When studying the period of Rebirth, usually stands out the advent of some inventions, such as the telescope and the precision clock. One of those inventions that caused a real revolution in the field of writing and reading was the press, that is, the letterpress printing machine invented by the German Johann Gutenberg in the fifteenth century.
The name press it refers, nowadays, almost automatically to institutions for the dissemination of news and opinions about everyday facts, that is: to specialized newspapers and magazines, whether daily, weekly or monthly. This name, however, originally designates a type of technical device capable of reproducing words, phrases, texts or even entire books through characters or movable type. This device was invented by Gutenberg in the 1430s.
For millennia, writing was restricted to very limited modes of replication, such as the cuneiform tablets of the Sumerian peoples, the papyrus Egyptians, Chinese ideograms, among other various forms of reproduction, whose access was restricted to small groups of people, generally scribes. It was only with Gutenberg's invention that the propagation of books such as the Bible – the first of the entire books published by the press technique – began to become intense. This was fundamentally due to the ease of reproducing the texts. It was not necessary to copy by hand word for word as was done until then. A mold was made with the movable characters and, from it, as many copies were printed as the stock of oil-based ink could support. The name that came to be given to the set of papers printed in movable characters was
codex, from latin codex.
Model of the printing machine invented by Gutenberg in the 15th century
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As stated above, the first printed book was the Bible, in the vernacular language (in German). This fact was of fundamental importance to the Protestant Reformation, which took place in the 16th century, given that until then the Bible was read in Latin and its circulation was not as large as it would be after the invention of the printing press.
French historian Roger Chartier, one of the great scholars of the history of books and reading, pointed out that Gutenberg's invention was so revolutionary that can only be compared to the invention of the computer and the digital reproduction of writing, as can be seen in excerpt a follow:
“My first question will be the following: how, in the long history of the book and its relation to writing, to situate the announced revolution, but, in fact, already initiated, which moves from the book (or the written object), as we know it, with its notebooks, leaflets, pages, to electronic text and reading in a monitor? […] The first revolution is a technical one: it totally changes, in the mid-fifteenth century, the ways of reproducing texts and producing books. With the movable characters and the printing press, the handwritten copy is no longer the only resource available to ensure the multiplication and circulation of texts.” (CHARTIER, Roger. From code to monitor: the trajectory of writing. Study grandfather. 1994, vol.8, n.21, pp. 185-199. ISSN 0103-4014.)
*Image credits: Shutterstock and Galyamin Sergej
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes