Joey Reich, age 9, of Winston Salem, North Carolina, for his question:

How did the first printing press work?

Printing was invented step by step and many people helped to make it better. At last the printing press was invented. It put all the old ideas together and added some new ones. The first printing press was made in a family workshop. Part of it was an old machine that had been made to squeeze the juice from grapes. This old grape press was remodeled to press pages of printed words onto sheets of paper.

The first books were written and copied by hand, one letter and one page at a time. Naturally this work was very slow. There were not many books around and each one was guarded as a precious treasure. Only a few people got a chance to read them. But for thousands of years, nobody invented a quick way to make lots of copies.

In Europe., the first printed pages were made with wooden blocks. A flat piece of wood was carved with deep letters and words, copied from a page of hand writing. The top was brushed with ink pressed down onto a sheet of paper. The ink left marks to show the letters and nothing in the spaces. The block could be used to make any number of copies.

Many print shops used these wooden printing blocks over 500 hundred years ago. Often they used colored in'.cs and added beautiful artwork to the carvings. Sometimes a block was made for every page of a whole book. But this took too much time and people were getting impatient because they wanted more books to read.

At last the Gutenbergs solved the problem in their family workshop. Johannes Gutenberg thought of molding separate letters from metal. The letters were arranged to build words. The words were arranged in 42 rows to form a page of print. When the rows of metal type were set in place, the page form was locked together. Later, the form could be taken apart and the same letters used to spell out another page.

This idea was quicker and much better than the old carved wooden blocks. But Johannes did not stop with one good idea. He used that old grape press to do the printing work, A clean sheet of paper was placed on a flat part of the press. The type form was brushed with ink and placed face down on the paper. There was a big wooden screw, once used to squeeze grapes. This was turned to bring a flat board down on the type form. It pressed a page of print onto the paper.

The Gutenbergs started their press around 1440. Soon they were printing 300 copies a day. When they had enough copies they took the type form apart and used the letters to line up the next page. In 1456, they were making the world's first printed Bibles.

Nowadays, our mighty presses hum as they roll the paper over the type. But the basic idea is not so very different from the first printing press. And it all started in the German town of Mainz. If you go there you can visit a model of the old Gutenberg workshop, just as it was about 530 years ago.