β All stories
The Story of the Printing Press
How books stopped being rare
Grab your favorite storybook and let's travel back to a time when making just one book took a whole year!
1/5
- 800s
Carving Whole Pages
Artists in China carved full pages of words into wooden blocks. They brushed ink on the wood to stamp paper!
The big idea
Tiny metal letter stamps changed how humans shared stories and ideas forever.
Fun facts
- β¨ Before the printing press, a single book could cost as much as a small house!
- β¨ Early printers made their black ink using walnut oil, tree sap, and chimney soot.
- β¨ The world's oldest surviving printed book was made in China using carved wooden blocks in the year 868.
Science words
- Movable Type β Little metal stamps shaped like letters that you can rearrange to form any word.
- Scribe β A person long ago whose full-time job was to copy books by hand.
- Parchment β A thick, smooth material made from animal skin that people wrote on before paper became common.