
Printed books existed nearly 600 years before Gutenberg’s Bible - gruseom
http://io9.com/5910249/printed-books-existed-nearly-600-years-before-gutenbergs-bible
======
tqs
Gutenberg didn't invent a machine for quickly producing books, he invented a
machine for quickly producing machines for quickly producing books!

That is, his key innovation was a way to mass-produce the _characters_ (the
movable type) which could then be arranged to mass-produce the printed pages.

First, individual characters were carved from steel (each taking about a day
to make). This was the only part of the process done "by hand". Every other
element of the process was produced through some form of
(repeatable/arrangeable) _transfer_ of shape/information.

The master characters were hammered into brass to create a mold which could
then be reused to cast multiple copies of a character. Each page had thousands
of characters and Gutenberg's shop had multiple presses going at a time, so
they needed lots of these characters on hand (50,000 is a conservative
estimate).

The masters could also be easily transported to another city. These masters
(plus raw materials of course) were all that was needed to set up a new print
shop. This enabled the printing press technology to quickly spread throughout
Europe.

I think it's a good analogy for the power of software :)

Source: [http://retinart.net/beautiful-things/gutenberg-book-
changed-...](http://retinart.net/beautiful-things/gutenberg-book-changed-
world/)

~~~
evincarofautumn
Yeah, that’s a good parallel. Copying is cheap and automation is applied not
only to a task, but to the automation of the task.

~~~
agumonkey
this 2 fold demultiplication hits my mind regularly.

    
    
      instance / class / metaclass / ()
      instance / model / metamodel / ()   -- very redundant.
      value    / type  / kind      / ()
      machine  / vm    / utm       / ()
    

() denotes the closed loop where you don't need another layer.

anybody has a theory that explains this trait ?

~~~
evincarofautumn
It’s just a linguistic phenomenon. In English, at least, the prefix _meta-_
denotes not only a single level of _metaness_ (if you will) but also two
levels or more, e.g., _meta-metaclass_ → _metaclass_. So the “closed loop” is
there only for convenience, like saying “and so on”.

If we were being precise, we would explicitly denote the level at which we
were working. However, we tend not to do so for two reasons: first, that we
rarely work with _n_ -meta things for high _n_ ; and second, that being
explicit is just plain unwieldy.

It’s for the same reason that we follow _line_ , _square_ , and _cube_ with
_4-cube_ , _5-cube_ , &c.

~~~
zem
i think it's deeper than that. the progression is from object (every one hand-
crafted) to template-based object-maker (hand-crafted per kind of object, but
can produce a bunch of objects of that kind), to metatemplate-based template
maker.

however, once you hit that second level of abstraction, you have almost
invariably added enough flexibility that the range of templates your template-
maker can make includes templates for other template makers. that is, it's not
just a quirk of linguistics that a meta-meta-template-maker is called a meta-
template-maker, they really do tend to be objects on the same level of
abstraction and flexibility.

~~~
evincarofautumn
We seem to be saying the same thing; I just don’t see any inherent meaning in
it. A literal interpretation of _meta-_ would have us define it like this:

    
    
        Instance ::= 0
        Meta(X)  ::= Succ(X)
    

But it’s much more convenient to define _meta-_ recursively:

    
    
        Instance ::= 0
        Meta(X)  ::= Succ(X)
                   | Meta(Succ(X))
    

In both cases, we have an arbitrary designation:

    
    
        Class    ::= Succ(Instance)
    

That kind of redundancy is a linguistic artifact, not a deeply meaningful one.

It’s not the case that reaching the second level of abstraction necessarily
results in enough flexibility to make the inductive step. As a counterexample,
consider C macros, which only add one _meta-_ because they are only expanded
once. Lisp macros, on the other hand, are expanded until a fixed point is
found. That’s why Lisp macros are Turing-complete while the C preprocessor is
only a pushdown automaton.

~~~
kpreid
A bit of disagreement with your last paragraph: The (Common) Lisp macro
processor is Turing-complete trivially because it invokes a Turing-complete
language along the way, not because of power inherent in its expansion
strategy.

Common Lisp macro bodies are written in Common Lisp, i.e. written in a Turing-
complete language — they would still be Turing-complete even if we wrote them
in the subset Lisp-without-macros. The C preprocessor, on the other hand, does
not invoke a Turing-complete language to compute a macro's expansion.

------
evincarofautumn
It’s an interesting accident of history that Gutenberg was able to make the
innovations he did, and thereby ignite the explosive popularity of movable
type in the West. If the Roman empire hadn’t brought the Latin alphabet in its
various forms to so much of Europe, it’s possible that a less modular script
would have dominated—leading to the same problems that plagued Chinese
printing.

