Long before printing began in Europe--during the Han dynasty in the first century A.D.--the Chinese had taken a lesson from the wasp, which makes its nest by chewing vegetable fibre and pressing the moist suspension into a film of even thickness. As a source of vegetable fibre, the Chinese used anything which came to hand: old fishing nets, worn-out rope and hemp, macerating it in tubs before removing with a sieve the artificial detritus. It is then possible to compress the latter to required thickness, and the triturated fibres adhere when dry. The Mandarin had now material far superior to papyrus, alike for copying or for storing the written word; but he lacked the incentive to share the advantage of this invention with his underprivileged compatriots. Chinese literature received a new impetus; but there were still few who could enjoy its benefits....
The capture of Samarkand by the Arabs in A.D. 750 marks the date when paper starts on its trek to the as yet non-existent printing presses of Europe. The Moslem invaders of Spain and Sicily brought it with them into the territories they conquered, and with it a recipe for deriving the fibre basis from old rags. For three centuries after its introduction to Christendom, somewhere about A.D. 1200, it had to compete with parchment or vellum made from stretched, pressed and dried animal membranes. What was probably decisive in establishing its supremacy was the spread of water mills in the two centuries before Caxton. Power was necessary to speed up maceration of the raw material; and we have record of paper mills in Germany by A.D. 1336. Had it not been for this new tempo and economy of production of thin, smooth and flexible material for the impress of the written word, the vastly increased volume of written matter put into circulation by the printing press could not have come about.
As we all know, printing from movable type began in Europe about fifty-years before Columbus set out on his first voyage; but few of us reflect upon the dramatic speed with which the new trade spread from one city or one country to another. A single leaf of a sibylline poem called the _Fragment of World Judgment_ is supposedly the earliest extant product of the new technique, probably issued about the year 1445 from the press of Gutenberg, a master printer, then resident in Strasbourg. From law-suit records we know that Fust, a goldsmith of Mainz who financed Gutenberg's earliest trials, was printing there during the fifties; and McMurtrie, author of _The Book_, states that