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smart phones and smart watches for connection to the Internet. And even though the technology of early printing was far less complex than today’s, its technology also evolved in stages. For example, we learned from Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Paul Needham that the method of producing movable type attributed to Gutenberg seems to have developed in phases rather than as a complete system, and that Gutenberg’s initial technique of type-casting (1454–55) was a precursor to the punch-matrix process which became dom- inant. Whether Gutenberg or someone else developed the punch-matrix process, and when this development might have taken place, remains un- known. By the early 1470s the printing press that Gutenberg had developed was also improved, presumably by another inventor—identity unknown but probably in Rome—with the introduction of “a movable carriage which en- abled the printer to place a whole sheet on the press and print it in two pulls from two successive moves of the carriage. This new procedure spread from Italy to other countries, and by the middle of the 1480s it had become gen- erally available. This improvement, which sped up the process of printing, had a profound effect on the production of texts.”22 Emulating manuscript codices that had evolved as information creation, transmission, and storage devices for over one thousand years, fifteenth-century printers in Germany copied manuscript formats in their page layouts and adapted manuscript hands in the design of their typefaces. Some of the earliest printers had pre- viously made their living as scribes, and some called the new art of printing ars artificialter scribendi, or the art of writing by mechanical means.23 The first scribe to adopt the new technology was scribe turned printer Peter Schoef- fer, the successor to Gutenberg’s printing equipment along with his partner Johann Fust.
Schoeffer’s colophon for his exquisitely beautiful Mainz Psalter of 1457 described its innovations in scribal terms:
22 Hellinga, “The Gutenberg Revolutions” in Eliot & Rose (eds.), A Companion to the History of the Book (2007), p. 209.
23 Buehler, The Fifteenth Century Book: The Scribes, the Printers, the Decorators (1960), p. 17. 48