Printing Press

What books do you read? In school, you and your classmates most likely have the same math book and science text. You and your friends have probably read some of the same books of fiction. These easily available and shared texts would not exist without the invention of the printing press. With the printing press, printing books and texts over and over is easy; any number of copies can be made. The printing press is a machine that prints text or pictures from type or plates. Its movable type is…

Books were originally copied by hand. Special writers called scribes had to copy each and every letter and word onto cloth pages. The process took months, sometimes years. Due to the long copying process, there were only a few people who owned books. Later, books were painstakingly printed with a technique called woodcut printing. An artist carved pictures or words onto a block of wood. Next, a block cutter would cut away the wood around the images and letters. To print the image or words, a printer would dip the…