the greatest invention of the Renaissance

'The immediate ancestor of the wooden press was . . . the press used in paper mills for squeezing water from the damp sheets, a device easily adaptable to printing. Most crucial was the invention of type'the mirror image of each of the letters of the alphabet made in metal by precision casting from matrices. . . .

[The] first printed books have a . . . curious characteristic: their pages so closely resemble those of manuscript books as to be virtually indistinguishable to the unpracticed eye. . . . [T]he practice suggests . . . that the earliest printers had no conception of the unique potentialities of their invention, that they considered printing only a new and particluar kind of writing. . . . Their difficulty in freeing themselves from traditional conceptions is explained by the fact that although typography was the greatest invention of the Renaissance, its earliest development was shaped almost exclusively by clerical tastes and needs.'

'Eugene F. Rice, Jr, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460'1559, 1970.