There were books long before the art of printing came into being: sewing together a pile of scrolls is no big deal. But a book that needed years of painstaking work by a dedicated monk was a rarity, something only a fistful of major personalities could own and (maybe) read. The great breakthrough came when printing one hundred books started entailing little more toil than printing one, namely with the invention of the movable type by Johannes Gutenberg. It opened the way to an outburst of literacy that encouraged many more people to read and think, thus probably starting the Renaissance. Find that glorious art documented here.