Academic Reading — All-Types Test 27

Reading passage

The development of the printing press A For most of recorded history, a book was an object of extraordinary labour. Each copy had to be written out by hand, letter by letter, a task that might occupy a trained scribe for the better part of a year and consume the skins of an entire flock of sheep in parchment. Books were, in consequence, scarce and costly, the preserve of monasteries, universities and the very rich. The technology that broke this bottleneck did not appear suddenly out of nothing. It was assembled, in the middle decades of the fifteenth century, from a cluster of older techniques that a goldsmith in the German city of Mainz managed to combine in a single, self-reinforcing system. B The crucial insight was not printing as such, for the idea of pressing an inked image onto paper was already ancient. Whole pages carved from a single block of wood had long been used to reproduce pictures and short texts. The difficulty was that a carved block could print only the one page cut into it, and cutting it was almost as slow as copying by hand. The breakthrough lay in movable type: the notion of casting each letter as a separate metal piece, so that the same stock of letters could be arranged into any page, dismantled, and set again into the next. To make this practical, several problems had to be solved at once. A mould was needed that could produce thousands of identical letters cheaply; an alloy was required that melted at a low temperature yet was hard enough to survive repeated impressions; and an ink had to be devised that would cling to metal rather than run off it, as the water-based inks used for wood did. C The solution to the first problem was perhaps the most ingenious. Drawing on the skills of the metalworker, the printer cut each letter in reverse on the end of a steel punch, then struck that punch into a softer copper bar to leave a neat impression. This impression, the matrix, was clamped into an adjustable hand-mould into which molten metal was poured; when the metal cooled, out came a single piece of type, perfectly formed and identical to every other cast from the same matrix. Because the mould could be adjusted, the narrow letter "i" and the broad letter "m" could each be cast to its own width while all remained exactly the same height. Thousands of pieces could be produced in a day, and a worn letter simply melted down and recast. D With type in hand, the actual printing borrowed from a machine already familiar in the wine-growing regions of the Rhineland: the screw press used to squeeze juice from grapes. Adapted to the new purpose, it pressed a sheet of dampened paper firmly and evenly against a tray of inked type. An assistant would ink the type with leather pads, lay the paper, pull the bar to bring down the platen, and lift out a printed sheet, repeating the cycle hundreds of times a day. A single well-run workshop could turn out in a week what a scribe would have needed years to match, and at a small fraction of the cost per page. E The consequences unfolded with a speed that astonished contemporaries. Within half a century, presses had been set up in hundreds of towns across Europe, and the number of books in existence had multiplied many times over. As supply grew, prices fell, and reading ceased to be the narrow privilege it had been. Ideas that once circulated slowly, if at all, could now be reproduced in their thousands and carried far beyond the reach of any single authority to suppress. Standardised texts made it possible for scholars in different countries to refer to exactly the same page, and errors, once introduced, could be corrected in every future copy at a stroke. The press did not by itself cause the upheavals of the following centuries, but it supplied the medium through which they spread.