Books previously had to be laboriously copied by hand, yet only a half-century after the Gutenberg Bible became the world’s first printed bestseller, millions of different volumes were flying off presses across Europe. Explore seven fascinating facts about one of the rarest and most influential books in world history.
Books previously had to be laboriously copied by hand, yet only a half-century after the Gutenberg Bible became the world’s first printed bestseller, millions of different volumes were flying off presses across Europe. Explore seven fascinating facts about one of the rarest and most influential books in world history. While the Gutenberg Bible helped introduce printing to the West, the process was already well established in other parts of the world. Chinese artisans were pressing ink onto paper as early as the second century A.D., and by the 800s, they had produced full-length books using wooden block printing. Movable type also first surfaced in the Far East.