Words Made Metal

For a thousand years, a book was a rare and costly thing, copied one letter at a time by hand, so that a single Bible could take a scribe a year and cost as much as a small farm. Then, around 1450, in the Rhineland city of Mainz, a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg fitted together a cluster of ordinary crafts — a metal-casting mould, an oily new ink, a wine-press, and cheap rag paper — into one m...