Of course, abjads and syllabaries are as common (and about as modular) as
alphabets, so it’s likely that we would have been fine either way. Still, it’s
interesting to think of what Europe would be like if the predominant script
were semantophonetic like Chinese. Oddly enough, the main reason that phonemic
scripts exist is precisely because languages tend to be non-isolating—in other
words, modularity in a language leads to non-modularity in its orthography,
and vice versa.

~~~
twelvechairs
Great post, but I'm not sure we should wholly credit the Romans with ensuring
we have a 'modular script'.

Before the Romans, the Greek and Phonecian writing systems (and derivitives)
were taking hold, and more complex scripts (like Chinese logograms) had never
simply never been common near Europe, with the single notable exception of
Egyptian heiroglyphs (which had complex logograms, but could equally be used
with simpler phonetic characters).

~~~
ekianjo
Even before the Greeks and Phonecians we have evidence of such writing
systems. SUch as the Linear A or Linear B
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B>). Word scripting using letters/glyphs
goes a long way in the past of Europe. It's a long tradition in this part of
the continent.

------
Turing_Machine
Gutenberg's real innovation was his type metal alloy. Most alloys shrink when
cast in a mold, causing distortion. Depending on the alloy, type metal may
even expand slightly. It gives a nice, sharply-defined character.

Gutenberg's type metal was also considerably harder than (say) pure lead,
which made it possible to print thousands of impressions from one setup.

------
webwanderings
What is much less well known is that, little more than 100 years later, Arab
Muslims were also printing texts, including passages from the Qur'an. They had
already embraced the Chinese craft of paper making, developed it and adopted
it widely in the Muslim lands. This led to a major growth in the production of
manuscript texts. But there was one kind of text which lent itself
particularly to mass distribution: this was the private devotional collection
of prayers, incantations, Qur'anic extracts and the "beautiful names" of God,
for which there was a huge demand among Muslims, rich and poor, educated and
uneducated. They were used especially as amulets, to be worn on the person,
often rolled up and enclosed in a locket.

[http://www.muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?ArticleID=9...](http://www.muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?ArticleID=940)

------
dan_c
By the way, it seems that the author forgot to mention that one of the
'western' innovations was the adjustable mould. Basically it is a device where
you can put matrices of different width, used to cast lead types; in that way
you can cast letters like /i/ or /m/ or even ligatures etc. with the same
mould. I must add that I don't know if Gutenberg actually invented the mould
as we know it (according to James Mosley[ _] the mould was first described in
the XVI century).

[_] [http://typefoundry.blogspot.it/2007/04/drawing-
typefounders-...](http://typefoundry.blogspot.it/2007/04/drawing-typefounders-
mould.html)

------
btipling
There was a better way to present the generally unknown history of moveable
type without twisting it into historical revisionism. Gutenberg invented the
mechanical printing press that revolutionized literacy and the availability of
information. This article does not dispute this, it just used a provocative
title to get you to click.

------
gchpaco
This article is superficially correct but omits enormous amounts of detail.

Woodblock printing is ancient, mostly used for religious texts but requires
very little infrastructure. Obviously not suitable for small printing runs, as
the entire block has to be carved at once.

Bi Sheng invented movable type using porcelain characters. But Chinese is
fantastically ill suited to that sort of printing; it was viewed historically
as a novelty and not used basically at all. He decamped to Korea where he
found a more receptive audience, IIRC.

Gutenburg's type alloy and the casting process were the real core of the
innovation; the rest of the technology existed, but wasn't compelling without
the ability to mass produce characters and with a reliable type alloy.

Oddly enough and for reasons I don't fully understand, woodblock printing
didn't take off in Europe until _after_ moveable type came in; mostly for
illustrations, IIRC.

------
michael_dorfman
And, actually, last week was the 1144th anniversary of the printing of the
oldest book for which we have a precise date:

<http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/05/dayintech_0511/>

------
SoftwareMaven
Far more interesting to me (since I knew about the real history of the
printing press) was the linked article[1] on the "tweets" scribes would put in
the margins of books they were copying before the press came to Europe.
Amazing how similar they sound to today's workplace griping!

1\. [http://io9.com/5896008/medieval-monks-complained-about-
their...](http://io9.com/5896008/medieval-monks-complained-about-their-jobs-
in-the-margins-of-ancient-manuscripts)

------
gscott
Six pages doesn't seem to compare with the complexity of the Gutenberg Bible.
Printing on a small scale,using wood... compared to large scale commercially
viable printing.

