In the mid 1400s a German gentleman by the name of Johann Gutenberg invented moveable type and the first printing press, known today as a letterpress. After years of secretly tinkering in his workshop, Gutenberg had created an ingenious method for quickly reproducing hand-written and block-printed works: tiny, individual carvings of letters could be combined to form a page, then printed, and finally rearranged to form another page. He derived the prototype for the first printing press based on the wine presses commonly found in his native Mainz. And so it came to be that the very first printed book was born.