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Within about fifty years of Gutenberg's press, Europe's printers produced an estimated twenty million books from roughly thirty thousand different editions.

Incunabula scholarship

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The story behind the card

Books printed in Europe before 1501 are called incunabula, from a Latin word for swaddling clothes or a cradle, because printing was still in its infancy. Johannes Gutenberg began printing with movable metal type in Mainz around 1450 and completed his famous Bible around 1455. Before that, books were mostly copied by hand, and a single copy could take months. Presses soon spread to more than two hundred towns and cities. Historians estimate total output at around twenty million copies, and the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, kept at the British Library, records about 30,000 editions.

Türkçe oku
Gutenberg'in matbaasından sonraki yaklaşık elli yılda Avrupa'daki matbaacılar, otuz bin kadar farklı baskıdan tahminen yirmi milyon kitap bastı.

Avrupa'da 1501'den önce basılan kitaplara incunabula denir. Sözcük Latincede kundak ya da beşik anlamına gelir ve matbaacılığın henüz beşikte olduğu dönemi anlatır. Johannes Gutenberg, 1450 dolaylarında Mainz'de metal hareketli harflerle basıma başladı ve ünlü İncil'ini 1455 civarında tamamladı. Ondan önce kitaplar çoğunlukla elle yazılarak çoğaltılıyor, tek bir nüsha aylar sürebiliyordu. Matbaa kısa sürede iki yüzü aşkın kente yayıldı. Tarihçiler toplam üretimi yaklaşık yirmi milyon nüsha olarak tahmin ediyor; British Library'deki Incunabula Short Title Catalogue ise bugün yaklaşık 30.000 farklı baskı kaydediyor.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Incunable
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