their origins obscure, unaware that all of them had first appeared in China.

Whose short, cheaply printed pamphlets poured from the presses in hundreds of editions around 1520?

Martin Luther wrote mostly in everyday German rather than Latin, so his pamphlets reached readers with little schooling, and by 1530 they had run to more than 2,000 printings.

What is the term for surviving books printed in Europe before 1501?

Incunabula is Latin for 'swaddling clothes': the name casts the 1400s as printing's infancy, though the cut-off at 1500 is an arbitrary line, chosen for convenience.

Who built the first iron printing press by 1800, able to print a whole sheet in a single pull?

Lord Stanhope, an earl and inventor, also improved and promoted the stereotype, a whole page cast as one solid metal plate, so a book could be reprinted without resetting it.

Which newspaper was first printed on Friedrich Koenig's steam-driven cylinder presses in 1814?

The Times had the machines tried out amid great secrecy, for fear of how its hand pressmen would react, and printed its first steam-powered issue on 29 November 1814.

Who patented the 'lightning press' in 1847, a rotary machine with its type fixed to a revolving cylinder?

Richard M. Hoe built on a rotary press that Josiah Warren had shown in New York in 1832 but chose not to patent, which left Hoe free to imitate it and patent his own.

The Linotype machine, operated from a keyboard, gets its name because it casts what?

A whole line of type at once, a 'line o' type', came out of the machine as one solid metal slug, replacing the old way of picking out and setting every letter by hand.

Which American author, a former printer, lost a fortune backing the Paige typesetting machine against the Linotype?

Mark Twain sank about $300,000 into the machine, which proved too complex and unreliable to sell, and the losses helped push him into bankruptcy.

Who introduced the printing press to England, setting up at Westminster in 1476?

William Caxton was a merchant and diplomat, not a craftsman: he learned to print while living abroad so that he could publish his own translations, then brought a press home.

Printing in English began in the 1470s with a translated romance about the legends of which ancient city?

Troy: its translator wrote that writing the stories out copy after copy had left his pen worn, his hand weary and his eye dimmed, so he learned to print them instead.

Where did Juan Pablos become the first documented printer in the Americas in 1539?

Mexico City got its press because the Seville printer Juan Cromberger sent Pablos across the Atlantic to open a branch, almost a century before the first press in England's American colonies.

Jesuit missionaries set up the first printing press in India in 1556 in which city?

Goa was only meant to be a port of call: the press was on its way to Abyssinia with a party of missionaries, but it never left India, so printing began there instead.

Who established the Ottoman Empire's first Arabic-script press for Muslims, in 1727?

Ibrahim Muteferrika, a Hungarian-born Ottoman diplomat, was allowed to print only non-religious books, so his first title, in 1729, was a dictionary, and he issued just 17 works.

Which printer working in Italy introduced italic type with a 1501 pocket edition of Virgil?

Aldus Manutius had the slanted letters cut to imitate the handwriting of the scholars of his day, and printed 1,000 copies when a few hundred was the norm.

The dolphin-and-anchor mark of a celebrated Italian press of about 1500 illustrates which Latin motto?

Festina lente, 'make haste slowly': the printer took the image from a Roman coin given to him by a friend, and rivals in France and Italy were soon pirating it.

Historian Elizabeth Eisenstein famously described the printing press as an 'agent of' what?

Change: her book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change argued that print spread, standardised and preserved texts, and so drove on the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution.

Abbot Johannes Trithemius attacked printing in a 1492 treatise titled 'In Praise of' what?

Scribes, he argued, worked on parchment that would far outlast printed paper; yet the treatise itself went to press in 1494.

What was the Catholic Church's list of banned books, first published by a pope in 1559, known as?

The Index of Forbidden Books was the Church's answer to the flood of religious argument that printing had let loose, and it stayed in force for four centuries, until 1966.

Which Canadian thinker's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy popularised the phrase 'global village'?

Marshall McLuhan argued that print had reshaped the way Europeans thought, and that electronic media would shrink the world back into a single village; he also coined 'the medium is the message'.

On a hand press, what was the paper-covered frame with cut-outs that kept the sheet's margins clean?

The frisket masked everything but the type so that stray ink never reached the margins, and the word lives on for the masking film that airbrush artists cut to shape.

