The Revolution Beggins

It was the beginning of the 19th century. 

Manuscripts and hand copied books started to be replaced by printed ones. 

A revolution was ongoing. 

The era of the hand press came to a 

close after the invention of the printing machine. 

Before the invention of the printing press and the consequent printing revolution, books were really rare and expensive.

Over medieval times, every word of every page of every text or book, was copied individually by the scribes, often monks. These men labored for up to a year in the copy of a single book, usually written in Latin:

At that time, few people were able to read. Not only because of the lack of education, but thanks to the lack of texts and books as well. Only priests, monks and part of the elite had access to books and to its messages.

In order to print the first printed books, there had to be faced not only technical dificulties, but prejudice as well.Printed Books were not as "special" or "unique" as hand copied ones. That's the reason why the first printing machines of Europe tey to imitate the apearence of hand written books. 

These machines had small blocks called types. The printer arranges the types according to the text to be printed within a frame on a press and then prints a page of writing. 

Around the 1440, Gutenberg devised a printing press that could print many copies in just a small fraction of time. His machine was an adaptation of a coin-maker’s punch to make a mold for casting types.

Types were now made of metal instead od wood and could be use in the printing process over and over again.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein calls the "communication shift" this transition in Western Europe from a scribal culture to one of print. For the time that a monastic scribe would have taken to produce a manuscript, a post-Gutenberg printer could produce too many copies of the same. This fact contributed to increase the dissemination of texts, the number of "literati" members, as well as possibilities for cross-cultural interchanges in printing shops.