Publishing Events

868 The Diamond Sutra, Oldest Known Dated Printed Book
The Buddhist text known around the world as the Diamond Sutra (although a more accurate translation of the Sanskrit title might be, for instance, the Vajra Cutter Sutra) is a short Mahaya...
1234 Choe Yun-ui Invents First Metal Moveable Type
"At first, one cuts letters in beech wood. One fills a trough level with fine sandy [clay] of the reed-growing seashore. Wood-cut letters are pressed into the sand, then the impressions be..." —Song Hyon
1454 First Copies of the Gutenberg Bible
The Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible, the Mazarin Bible or the B42) was one of the first books printed in Europe. It is an edition of the Vulgate, printed by Johannes Gute...
1796 Alois Senefelder Invents Lithography
Problems with the printing of [Alois's] play Mathilde von Altenstein caused him to fall into debt, and unable to afford to publish a new play he had written, Senefelder experimented with ...
1843 Rotary Printing Press Invented by Richard March Hoe
In 1843, Richard invented the rotary printing press, a design much faster than the old flat-bed printing press. The design was patented in 1847 (US patent 5199), and first commercially in...
1908 Houdini Publishes 'The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin'
"Memory," wrote Dr. Morris N. Young in 1961, "is the sum of what one can remember; the diary of the mind." In the great collections that they built and gave to the Library of Congress, Ho...
1938 Xerography is Invented by Chester Carlson
It took Carlson 15 years to establish the basic principles of electrophotography, and he patented his developments every step along the way. He filed his first preliminary patent applicat...
1969 Gary Starkweather Invents the Laser Printer
The laser printer was invented at Xerox in 1969 by researcher Gary Starkweather, who had an improved printer working by 1971 and incorporated into a fully functional networked printer sys...
1970 First Dot Matrix Printer Introduced to Market
The LA30 was a 30 character/second dot matrix printer introduced in 1970 by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts. It printed 80 columns of uppercase-only 5x7 dot matrix...
2010 Oct 20 Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse Magazine, Dies
Bob Guccione, who founded Penthouse magazine in the 1960s and built a pornographic media empire that broke taboos, outraged the guardians of taste and made billions before drowning in a s...