A Trivia Book on Gutenberg

More About Gutenberg
Block printing, whereby individual sheets of paper were
pressed into wooden blocks with the text and illustrations
carved in, was first recorded in Chinese history and was in
use in East Asia long before Gutenberg. By the 12th and
13th century many Arabic and Chinese libraries contained
tens of thousands of printed books. The Koreans and
Chinese knew about movable metal types at the time, but
arising from the complexity of the Chinese writing system,
movable type printing wasn't as widely used as that of
Renaissance Europe.
It is not clear whether Gutenberg knew of these existing
techniques or invented them independently, though the
former is considered unlikely because of the substantial
differences in technique. Some also claim the Dutchman
Laurens Coster as the first European to invent movable type.
Gutenberg indeed introduced efficient methods into book
production, leading to a boom in the production of texts in
Europe - in large part, owing to the popularity of the
Gutenberg Bibles, the first mass-produced work, starting on
February 23, 1455. Even so, Gutenberg was a poor
businessman and made little money from his printing
system.
Gutenberg began experimenting with metal typography after
he had moved from his native town of Mainz to Strassburg
(then in Germany, now Strasbourg, France) around 1430.
Knowing that wood-block type involved a great deal of time
and expense to reproduce because it had to be hand carved,
Gutenberg concluded that metal type could be printed much
more quickly once a single mold had been fashioned.