Here’s the thing, though: Gutenberg was not the first to try movable type. The Chinese were using basic printing presses in the ninth century; Pi Cheng introduced movable characters between 1040 and 1050. So why didn’t it catch on then? And even setting that aside, surely some tired monk must have thought of the idea sooner.
Turns out, prior to the 14th century, books were primarily printed on parchment — created from sheep skins. A single 150-page book required the skins of 12 sheep to make the parchment. That much parchment wasn’t cheap — the parchment on which a book was written cost far more than the actual writing. With that much cost sunk in the materials, it’s no wonder that book-buyers wanted beautiful, handwritten script — it added relatively little to the cost.
What was the reason that the Greeks and the Romans had not the advantage of printed books? The answer will be, from ninety-nine persons in a hundred—Because the mystery of printing was not then discovered. But this is altogether a mistake. The secret of printing must have been discovered many thousands of times before it was used, or could be used. … It did not require an Athenian intellect to read the main secret of printing in many scores of processes which the ordinary uses of life were daily repeating. To say nothing of analogous artifices amongst various mechanic artisans, all that is essential in printing must have been known to every nation that struck coins and medals. Not, therefore, any want of a printing art—that is, of an art for multiplying impressions—but the want of a cheap material for receiving such impressions, was the obstacle to an introduction of printed books even as early as Pisistratus. The ancients did apply printing to records of silver and gold; to marble and many other substances cheaper than gold and silver, they did not, since each monument required a separate effort of inscription. Simply this defect it was of a cheap material for receiving impresses, which froze in its very fountains the early resources of printing.
Thomas de Quincey, in “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain”, makes a similar point:
(The entire essay is well worth reading.)