“The printing press, as every school child knows, was invented by Johann Gutenberg. In fact, history may have given Gutenberg more credit than he deserves. There is reason to believe that movable type was actually invented by a Dutchman named Janszoon Koster and that Gutenberg – about whom we know precious little – learned of the process only when one of Koster’s apprentices ran off to Mainz in Germany with some of Koster’s blocks and the two struck up a friendship. Certainly it seems odd that a man who had for the first 40 years of his life been an obscure stonemason and mirror polisher should suddenly have taken some blocks of wood and a winepress and made them into an invention that would transform the world. What is certain is that the invention took off with astonishing speed. Between 1455, when Gutenberg’s first Bible was published, and 1500 more than 35,000 books were published in Europe. None of this benefited Gutenberg a great deal – he had to sell his presses to one Johann Fust to pay his debts and died in straightened circumstances in 1468.”