------
bigphishy
Actually, much sooner, in 593 A.D., the first printing press was invented in
China.

However, Gutenberg's was far superior because the press could be altered, the
chinese press was carved in wood and could not be modified.

------
ctdonath
The limited-run exhibit "Passages" in Atlanta shows a portion of a Gutenberg
Bible right next to an oriental printed text from 700-something. I just saw it
yesterday. Fantastic exhibit, if you have the chance see it before ends.

------
ibotty
nice article.

but isn't it more work to hide the content from js-disabled-browsers? so why
do it?

------
nicholassmith
There's many parallels between Gutenberg and most of the tech industry for the
entire span of human industry.

It's not about getting there first, it's about doing it well. For many the
same reasons everyone assumes Edison invented lightbulbs many assume Gutenberg
invented printed books. Neither invented the core concept, they just refined
it down into what it needed to be to be marketable. Gutenberg disrupted an
entire industry not by printing the books but, as others have mentioned, by
designing a system that was relatively cheap and more reliable compared to the
previous systems.

Although if you want to talk about truly contentious tech. history and
marketable success you'd have to head to photography.

------
nzealand
If it was obvious and easy, it would not have taken 600 years for Gutenberg to
get it right.

~~~
toddh
Maybe it wasn't as necessary without the context of a wide spread literate
culture and market economy?

------
DanBC
This book is pretty good if you're interested in this type of thing. It's a
bit surprising what ancient civilisations had.

([http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancient-Inventions-Peter-
James/dp/03...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancient-Inventions-Peter-
James/dp/0345401026/))

------
alvkhn
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&l...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&list=PLF5BA848B6BA5650F&v=IUXIStZ3vSo)

------
Jun8
Ahh, this nice post could form the beginning of a great discussion for an
evening between on the East and the West, spanning literature and technology,
if the participants are enlightened (some people do tend to take things
personally on these matters) and the wine is good.

One discussion topic could be why Gutenberg's press had the explosive effect
it had in Europe and not in China? Tyndale smuggling his printed bibles to
England may be mentioned.

Another, harder discussion, would be why such topics, i.e. "we invented X
hundreds of years before you!" still entice people from the "East" and cause
resentment.

Not able to do that on this board, let me give you the following lengthy
quotation instead, from Orhan Pamuk's _The Black Book_ , (for me) his best
work so far [I mostly used Maureen Freely's bad translation, made a few
changes]. This is one of the best novels I know trying to analyze the "East is
East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet", which in a number of
very few countries (Turkey foremost, but Russia, too, and some Balkan
countries perhaps) has an indelible effect on daily life.

<quote>

Whenever I venture into the endless saga about what the West stole from the
East and East from the West, I think this: If this realm of dreams we call the
world is but a house we roam like sleepwalkers, then our literary traditions
are like wall clocks, there to make us feel at home. So:

1\. To say that one of these wall clocks is right and another wrong is utter
nonsense.

2\. To say that one is five hours ahead of the other is also nonsense; by
using the same logic you could just as easily say that it’s seven hours
behind.

3\. For much the same reason, it is 9:35 according to one clock and it just so
happens that another clock also says its 9:35, anyone who claims that second
clock is imitating the first is spouting nonsense.

A year before he attended Averroes's funeral in Cordoba, Ibn Arabi, who would
write two hundrend mystical texts before his own demise, found himself in
Morocco; it was during his sojourn that he penned a text inspired by the Al-
Isra sura of the Koran. [...] Now, anyone who reads Ibn Arabi's account of his
travels with his guide through the seven heavens and concludes, after noting
that he was thirty-five years old at the time of writing, that Nizam, the girl
of his dreams was right, and Beatrice wrong, or that Ibn Arabi was right and
Dante wrong, or that the Book of the Israelites and _Makan Al-Asra_ was
correct while the _Divine Comedy_ is incorrect, is perpetuating the first sort
of nonsense I was describing.

In the eleventh century, the Andalusian philisopher Ibn Tufeyl wrote a book
about a child abandoned on a desert island; during his sojourn there he came
to respect nature, the sea, the life-giving sustenance afforded to him by a
doe, the certainty of death, the heavens above and the "divine truths"; but
claiming that _Hayy Ibn Yakzan_ is six six hundred years ahead of _Robinson
Crusoe_ or that, observing the latter describes the tools and objects in
greater detail, that Ibn Tufeyl was six hundred years behind Daniel Defoe is
an example of the second kind of nonsense.

</quote>

You can search Google Books to read Pamuk's interesting example for the third
kind of fallacy.

