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Introduction to the
McDonald Collection
A Brief History of Writing
The Manuscript Tradition

The Incunable Era

The Rise of Craft

The Gutenberg Press

Bookbinding
The Incunable Era

The First Book

The Art of Type

Printing with Paper

The Gutenberg Press

Printing for the Public

Improving the Press

The Book as Art

The First Book

Printed Media and the

In 1436 Johaness Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, began

American Civil War

designing a machine capable of producing pages of text

at an incredible speeda product that he hoped would

Writing and the Private

offset losses from a failed attempt to sell metal mirrors.

Citizen

By 1440 Gutenberg had established the basics of his

printing press including the use of a mobile, reusable set

The Newspaper Empire

of type, and within ten years he had constructed a

Literature in the Modern

working prototype of the press. In 1454 Gutenberg put

Era

his press to commercial use, producing thousands of

indulgences for the Church. The following year he printed

A Record of Our Past

his famous 42-line Bible, the first book printed on a

moveable type press in the West.1

Accessing the McDonald

Collections

Gutenberg's press was the combined effort of several

A Glossary of Terms

discoveries and inventions. The printing press was built

around the traditional screw press, a precursor to today's

Recommended Reading

drill press, with an added matrix on which

individually-cast letters and symbols could be arranged to

Acknowledgments

form the desired text. This moveable type design allowed

pages of text to be quickly assembled from a pre-cast
selection of letters and symbols rather than laboriously
carved from a block of wood as in the block printing

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Manuscript leaf embellished by hand with red, blue, and gold. 1496. More
images here

method. Gutenberg also created a unique oil-based ink

which transferred from his metal type to the printing
substrate much more effectively than the water-based
inks that other printers of the era used. In order to print
a page, Gutenberg would arrange the necessary letters
on the matrix and coat them in his ink. The matrix was
then mounted on the contact end of the modified screw
press and lowered until it struck the paper underneath.
The process, while labor intensive, allowed Gutenberg to
print pages at a much greater rate than printers using
the block printing method or those doing manuscript
work.2
Johannes Gutenberg's moveable type press marked the
beginning of the Printing Revolution, a colossal moment
in the history of information and learning. With access to
printing presses, scientists, philosophers, politicians, and
religious officials could replicate their ideas quickly and
make them available to large audiences.

Notes
1. Kapr, Albert. Johannes Gutenberg: The Man and His
Invention (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996).
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2. Scholderer, Victor. Johann Gutenberg: The Inventor
of Printing (London, England: Trustees of the British

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Treasures of the McDonald Collection - Special Collections & Archives ...

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Museum, 1963). Return to text

Matrix containing moveable type. More images here

The Book as Art

The First Book

Presented by the Special Collections & Archives Research Center, Oregon State University Libraries.
Email: scarc@oregonstate.edu
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