Since getting involved in the book business a few years ago, I began thinking about Johannes Gutenberg, the clever printing-press inventor. He helped make our modern book business possible.

Can you imagine if each copy of my book, “A Moose and a Lobster Walk into a Bar,” was still being printed by hand, by monks using fancy quill pens that drew each letter carefully on thick sheets of parchment?

The making of my books would have been so slow before Gutenberg’s day in the 1400s that a few sales would have been the best I could have expected. Back then, the average book could cost you three or four months’ wages (if you had a job). The meager sales would have put more than a dent in Amazon’s sales, to say nothing of my royalty checks.

On the other hand, from the author’s perspective, there were so few books being made and sold back then, you could get on the bestseller list with the total sales of maybe three or four books.

Those who know such things say Gutenberg developed the first method of using movable type and the printing press, which he fashioned from a wine press. Considering how many writers through the years have shown a fondness for grape drinks, it’s a little ironic that the first European printing press would have that “grape” connection.

Like so many other neat things – pasta and fireworks, to name two – block printing had been known in China for many centuries before Gutenberg’s day. In fact, a printed book dating from about 868 has been discovered there with the bookstore receipt still in it.

Some historians say Gutenberg’s main contribution involved the invention of movable type.

But here again, the Chinese beat him to the punch. Movable type was invented in China around the 11th century by a man named Pi Sheng. His original type was made of earthenware pottery.

So, if Johannes didn’t invent movable type and the printing press, what did he do? Well, he undoubtedly ate a lot of wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut and also made a lot of important improvements to the things used in printing, like metals and ink. For example, he developed a metal alloy used for making type, he found a way to make molds for casting blocks of type precisely and accurately and he came up with an oil-based printing ink that was better than any before it.

Once he’d done all these things, he retrofitted the old wine press so it was suitable for printing books faster and cheaper than anyone before him. And for that, people like me are very grateful.

Like others in the book business who followed him, Gutenberg never managed to make a lot of money. I like to think that I am following in that tradition.

So, I raise a glass of freshly pressed grape juice to the great inventor – Johannes Gutenberg – and his grape-stained printing press.

John McDonald is the author of five books on Maine, including “John McDonald’s Maine Trivia: A User’s Guide to Useless Information.” Contact him at mainestoryteller@yahoo.com.