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• 1 media/PR-INC-00000-A-00007-00002-00888-000-00059.jpg 2023-09-07T13:22:33-07:00 The Early Years of Printing 25 plain 2023-11-07T09:50:04-08:00 The history of printing dates to the mid-15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg began experimenting with movable type. By 1450, he had perfected his printing press. Generally books were printed using one of two methods: block book printing, in which a single wooden block was used to print each page; or typographical book printing, which used individual metal castings for letters.
  
  The earliest printed books generally used type that was designed to mimic scribal handwriting, and it was common to send books to be finished by illuminators, who would add hand painted initials, illuminations, and rubrications. As a result, many early printed books are sometimes difficult to distinguish from manuscripts. Gutenberg, for example, used the Textura quadrata script, which was commonly used in the production of church manuscripts. He created about 300 different types of castings, many of which imitated the ligatures and abbreviations commonly used in religious manuscripts.
  
  While the production of manuscripts and printed books existed side by side during the early decades of printing, the printed book as a vehicle for information quickly overtook the manuscript. By the 1480s, the production of manuscripts was in steep decline. Manuscripts created in the late years of the 15th century were recognized as something unique and special, as representations of pictorial art more than as vehicles for the transmission of text. However, the continued inclusion of illuminations in printed books was a way of bringing the "uniqueness" of manuscripts to a much wider audience.
• 1 media/trinity-grylls-2-145_a2r.jpg 2023-09-12T14:28:23-07:00 The Transition from Hand Production to Mechanical Production 13 plain 2023-11-09T11:50:50-08:00 As one scholar has noted, the transition from manuscript to print was not at all dramatic. Early printed books (incunabula) followed the manuscript tradition very closely--their type was fashioned after letter forms used in manuscripts, they used the same ligatures and abbreviations as scribes, and they generally observed the appearance of manuscripts. The main difference was that because print letterforms were cast from molds, they achieved a remarkable uniformity that not even the most skilled calligrapher could achieve.
  
  The transition from vellum to paper was also not particularly dramatic. Both existed side by side in Europe as early as the 13th century, but the use of paper gradually increased into the 15th century. Paper eventually won out, as it was cheaper and easier to mass produce, was more pliable than vellum, and absorbed ink better.
  
  Another side effect of the transition from hand to mechanical production that may have been dramatic, or at least noteworthy, was the increase, albeit brief, in work opportunities for illuminators and rubricators. With the overall increase in the availability of books as a result of the printing process, the work available to these professionals increased and remained at a high level into the 16th century, when printed initials overtook hand painted initials in printed books. Illuminators, especially, were in high demand to hand color woodcut illustrations and to transfer drawings onto wooden blocks.