"It shall scatter the darkness of ignorance, and cause a light... to shine amongst men."
Johannes Gutenberg, printer
Writing was an important step in the advancement of civilization, but few books were produced and they reached a limited number of people. Such books were usually of a religious nature, handwritten in Latin, and copied by clerks for the clergy and the nobility. It was only when the printing press was developed that knowledge and ideas were spread more widely.
The earliest form of press incorporated a wooden block with raised letters on one side. Such blocks were arranged in a frame and inked, so that when pressed onto paper an impression of the letters was produced. Unfortunately the blocks disintegrated with use, and so could not produce many copies; it was very time- consuming for craftsmen to produce new blocks for letters and illustrations.
In 1450 Johannes Gutenberg (circa 1400-1468), a German printer, developed a technique where letters produced from molds of metal alloy were arranged into words, then locked together using a template to produce a whole page of typeface. This was sufficiently robust to print many hundreds of identical pages and hence the production of books became widespread, enabling more people to learn to read and increasing the demand for reading material.
Gutenberg's press would have had limited usefulness without appropriate inks. Before his time, simpler printing methods made use of water-based inks, and Gutenberg himself introduced more robust oil-based inks, including colored inks that were printed experimentally in some copies of his bible.
Flatbed-printing methods were eventually replaced by rotary presses, and by the end of the twentieth century computer to plate (CTP) technology was used, in which material was sent directly from a computer to a printing plate.