Which printing method, in which a rubber blanket carries the image from plate to paper, largely replaced letterpress last century?

Offset printing was first built in 1875 to print on tin and only reached paper in 1904, yet within decades it had pushed letterpress out of most commercial work.

Which Dutch scholar, a friend of Thomas More, sold at least 750,000 copies of his books in his own lifetime?

Erasmus worked inside his printers' shops, making last-minute changes and correcting page proofs as soon as the ink was dry, and became the most read author of his age.

Gutenberg's Bible is also named after which cardinal, chief minister of France under the young Louis XIV?

Cardinal Mazarin's Paris library held the first copy that bibliographers described, so his name stuck to the whole edition; the original is still kept there in a vault.

On a hand press, what were the leather pads stuffed with wool or horsehair used to ink the type called?

Ink balls had to be dabbed together and worked over the type by hand, so swapping them for rollers in the 1800s was one of the steps that let presses be mechanised.

Nicolas Jenson's celebrated typeface of 1470 set the pattern for which upright style, still the standard for printed books?

Roman type broke with the dense black letters of the earliest printed books, and four centuries later William Morris was still praising the beauty and perfection of Jenson's version.

Around 1473, Dominican friar Filippo de Strata likened the printing press to what, against the 'virgin' pen?

A whore, he wrote, against the 'virgin' pen: the friar's complaint was that printers cared more for profit than for accuracy or classical scholarship.

The oldest dated printed book, a Diamond Sutra of 868, was found in walled-up caves near which town?

Dunhuang's cave library had been walled up since the 11th century; the monk who found it sold the scroll to the explorer Aurel Stein in 1907, which is why it is now in London.

The closing note of the 868 Diamond Sutra says that Wang Jie had the scroll made for what?

Universal free distribution: Wang Jie had it made on behalf of his two parents, and the note's date, 11 May 868, is what makes this the earliest printed book that can be dated.

In the 760s Japan's Empress Kōken had printed charms sealed in how many miniature pagodas?

1,000,000 was the point of the project, known as the Hyakumantō or 'million pagodas': the empress ordered them as an act of merit after years of political struggle and shared them among the leading temples.

The surviving volume of Korea's 1377 metal-type book is kept not in Korea but in which country's national library?

France has it because one of its diplomats, Victor Collin de Plancy, bought the volume while serving in Seoul and took it home with him.

Laurens Janszoon Coster, whom the Dutch long credited with inventing printing, came from which city?

Haarlem's claim rests on a story written down more than a century after Coster died, and not a single book printed by him has ever been found.

Johannes Gutenberg was born with which family surname?

Gensfleisch was his father's family name; 'Gutenberg' was the name of the family's house, and it is the house's name, not the family's, that the world remembers.

Alongside the Bible, Gutenberg's press ran off several thousand church certificates of what?

Indulgences were among the first things his press turned out, by the thousand, in 1454 and 1455; some sixty years later, attacks on these same certificates set off the Reformation.

Project Gutenberg, the free online library named after the printer, began in 1971 when its founder typed up which document?

The Declaration of Independence was to hand because Michael Hart had been given a copy at a grocery store on the Fourth of July, and he typed it into a university mainframe that night.

Gutenberg's Bible was set in which blackletter style, named for the woven look it gives a page?

Textura sets its straight vertical strokes so close together that a page looks like woven cloth; it was the formal hand of manuscript books, so the printed Bible looked like the handwritten ones buyers knew.

Gutenberg's Bible type ran to far more characters than the alphabet has letters, chiefly because it included many what?

Ligatures and abbreviations, the joined letters and shortcuts of handwritten Latin, were each cast as a separate piece of type, taking the full set to roughly 290 different characters.

After printing, how were the coloured capital letters and headings added to each Gutenberg Bible?

By hand: Gutenberg began by printing the headings in red but soon gave it up and left blank spaces to be filled in afterwards, which is why no two copies look alike.

The first Gutenberg Bible to cross the Atlantic, in 1847, now belongs to which institution?

New York Public Library has it because the collector James Lenox, who brought the Bible to America, opened his private library to the public, and that library was later merged into the city's new one.

Dealer Gabriel Wells broke up a damaged Gutenberg Bible in 1921 and sold the leaves as what?

