← Explore on the interactive map
Sixteenth-Century Letterpress Printing
Sixteenth-century European letterpress, built on metal type, movable matrices, and the screw press, had by the 1590s become foundational to the Refor…
Timeline
- 1590–1595Antwerp and Venice · ItalyIn the early 1590s, printing shops across Europe commonly used metal type, wooden printing beds, and screw presses, typesetting in Roman, Gothic, and vernacular fonts, and printing religious texts, classical works, and commercial ledgers side by side.
- c. 1596–1600Frankfurt · FrankfurtIn the mid-to-late 1590s, the autumn Frankfurt Book Fair gathered German, Low Country, and Italian publishers; letterpress products spread northward, to Iberia, and to Eastern Europe through booksellers' networks, promoting the circulation of new scholarship, political pamphlets, and illustrated books.
Sources
- The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe — Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (1983)
- Printing and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France — Francis Higman (1997)