Mike Cioffi, age 11, of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, for his question:
When was the first book printed?
Nobody can say exactly when the very first book was printed. But we do know the age of the oldest surviving printed book. At the time, the printer did not add a note that this was the first of its kind. No doubt others much older were lost. In any case, this oldest survivor was printed more than eleven centuries ago. And, wouldn’t you know, it was created by the Chinese.
All through the early and middle ages of human history writing was done by hand, letter by patient letter. A scribe spent months and some¬times years to copy a single book, page by patient page. So books were rare, very precious and hard to come by. And when books are scarce, people tend to be backward.
In ancient Egypt, they wrote picture letters on pressed fibers of papyrus reeds. Their handmade books were long rolls and scrolls. Later the Romans did hand written scrolls on prepared skins called vellum. Real paper was invented around 105 A.D., by a Chinese waterworks man named Ts’ai Lun. This invention did not spread to Europe for several centuries. And paper is needed to do printing.
Meantime, the Chinese went ahead with the first stages of printing, called block printing. Blocks of carved or molded print were smeared with ink and pressed onto pages of paper, at least 1,100 years ago, and one of those block printed books has survived. It is called the Diamond Sutra, printed in 868 A.D.—the oldest printed book we have.
Actually it does not look much like a modern book. It is six pages of text and a picture page, pasted together in a long roll. It is thought that the blocks from which the pages were printed were made of baked clay. In Chinese, each written word is a different character. There are no separate letters of an alphabet to arrange and rearrange.
No more book printing progress was made until the 1400’s, in Europe where languages had alphabets. By this time, block printing was popular. Many whole books and folios have survived, printed from whole pages of carved texts and pictures. But block printing was very slow. So several German inventors devised moveable type, separate letters that could be fitted together, used and taken apart to arrange new type, and also a press to print the pages.
The most famous inventor was Johann Gutenburg, of Germany. His moveable type was cast in metal; the letters and lines could be broken apart and reused. His printing press worked by hand and he invented an oil based printing ink. Most likely, he printed several trial booklets and such. But in 1456, he printed the entire Bible on 1282 handsome pages. This is one of the oldest printed books that looks like a book to modern eyes. About 50 copies still survive and if you happen to own one, you can name your price for it. But the old, old Diamond Sutra is too valuable to have a price tag.