Noble Fragments went to collectors and libraries a leaf at a time, each in a portfolio with A. Edward Newton's essay 'A Noble Fragment', which gave the leaves their name.

A Gutenberg Bible stolen from a state university in 2009 was recovered in a 2013 FSB sting in which city?

Moscow State University kept the theft quiet: its two-volume Bible vanished in 2009, and the loss was made public only in 2014, after the security service had got it back.

The 1457 Psalter printed by Gutenberg's former partners was the first European book to state what about itself?

Its date of printing, 14 August 1457, sits in a closing note that also names the printers, whereas Gutenberg's own Bible carries neither a date nor his name.

The 36-line Bible of c. 1460, possibly set in Gutenberg's older type, is named for which city?

Bamberg is where the Bible is believed to have been printed: a local printer named Pfister was using its type there by 1461, though many scholars doubt his workmanship was good enough to have produced it.

Anton Koberger, printer of the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle, was godfather to which artist?

Albrecht Dürer grew up on the same Nuremberg street as his godfather, who switched trades to printing around the time the artist was born and built a business of 24 presses.

The lavishly illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 tells the story of what?

The history of the world called for some 1,800 pictures, so the same woodcut of a town or a king was often used again with nothing changed but its label.

In 1500 Wynkyn de Worde became the first printer to set up shop where in London?

Fleet Street stayed the home of London printing for centuries afterwards, and by the 20th century most of Britain's national newspapers were being produced there.

Italy's first printing press was set up in 1464–65 at a Benedictine abbey in which town?

Subiaco's abbey took in two German printers, Sweynheym and Pannartz; the first book they printed there, a Latin grammar by Donatus, has not survived.

In 1470 three German printers set up Paris's first press inside which institution?

The Sorbonne press was the project of two of its scholars, who brought the printers from Basel and chose what they printed; after 22 works the three set up on their own in the rue Saint-Jacques.

Which medieval English classic was the first major book to come off England's first printing press, at Westminster?

The Canterbury Tales went to press about 1476, and by fixing one form of English on the page for thousands of readers, its printer is credited with helping to standardise the language.

The 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili hides the name of its presumed author, Francesco Colonna, in what?

An acrostic of chapter initials spells out in Latin 'Brother Francesco Colonna dearly loved Polia', yet the book is unsigned and has also been credited to Alberti and to Lorenzo de' Medici.

Robert Estienne's 1551 Greek New Testament introduced which feature, now found in almost every Bible?

Numbered verses were widely adopted and Estienne's scheme is still the one in use; he himself had to flee Paris for Geneva after theologians there tried to censor his Bibles.

Claude Garamond, whose name lives on as a typeface, worked in 16th-century Paris chiefly as what?

A punchcutter carved each letter in steel to make the moulds for type; many 'Garamond' fonts sold today in fact copy a later craftsman, Jean Jannon, whose work was long mistaken for his.

Christophe Plantin's workshop, now a museum holding the two oldest presses, is in which city?

Antwerp bought the family's printing house in 1876 and opened it to visitors a year later, with its presses, type and the firm's complete business archives still in place.

Tyndale's English New Testament of 1526, smuggled into England by the thousand, was printed in which German city?

Worms was the second attempt: printing had begun at Cologne the year before but was broken off, and once copies reached England the Bishop of London had them bought up and burned.

The 1631 'Wicked Bible' got its name from a misprint that dropped 'not' from which commandment?

Thou shalt not commit adultery lost its 'not', so the page ordered the very sin; the king's printers were fined £300 and stripped of their licence, and most copies were destroyed.

Which 1644 pamphlet by John Milton attacked Parliament's licensing of printed books?

Areopagitica takes its title from a speech by the Athenian orator Isocrates, and Milton had a personal stake: his own pamphlets on divorce had been held up as proof that printing needed licensing.

Which university's press, the world's oldest, got its letters patent from Henry VIII in 1534?

Cambridge won its royal licence in 1534 but then printed nothing for half a century: the university's first printer did not set up shop until 1584.

The 1710 Statute of Anne, the first copyright law, vested the right for the first time in whom?

Authors gained the right for 14 years, renewable once; the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers whose old monopoly had lapsed, had lobbied to get it back.

Who managed the first press in the English colonies, set up in Massachusetts in 1638?

