The Buddhist history of moveable type before Gutenberg (2016)
The travels of Marco Polo(1300) talks about books in China so cheap that people could actually buy them as they are made from woodblocks.<p>But &quot;cheap&quot; here is not the price of a book today. A book requires someone spending at least a year writing it, specially in the past, with very bad lighting after sunset or in bad weather. That usually meant a book costing the equivalent of a car today, or even more expensive.<p>Chinese books were cheap compared to buying a car but way more expensive than today. And very few books could justify the investment of creating the woodblocks.<p>Gutenberg probably got the idea from Marco Polo,woodblock was already used for graphics in Europe, but added his knowledge with metal working and invented an alloy that expands as it cools down. That is extremely rare in metals, almost all of them contract.<p>That unique property gave Gutenberg type its incredible quality.<p>Also, Gutenberg knowledge of metal made him create a method that let you recreate the type very easily again and again when the type wears out.<p>And then he added the concept of the press and the distributor of ink that were taken from other professions like olive oil and wine makers(something as old as Romans in Europe).