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Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the idea of a page. He assembled movable metal type, an oil-based ink, and a press adapted from other trades, and he made books reproducible in Europe at a new speed. A text stopped being a thing a scribe copied by hand for one owner. It became a thing a workshop could repeat.

The press mattered because a book could finally be made more than once, on purpose.

Johannes Gutenberg · Encyclopaedia Britannica · 1455 · Factapp