Stephen Daye was a locksmith, not a printer: the press belonged to a clergyman who died on the voyage out, and Daye worked it for the widow to pay off his family's passage.

What sold at auction in 2013 for $14.2 million, then a record for a printed volume?

A 1640 Bay Psalm Book is a plain hymnal whose translations nobody calls polished, but it was the first book printed in British North America and only eleven copies are known.

Which founding father was a Philadelphia printer, publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette at 23?

Benjamin Franklin grew so rich from his press that he retired from printing in his early forties, leaving his foreman to run the shop for a half share of the profits.

What was the young apprentice who mixed ink and fetched type in a print shop traditionally called?

A printer's devil may owe the name to ink: one explanation is that the boys' hands and faces were stained black, and a printer wrote in 1683 that workmen jokingly called them devils.

Capital letters are called 'uppercase' because printers once kept that metal type where?

In the higher of two trays: a compositor's type sat in a pair of shallow cases, one above the other, with the capitals in the upper case and the small letters in the lower.

Which everyday word began as French printers' slang for a cast plate, supposedly echoing the sound of the mould?

Cliché first meant a plate cast from a page of set type so that it could be reprinted without change, also called a stereotype; both words then came to mean anything repeated unaltered.

Running a finger down the first two key columns of a Linotype produced which nonsense phrase?

etaoin shrdlu filled out a botched line so that it could be cast and thrown away, but the slug was sometimes left in by mistake, and the phrase turned up in print.

Printers' filler text 'lorem ipsum' is a scrambled passage from which Roman author?

Cicero's treatise on ethics was traced as the origin only around 1982, when a Latin scholar hunted down the rare word 'consectetur'; 'lorem' is the tail of dolorem, 'pain'.

Mergenthaler's Linotype machine was first used commercially in 1886 by which newspaper?

New York Tribune compositors put the machine straight to work on the daily paper and on a whole book, The Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports, the first ever set by Linotype.

How did William Bullock, inventor of the 1863 web-fed rotary press, die in 1867?

Crushed by one of his own presses: while installing it he tried to kick a drive belt onto a pulley and was caught in the machine, gangrene set in, and he died during the amputation.

Clymer's Columbian iron hand press of 1813 carried a cast-iron counterweight shaped like what?

A bald eagle of about 50 pounds raised the platen after each pull; on presses sold in France it was sometimes swapped for a globe or a lion, since an eagle was a touchy political symbol there.

Alois Senefelder invented lithography in 1796 after he could not afford to publish what?

His own plays had already left him in debt, so he experimented with greasy ink on smooth limestone and found he could print from the flat stone, a method soon used for music and maps.

In 1881 Frederic Ives patented the first commercial method of which process, which let newspapers print photographs?

Halftone breaks a photograph into dots of varying size that the eye blends into shades of grey; the first printed example, a portrait of Prince Arthur, ran in a Canadian paper in 1869.

Friedrich Koenig founded the world's oldest surviving press manufacturer in 1817 with which partner?

Andreas Bauer was the watchmaker who had built the steam press with Koenig; the firm they founded in an old monastery still carries both names and makes the machines that print most banknotes.

Baskerville's celebrated 1757 Virgil was printed on which new, smoother kind of paper made by James Whatman?

Wove paper is formed on a fine woven wire cloth, so it lacks the ribbed lines of laid paper, the only kind Europe's mills had made for some 500 years, and it takes a sharper impression.

William Morris founded which private printing house in 1891, best known for its monumental Chaucer?

The Kelmscott Press printed 53 books by hand in editions of about 300, imitating the look of 15th-century printing, and its example started the modern fine press movement.

To stop his ex-partner inheriting it, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson dumped the Doves Press type into what?

The River Thames took the type a little at a time: he is said to have made some 170 trips to Hammersmith Bridge by night, and in 2015 a designer recovered 150 pieces from the riverbed.

Who published the 1605 'Relation', recognised as the world's first newspaper?

Johann Carolus had been copying out a weekly news-sheet by hand for subscribers, and turned to a press because, as he told the city council, the copying was slow and took too much time.

The 1578 catechism Thambiran Vanakkam, the earliest printed work in any Indian script, was in which language?

Tamil came first because the Jesuit Henrique Henriques, who held that doctrine should be taught in local languages, had mastered it and had his catechism printed at Quilon.