"}When we think of the invention of the Gutenberg press, we often \nassociate it with the spread of the Reformation a few decades later. We \nimagine presses hidden away in people\u2019s basements, where ordinary \ncitizens might churn out subversive tracts. The printing press, with the\n benefit of hindsight, seems inextricably linked with the spread of \nheresy, radicalism, and revolution. Yet in the late fifteenth century, \nbefore the Reformation, it was a technology that usually enjoyed, and \nperhaps even required, extraordinary encouragement from the \nauthorities. Printing presses on their own are huge and heavy, even \nbefore accounting for the cases of type, the moulds or matrices required\n to cast new type when it began to wear out, and the punches used to \nmake the moulds in the first place. It was a costly, capital-intensive \nbusiness, requiring huge investment before you could print your very \nfirst page.
Many of the very first printers were either directly \nfunded by rulers, or else obtained special privileges from them. The \nGutenberg press didn\u2019t immediately spread from Mainz to the major nearby\n cities of Stuttgart, Heidelberg, W\u00fcrzburg, or Koblenz, as we might \nexpect, but leapfrogged them all to Bamberg, where one was set up by the\n secretary to the city\u2019s prince-bishop. Many of the much closer and \nlarger cities don\u2019t seem to have got their first presses until decades \nlater. Even Venice gained printing earlier, in 1469, when its senate \ngranted a five-year patent monopoly to a German to introduce the art. \nAnd when the printing market became over-crowded, Venice also granted \ntemporary monopolies over the printing of particular texts \u2014 an \nextraordinary level of interference in an industry, which was only \njustifiable in light of the major up-front costs of deciding to print a \nbook.
Such policies were soon replicated abroad. The first press \nin France was set up by the university of Paris, and the king granted \ncitizenship to the foreign workmen who installed it. The first Italian \npress, too, was introduced with the support of a cardinal to the \nmonastery of Subiaco, after which it moved to Rome. When it ran into \nfinancial difficulties after printing too much, it was bailed out by the\n Pope. And as the press spread even further afield, the greater the \nencouragement it required. Far-off Scotland in 1507 granted a monopoly \nto two printers not just over the use of a printing press, but over all \nimports of printed works too.
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The Arabic alphabet may have a \nsimilar number of letters to the various alphabets that were used in \nEurope in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But Arabic is a cursive\n script, with its letters connected into words using ligatures, and with\n very different characters for letters at the beginning, in the middle, \nand at the ends of words, as well as for letters that stand alone. This \nmeant having to design, cast, and re-cast many more types. From the \nget-go, it meant that an Arabic-script printing press had a much higher \ncapital cost. And it meant that the process of typesetting each page was\n significantly more time-consuming, resulting in higher running costs \ntoo (or, put another way, much higher capital costs for each book). The \ntypical case of type used in Europe was only about 3 feet wide, with \nabout 150 or so compartments. A typesetter could pick out the letters \nwhile more or less standing in place. One of the earliest Arabic-script \nprinting presses in the Ottoman Empire, however, reportedly had a case \nof 18 feet, with some 900 compartments \u2014 six times larger, and probably \neven more cumbersome, requiring the poor typesetters to walk up and \ndown, rummaging around for the types they needed for each page.
One\n solution to the cost of all those additional Arabic characters might \nhave been to use a less joined-up Arabic script. But this was the sort \nof thing that would have required an especially reckless entrepreneur \u2014 \none who would bear the costs of designing an unfamiliar typeface, \ncutting the punches for it, using those punches to create new moulds, \nusing those moulds to cast the new type, and only then printing with it,\n all with the hope that works printed with their novel ligature-less \nscript would actually sell. (And that\u2019s assuming potential customers \nwere even able to understand it!)
Or it would have required the \nstate to enforce the adoption of a new, cheaper alphabet. This would \neventually happen in the early twentieth century. Following the rise to \npower of the \u201cthree pashas\u201d in a coup in 1913, the Ottoman government \ntried to impose a new, simplified Arabic script without ligatures, \napparently with the idea that this would make the work of military \ntelegraphers easier. (Its attempted introduction during the First World \nWar only seems to have caused confusion.) Ottoman intellectuals had \nalso, since at least the 1860s, proposed moving to simpler alphabets, \nwith such efforts eventually succeeding in 1929 when the nascent Turkish\n Republic officially adopted a Latin-based alphabet.