The first fifty years
The 1450s are the starting point, because the first European printing with movable type is generally dated to that decade in Mainz. What followed is better measured by the books themselves. Scholars catalog works printed before 1501, called incunabula, and the surviving records point to tens of thousands of separate editions. A rough common estimate puts the total number of copies produced by 1500 in the millions, though such figures are inferred from typical print runs and should be treated cautiously.
Printing moved quickly from Mainz to other cities. Italy had presses by the mid-1460s, and Venice, Paris, Lyon, Basel, Cologne and other trade centers followed. By 1500, presses operated in well over a hundred places in Europe. Many early printing ventures failed, and the market was crowded by the end of the century.
What people printed
The first books looked much like the manuscripts they imitated, and the early list was dominated by familiar works.
- Religious books. Bibles, psalters, prayer books, sermons and works of devotion were the most common type.
- Classical and humanist texts. Latin and Greek authors, and the commentary on them, found a ready market among scholars, students and clergy.
- School books. Grammars, primers and textbooks sold steadily and gave printers a dependable income.
- Law, medicine and practical manuals. Handbooks for lawyers, physicians and merchants were printed in quantity.
- Maps and travel. A printed edition of Ptolemy’s geography with maps appeared in Bologna in 1477. Printed accounts of voyages and discoveries circulated soon after. A letter from Columbus about his first voyage was printed in several editions in 1493, and its publication shows how news of a distant event could be copied across cities.
Over time, more works appeared in local languages as well as Latin, and cheaper and shorter formats were added.
Books and prices
Printing lowered the cost of making a book, though not to the level of an ordinary household purchase. Before printing, a long text had to be copied by a scribe over weeks or months. A printer could produce hundreds of copies from a single typesetting, sharing the cost of the labor. Paper, a product of paper making, was much cheaper than parchment, which helped. Economic historians have argued that the price of books fell significantly in the decades after printing began, though precise comparisons are difficult because of the variety of books and the lack of complete price records.
Libraries, universities and schools
Printed books made it easier for schools and universities to equip students with the same text. Teachers could assign editions with uniform page layouts, and scholars could refer to specific passages. Libraries grew, and private collections became more attainable for merchants, doctors and clergy. Features that make it easy to navigate a book, such as title pages, indexes and page numbers, became more common in printed volumes.
Literacy: how much did it change?
It is tempting to say that printing led directly to a literate Europe. The picture is more nuanced. Literacy rates in the late 1400s and 1500s are hard to measure and varied greatly. Urban men and clergy were more likely to read than rural women, and in many places only a small fraction of the population could read well. Changes in literacy depended on schooling, religious teaching and economic need, not only on the supply of books.
Printing probably contributed by making basic reading material cheaper and more available, and by encouraging people to learn to read to use it. But the effect was gradual, spread over centuries, and uneven between regions and social groups. Printed matter was also read aloud to groups, which let people without reading skills take part in the circulation of ideas.
Ideas, religion and science
The same decades saw the start of changes in religion and learning. Religious reform movements of the early 1500s used print heavily, a subject explored in the context of Reformation printing. Scholars exchanged work more easily, and landmark books of 1543 by Copernicus and Vesalius circulated beyond the cities where they were made. Printed charts and guides for travelers were part of the same environment as the voyages of the caravel ship, as captains and cosmographers could compare accounts and maps more easily than in a manuscript culture.
Printing also had downsides. Errors could be repeated across a whole edition, falsehoods spread, and rulers learned to censor. Not every consequence was positive, and not every change attributed to the press was caused by it.
A longer story
The decades after the 1450s began a long expansion. Hand presses remained broadly similar for centuries, and further changes came with steam presses in the early 1800s, cheaper wood pulp paper later in that century and a long list of later technologies. The first fifty years show a business and a technology rapidly finding customers, rather than a sudden transformation of society. The larger shifts took longer, and they depended on many other factors besides the press.