Gutenberg is considered the inventor of movable metallic type that made printing many books at once practical for the first time. Movable type revolutionized printing, fostered the standardization of type size and ushered in the beginning of mass communication in fifteenth century Europe.

Printed books had been in existence long before Gutenberg. The oldest surviving book is one from China produced in 868 a.d. when wooden blocks were engraved with characters and then inked. Eleventh century Chinese books and 13th century Korean books show that printing was accomplished with some movable type. However, because Asian languages use thousands of complex characters for words rather than letters of an alphabet, movable type had a limited practicality. In Europe, perhaps twenty years before Gutenberg, a Dutch church official, Laurens Janszoon Coster, is credited with using some movable type but not with the precise system set up by Gutenberg.

Gutenberg was...