Around 1440, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg developed a printing press that used movable metal type. Before his invention, books in Europe were copied by hand, a slow process that made them rare and costly. Gutenberg cast individual letters from a metal alloy, arranged them into pages, inked them, and pressed sheets of paper against them with a machine adapted from a wine press. Because the letters could be rearranged and reused, a single workshop could produce hundreds of copies of a text in the time a scribe needed for one. His most famous work, a Latin Bible printed around 1455, is still admired for its beauty.
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