Gutenberg’s press amplified the power of a monk by 200 times

Does that mean that Baptists will need to stop using printing presses?

200 is way too low. More like 2,000x or more.

About 100 years before Luther, a Czech preist named Hus began teaching many of the same things Luther would teach. When Luther was told, “You’re a Husite,” he had trouble getting his hands on Hus’s teachings. It’s easy to wonder today why the Catholic church would take 4 years (1517-1521) between Luther’s objection to the church’s teachings and his trial and appeal to recant. But that timetable worked for Hus. They burned Hus and the vast majority of the copies of his writings.

I can go with 200x, actually. Sure, a nice Heidelberg offset press will make the pages fly through at a couple per second and achieve that 2000x improvement Dan talks about, but I’d guess that the original printing press would be good for about one page every 10 seconds or so, which is about a 200x improvement over what a hand copyist can do. Probably the biggest advantage of the press for books, though, is that boredom is nowhere near as much of an issue, and then ~ 400 years before Eli Whitney did the same for rifles and the cotton gin—Gutenberg made (in effect) interchangeable parts for books. Each page could be swapped with any of hundreds of others to make a book. Contrast that with hand-writing, where you’re almost always a word or two off if you’ve got to copy the same page a few times.

Anybody else learn typesetting in shop class? Shop and history lesson in one!

Another fun fact is that Gutenberg’s press was used to print indulgences, according to the wiki article about him. So he got Luther started in more than one way, to put it mildly.

Oh, and writing from experience; Mainz is well worth the visit. I visited the old Gutenberg Museum in 1989, and it’s been updated and expanded. If you go, make a point of visiting St. Stephan’s Church, which is the only stained glass that Marc Chagall ever did in Germany. Just.plain.powerful, and quite frankly I found it more interesting than the Rose Window in Notre Dame.

I can go with 200x, actually. Sure, a nice Heidelberg offset press will make the pages fly through at a couple per second and achieve that 2000x improvement Dan talks about, but I’d guess that the original printing press would be good for about one page every 10 seconds or so, which is about a 200x improvement over what a hand copyist can do.

But the issue isn’t how many you can print how fast with a screw-type printing press versus a movable-type printing press. The issue was set-up cost. Screw-type printing presses had been around for over a thousand year. But before Gutenberg, you had to engrave or carve every page in metal as one piece. What Gutenberg added was the ability to prepare to print whatever tract Luther wrote with minimal setup cost. Just move the letters around. So they could do a run of Luther’s latest tract the day after he wrote it and it didn’t matter if only 500 were wanted.

By 1530 Luther’s followers had produced between 1 and 2 million copies of pamphlets by Luther.

It’s simply that to get to 2000x, you’ve got to actually….get to 2000x faster than a scribe. I’ve been writing out my own copy of the Torah for the past few years as part of my Bible study, and I find that to get 20-30 verses written halfway neatly—and I having the advantage of a modern pen instead of a quill and ink—takes about an hour. So if you can get pages through the press at about 200/hour, or one every 9 seconds, you’re at about 200x.

You can, though, get to 2000x simply because at the time, you had about 10-100x more people who could work the screw than could work a quill. Or get a Heidelberg. Well worth the time to visit a print shop to see them run!