~~~
bascule
There's a simple reason why Gutenberg's technology was explosive and these
alleged Asian moveable type systems were not:

"Gutenberg's True Innovation", not present in the article despite that being a
paragraph heading, wasn't any of the things mentioned in the article.

Gutenberg created a system to easily cast letters as interchangable parts
(centuries before Eli Whitney, as it were) This meant that Gutenberg built a
system to _mass produce printing presses_

Carving the letters for an entire typeface by hand could take over a year.
However, Gutenberg created a system for taking a hand-sculpted typeface,
turning each letter into a mold, and then quickly and cheaply casting each
letter. The result: mass production of the most difficult part of the system
to produce, the typeface itself, and thus a way to mass produce printing
presses.

This article is about as poorly researched as The Oatmeal's ode to Tesla.

------
carguy1983
Honest question. I'm not white ; do many white people in America really truly
believe high school history as it is taught?

i.e that white people invented absolutely everything and Europe is the only
old world with history worth studying? Then again maybe it's changed in the
past 15 years?

~~~
adrusi
The way we are taught in america is that nothing happens outside of america. I
am a high school sophomore and so far I have had to site through 5 years of
American History classes, and no World History classes. In these classes we
learn about the contributions of blacks to society, and in more recent
history, the contributions of other races, but hardly anything about other
countries unless we were at war with them.

We're taught as if there is a concrete separation between American History and
World History, when in fact, teaching America separately means artificially
separating it from the rest of the world and having to constantly compensate
for that.

~~~
learc83
You're telling me you've never learned about Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt,
China, Medieval Europe?

I find that very unlikely. If it is true please don't go around making
statements like _we are taught in america is that nothing happens outside of
america_.

You can't speak for America as a whole since we don't have a national
curriculum.

More than likely you just feel the way you do because you just took US history
and haven't gotten to any or the world history classes.

>We're taught as if there is a concrete separation between American History
and World History,

There's nothing wrong with teaching a separate US history and world History
class. When you get to college you'll find that history classes are even
further subdivided by time and geography.

~~~
adrusi
The only time I was ever taught about ancient greece, egypt, china, etc was in
third grade, and I hardly think that counts. I've gone to school in three
different states, so I have at least some reasonable sample of nation, and
although there is no national curriculum, the curricula are generally similar
enough.

And college history courses assume that you already have enough knowledge from
high school history courses to understand the historical context of what they
teach, but by teaching American history separate (and before) world history,
we are not taught any global context for events in American History.

~~~
learc83
>The only time I was ever taught about ancient greece, egypt, china, etc was
in third grade, and I hardly think that counts.

If that's true you are an _extremely_ rare case. I just took a look at the
social studies standards for my state (Georgia, not exactly a top performer
education wise) for middle schoool.

6th grade is the history and geography of Latin America, the Caribbean,
Canada, Europe and Australia, 7th is Africa, Southwest Asia (Middle East),
Southern and Eastern Asia, and 8th is US/Georgia History.

If you really haven't had _any_ world history since 3rd grade it looks like it
may have been a consequence of moving between 3 states.

If each state had world history at a different year in their curriculum, you
may have missed them entirely.

Please don't try to speak for America on a forum with an international
audience. Your experience is not representative.

------
adrusi
> Gutenberg's printing press was a novel technology. But to > say that he
> invented the printing press is like saying > Steve Jobs or Bill Gates
> invented the computer.

Well, Steve Jobs is a bad example here because he _did_ create the first
personal computer, as opposed to traditional mainframes, that was more than an
experimental computer programmed using a switchboard and outputting with
pulses of lamps. Maybe this _is_ the point of the article, that Gutenberg's
press was to the previous presses as PCs were to mainframes, but if it is then
it's confusing.

Bill gates is a worse example because his company didn't make hardware until
much later.

~~~
rtkwe
Jobs took existing concepts from the Xerox concept PC (with the GUI) and
shrunk the price and hardware (in the Apple II). There were personal computers
before Jobs, he brought together a lot of things which made it a commercial
success. In many ways he's much like Gutenburg, he took a group of existing
technologies and concepts and brought them together in a working mixture.

~~~
adrusi
ah, nice to know. I thought the closest thing to a personal computer before
the Apple I were the micro computers, the size of a room.

~~~
unimpressive
No.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor>

Expensive, but by no means did it take up a whole room.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine>

Still not exactly a "personal computer". And still expensive, but getting
closer.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800>

The microcomputer that sparked the microcomputer revolution.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_computer_club>

The two Steve's were active members.

While there _were_ mainframes that took up whole rooms, systems that didn't
were available in the 60's, but at prices only large organizations could
afford.

