Bookprinting

The discovery of book printing marked the beginning of the period of cultural change which lead to the end of the Middle Ages. Shortly before 1450 Johannes Gutenberg invented the concept of a printing press with removable letters. Already by the end of the 15th Century all over Europe printers had come into existence who printed books, which were now also accessible to the prosperous merchants and were no longer exclusive to the clerics and the nobility. For the next 400 years there was little change to Gutenberg’s method of printing. The introduction of typesetting machines and high speed printing machines lead to a renewed increase in the production of books in the 19th Century with the result that books became a mass product. In the 1980’s lead typesetting came to an end and was replaced by modern technologies such as Offset and Digital printing.