Spread of printing and incunabula
Difusión de la imprenta e incunables
- Date
- 1465-1500 · confidence high
- Place
- Venice, Italy
- Credited to
- Aldus Manutius, Nicolas Jenson, Anton Koberger and other printers
- People
- 👤 Aldo Manucio1449–1515👤 Anton Koberger1440–1513👤 Nicolas Jenson1420–1480
- Field
- Communication
What it is
Within fifty years, printing had taken root in more than 250 European cities, with Venice as its publishing capital; Aldus Manutius introduced italic type, the pocket format and editions of Greek classics. Some 30,000 titles were printed before 1501.
What it led to
- The creation of a pan-European book market and publishing capitalism
- Humanism spread in an affordable pocket format
- The birth of state and ecclesiastical censorship (the Index of Forbidden Books, 1559)
- The consolidation of punctuation, roman type and italics
Built on
Made possible
- Semicolon as a punctuation mark1494 (impreso en 1496)
- Printed newspaper1605
- Encyclopaedias and atlases
- Pocket book