While Guttenberg’s invention of moveable type allowed for printing to proliferate across Western Europe, the process of printing itself existed well before the 15th c. Early printed books, referred to as incunabula, were printed using a process that did not include movable type. Occasionally, these early printed books were hand-decorated and painted so as to look more like manuscripts, but the reverse is also true. Some manuscripts being produced in the time of printing’s early spreading through Europe were designed to look like they were printed rather than hand-made. Print allowed for books to be copied in vast numbers (in comparison to how quickly manuscripts could have been produced). While workshops could, and did, produce manuscripts in large quantities in shockingly brief periods of time, printing would speed the process up that much more so.
Barbier, Frédéric. Gutenberg’s Europe: The Book and the Invention of Western Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017)
Davies, Martin. Incunabula: Studies in Fifteenth-Century Books Presented to Lotte Hellinga (London: British Library, 1999)
-------The Gutenberg Bible (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks and the British Library, 1951)
Hindman, Sandra. Printing the Written Word: the Social History of Books, circa 1450-1520 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)
Jensen, Kristen, et al. Incunabula and Their Readers: Printing, Selling, and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century (London: British Library, 2003)
Saenger, Paul Henry, The Bible as Book: the First Printed Editions (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 1999)
Further Reading: