In an age when the knowledge of the world is accessible with a few key strokes, it's difficult to appreciate the world's hunger for knowledge before printed media.
Imagine being in a world where the extent of your knowledge was limited to friends, family, and church.
But that began to change after 1400 AD when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type and the printing press.
Researchers are now beginning to piece together the spread of early books.
University of Oxford researcher Cristina Dondi is currently cataloging half a million printed books that still survive from the years 1450 to 1500 to see just how books and knowledge spread during book production's first boom. Books from this time were precious, and many include stamps, decorations, annotations, prices, and other bits of information that help her team figure out who owned the book and where it traveled throughout the past five centuries.
What they've learned so far is that books spread much more quickly than most scholars initially thought and it wasn't only bibles and other religious texts that were making the rounds. The most popular texts revolved around educational themes like grammar, reading, and writing. This abundance shows that the people of that period were hungry for knowledge and demanded ways to learn for themselves. It also indicates that books weren't just reserved for the elite members of society, they could already afford handwritten books after all, but rather that they were made affordable enough for the less privileged classes to obtain.
One of the biggest reasons that books were able to become so affordable in the first place – financing. Venice, Italy became the center of book publishing quickly after the invention of the printing press because of its flourishing economy during that time. Wealthy bankers promptly saw the emergence of a brand new market and happily invested money into the technology to help create supply. Just like the internet today, cheap access to books during the sixteenth century proved to bring a wealth of benefits to the masses.